Why does the North need to “level up”? Origins of the North-South Divide
The UK’s “North-South divide” has long been a feature of political debates in the UK, used to boost support when unveiling new economic policies or blame the opposition party’s failings. On one hand, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair dismissed notions of a “North-South divide” as too simplistic and outdated. George Osborne stood in the Museum of Science and Manchester to call for a “Northern Powerhouse”, and Boris Johnson vowed to “level up” economic performance across the UK. But what do these claims actually mean, and how does the “North-South” divide impact individuals’ everyday lives? In this first of a two-part series, I’ll explore the historic origins of the divide and its evolution over time.
While many perceive the Industrial Revolution to be a key driver of differences between the North and South, differences between the two regions are rooted much farther back in history. In AD 197, Septimius Severus divided Roman Britain into the provinces of “Britannia Superior” and “Britannia Inferior”, drawing a line from the Wash in East Anglia to the River Mersey, intending to prevent the governor of a united Britannia from becoming too politically powerful. Consciousness of north and south ebbed and flowed for much of medieval and early modern England depending on the political mood. While the 11th century was dominated by bitter disputes between Canterbury and York for primacy and Norman apprehensions of northern separatism (culminating in the infamous “Harrying of the North”, in which up to 75% of the population died or left their homes), uprisings from the North had significantly died down by the 16th century (Jewell 1994).
By this time, however, economic differences had begun to manifest: an unusual network of family-held firms first developed in 1555 when Parliament agreed to exempt Lancashire and Yorkshire cloth manufacturers from restrictions on buying their own wool. By the late 18th century, an abundance of coal and reliable water power boosted the North’s transition to large-scale cotton manufacture, followed by the growth of export industries such as ship building and engineering that helped fuel the growth of the British Empire. It was the south of England, dominated by agriculture and handicraft industries, that suffered from the problem of unemployment, but by the 1850s the metropolitan South East, which specialised in commerce, banking, finance and government had also begun to grow rapidly, with large numbers of migrants from England and Wales increasingly drawn to London (Schürer and Day 2019).
World War I devastated the North’s primary economic model of industrial growth and exports, as growth in competition for manufactures from Japan and the United States and a substantial increase in trade costs through increased protectionism meant British exports in the mid-1920s dropped 25% relative to its 1913 level. Unemployment reached 13.5% in the North East and North West, more than twice as high as London, with workers in cotton textiles (13.6% unemployment), steel (25.5%) and shipbuilding (30.5%) hit especially hard (Boyer and Hatton 2002). Lack of domestic demand for coal and other products of heavy industry led to systematic mass unemployment, culminating in strikes (nearly 900 a year during the inter-war years) and hunger marches. Growth industries focusing on electrical and consumer goods began to cluster in the South East and Midlands, which the industrial North could not attract in sufficient scale to compensate for declining industry. Even the post-WWII economic boom could not raise manufacturing employment back to pre-1930 levels, with the South East benefitting from the vast majority in growth in manufacturing.
The rapid and sustained de-industrialisation beginning in the 1970s, coupled with expansion of financial, banking and producer services, generated the marked increase in the magnitude of the “North-South” divide that we see today. These gaps are apparent not just in traditional economic indicators such as labour productivity or Gross Value Added, but also social outcomes such as education and mortality (Obolenskaya, Lupton and Provan 2016). Thus, in working to close the North-South divide, policymakers must first overcome a long history of economic differences, but this history of differences also means the North is uniquely able to draw on a broad range of strengths in its pursuit of economic prosperity.