Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, September 21, 2012

Yet another cleavage

How many coinciding cleavages can your students identify?

The great divide: Economically, socially and politically, the north is becoming another country

IN 1962, as Britain pulled slowly out of recession, Harold Macmillan told an audience that he was determined to “prevent two nations developing geographically, a poor north and a rich and overcrowded south”. The price of failure, the Conservative prime minister said, would be that “our successors will reproach us as we reproach the Victorians for complacency about slums and ugliness.”…

The north remains poorer than the south, with sharply lower employment rates and average incomes. In [2008] men in the north were [20%] more likely to die under the age of 75 than men in the south…

England’s north… contains poor ex-industrial cities, like Bradford and Middlesbrough, and depressed towns like Consett, near Newcastle. But there are also impressively wealthy parts, such as Sheffield Hallam, where 60% of the residents have degrees, and York, where the unemployment rate is a quarter lower than the national average…

For much of the past 20 years growth in the British economy has come from two sectors: government spending, primarily on health care and education, and the private service sector. The north has benefited only from the first…

Now public spending is being cut everywhere, as the government tries to tackle a huge budget deficit. That would be expected to hurt the north more anyway, but the cuts are actually sharper there…

The Conservative Party is retreating in the north, too. Its problem is not just that northern seats tend to be poorer, and thus more likely to vote Labour. Broad mistrust of the Tories, cemented during the 1980s recession, means middle-class voters in the north are actually more likely to vote Labour than are working-class voters in the south…

This worries MPs and strategists, who know that the Tories cannot secure a parliamentary majority in 2015 without winning more seats in the north and Midlands…

David Cameron, like his one-nation hero, Macmillan, appears fated to watch England continue its slow separation into two distinct countries.