Last December’s British general election, like the Brexit vote of 2016, brought the North of England suddenly to the forefront of the country’s political discussion. The Labour Party was routed in many of its former Northern heartlands, with the Brexit question having proved pivotal in smashing the “red wall.” Substantial Labour majorities across the postindustrial North vanished in a puff of smoke.

For many, it was a sad and perplexing sight: after all, the North had once led the world in industry (textiles, coal mining, steel, shipbuilding), and had long prided itself on its radical heritage, having been the hotbed of Luddism and Chartism, the birthplace of the modern labor movement and of early suffragism. Its left-field cultural sensibilities — from the pathbreaking new wave of British social-realist cinema of the 1950s and ’60s, through the Beatles and Merseybeat, to the idiosyncratic post-punk music scenes of Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield — have likewise been much celebrated in the region and beyond it.

The North was never homogeneously Labour, but last December saw Northern constituencies which had returned Labour MPs for many years, in some cases the best part of a century, go Conservative. This had Tory pundits in raptures. The North — for so long given nary a second thought by most London-based commentators — found itself the recipient of patronizing pats on the head, flattered as the repository of earthy common sense and hard-bitten wisdom. True, this is how the North has often seen itself, but it was hard to escape the feeling that it was being congratulated for finally knowing its place.