England’s North Has Been Crushed by Thatcherism and Austerity
Northern England spawned the industrial revolution as well as a powerful workers’ movement and a lively culture of popular modernism. But the dysfunctions of Britain’s economic and political system have reduced it to a shadow of its former self.
Derelict factory building in Gateshead, England, 2014. (Andrew Curtis / Wikimedia Commons)
In 1949, on a ship somewhere in the Indian Ocean, Donald Horne, the iconoclastic Australian writer and critic, was catching up on back issues of the Economist. As he flicked through the pages of that famous organ of Manchester liberalism, skipping past articles on the dividends of Smith’s Potato Chips and the international balance of payments, he learned that the country he was to call home for the next half-decade was one wracked by endless crisis.
Horne wrote up his reflections some twenty years later, after returning to his native land where he had made his name with a coruscating takedown of the Australian elite in The Lucky Country. Horne saw England as a nation deeply uncertain about itself and its place in the world. “Come to Britain,” he wrote, “and see the crisis.”
The Northern Metaphor
If Horne’s book, God Is an Englishman, is remembered today, it is likely to be for his vivid summation of one of England’s great divisions: that between the North and the South.
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