Okay yankees thank you for coming with me on the magical mystery tour of why you need to hate the English and specifically the Southern English, it's time to talk about the North.
So here we have Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and York, five of the most populous cities in the UK. Those together are well over (about twice) the populations of Edinburgh and Glasgow put together. This area contains some of the most shocking natural beauty in the country and also was relentlessly targeted by capitalists for internal colonisation and industrialisation within Britain in the 18th & 19th Centuries.
Workers from this area and from each of these cities have at various times throughout British history been massacred by people from the South in a centuries-long conquest that establishes the South as the UK's centre of power and the North as the UK's generator of power (I mean this quite literally because factories, power plants and coal mines are all quite notoriously concentrated in the North). These bouts of open violence by the Southerners are just the visible eruption of physical violence against the North, usually against workers' uprisings, but are part of a slow burning eternal obliteration of the Northern working class.
The area I've shown is the most commonly agreed conception of what "The North" is, but because this socioeconomic history defines what people understand the North to be some people will feel intuitively that Birmingham, which is firmly in the Midlands, is part of the North as well. The uniting political reality of the North is being used for other people's political ambitions with no real voice whatsoever. This is why Andy Burnham former Mayor of Manchester becoming PM tomorrow is supposed to be a big deal, because he's promising a devolution of power from London, but we'll have to see if that really happens at all.
If you want to understand the tension between London and the rest of the UK but especially the North, this map of Gross Regional Product is pretty useful. You'll notice that they have included two colours on this map that are just for London. This is because, and I cannot stress this enough, London is completely unlike the rest of the country in basically every way.
Firstly, London is huge. If you add up all the other cities I just mentioned above, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh, you would have roughly half the population of London. Secondly, London is rich and horribly unequal. If you look at the table above, you will see that GRP per capita for inner West London is over five times the national average. Bear in mind that average is divided by such an enormously higher population than other regions, AND that most of the people living in London are still poor as hell. That should give you a picture of how unequal London is.
But this is actually a much better picture of how unequal London is:
Grenfell tower, where a fire killed 72 people, is in the Royal Borough of Chelsea & Kensington which also contains: Kensington Palace, Lords Cricket Grounds, Notting Hill (from the Hugh Grant film Notting Hill), and Westfield London.
The Grenfell fire, a product of unsafe cladding that wasn't replaced despite being flagged as dangerous because the landlord didn't want to spend money, is a perfect demonstration of London's inequality because in the same borough as all these obscene displays of wealth dozens of working class black and brown people burned to death because their safety was too expensive. There are tonnes of towers around the UK that still have the same kind of cladding by the way, and since the fire the number of MPs who are also landlords has consistently gone up and up and up.
But Sophie you're talking about London, I thought you said we needed to talk about the North! Great point reader, thanks, but to understand the North and moreover understand which British people are deserving of international loathing and capital punishment for crimes against humanity we have to understand London. I hope it's obvious enough to point out why the Scottish, Welsh and Irish in particular don't deserve to be lumped in with the English, but within England there is a stark divide between the realities of people whose families have been in the working poor or the monied gentry for generations and generations, and that divide is mostly regional. In the North there is extreme deprivation, in the home counties there are a tonne of rich white people who make horrible decisions on behalf of millions, and in London there are both.
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