The diverging politics of the Labour north and Conservative south make England look ever more like two nations. Reuniting them will be hard

England’s two nations

Divided kingdom

Apr 20th 2013 | Heswall, Liverpool, Sheffield and Southampton |From the print edition

IN 1951 Winston Churchill launched the Conservative Party’s general-election campaign in Liverpool. The crowd went wild. “I’m not conceited,” he later told his doctor, “but they wanted to touch me.” The Tories went on to win a majority of votes in the city.

Today such a result is unimaginable. In the 2010 general election the Conservative Party won just 19,533 votes in Liverpool. Labour won 116,285. The Conservatives lost in all of the city’s five constituencies, and in 71% of those in the north-west as a whole. The party fared even worse in the north-east, where it won only 7% of the seats.

Over the years the Conservative Party has been expelled from most of the north of England (and almost all of Scotland). Labour has been virtually driven from the south. Margaret Thatcher once told a newspaper interviewer that economic change has the potential to alter “the heart and the soul” of a people; the double-edged sword of Thatcherism changed the hearts and souls of north and south in strikingly different ways, and with long lasting effects. The differences between them now go beyond economic circumstance—their cultural and political identities are ever more distinct. This represents a daunting but inescapable political challenge.

On ordinary electoral maps the north-south divide is not as plain as it might be. Rural British constituencies are both big and nearly always represented by a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat. Thus swathes of the country will appear blue and yellow come what may. And Northern Ireland is represented by parties not seen elsewhere. If you look just at the mainland, though, and equalise the size of the constituencies, the binary reality becomes obvious (see map). Save for a belt of Tory hills and dales across North Yorkshire and the Lake District, the north is red—as are, barring nationalists, Wales and Scotland. The south is deep blue, strikingly so in the surrounds of London (it gets more Liberal Democrat to the west). Only in London and the Midlands do the parties seem to be in real competition.

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