Isolated elements

Of the 158 seats that make up the three northern English regions, only 43 are Conservative: 86% of the party’s seats are elsewhere in the country. Of the 197 seats in the three southern regions outside London, Labour now holds a mere ten. In the 2010 election Conservatives won 31% of the vote in the north and 47% in the south; Labour won 17% of the vote in the south but 38% in the north.

Combining one of the most centralised systems of government with one of the starkest regional splits in party support makes England an oddity. Italy’s geographic division is deeper, economically; but right and left both have strongholds in the rich north and the poor south. Electoral maps of France and Australia are kaleidoscopes of shifting colours. America’s division between Democratic coasts and a Republican middle is relatively new—until 1988 the West coast was a Republican bastion. And unlike the peoples of Belgium, Spain and Germany, all of whom enjoy a federal structure, England’s halves must rub along in just one Parliament.

The rift goes back a long way. In 1900 John Hobson, an economist, described a southern “Consumers England” of leisurely suburbs and a northern “Producers England” of mills and mines. The north was Liberal territory: Conservatives were as weak there then as they are today. Later, as women and working-class men won the vote, the rise of the Labour Party and class affiliation overwhelmed older, regional patterns. Between the 1920s and 1960s the electoral map was more uniform than before or since.

The return of the split reflects the diverging economic experiences of the two halves of the country. Beginning in the 1960s changing industrial fortunes drove a wedge between the manufacturing-oriented north and the services-heavy south. In the 1980s wealth generated by London’s booming financial-services industry turned neighbouring regions a deeper shade of blue. Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist reforms were accompanied by high unemployment, particularly in northern cities. She defeated the National Union of Mineworkers, accelerating the industry’s decline—many former mining towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire struggle to attract new jobs to this day. The privatisation of the steel industry had a similar effect in places like Teesside. In Wales and Scotland Conservatism was widely viewed not just as malign but as a foreign imposition.

“Scousers have long memories,” says Tony Caldeira, who ran as Tory candidate for mayor of Liverpool. A doggedly upbeat bunch—and, tellingly, a young one—Conservative activists in the city report that Lady Thatcher’s legacy is hurled across doorsteps with a “barrage of hatred”.

And some of the forces behind fission have strengthened since the 1980s. Under the 1997-2010 Labour government the economy grew more slowly in the north—and, partly as a result, the state accounted, directly and indirectly, for a larger share of jobs created there. Public-sector workers are more likely to vote Labour, regardless of their social class, and constitute a larger proportion of the workforce in the north.

When Labour increased public spending in the north it strengthened its position there. When the Conservative-led coalition began to cut public-sector jobs they strengthened Labour’s position there, too. (The same may yet prove true of cuts in benefits, which are a larger part of incomes in the region.) Tory grumbling about Labour’s “client state” has something to it. At every election, the Liverpool offices of Unite, a trade union with some 250,000 public-sector members, become the engine room of the local Labour campaign. The possibility of the government “localising” public-sector pay, which would mean lower pay for teachers, doctors and policemen in the north, haunts those Conservatives vying for their votes.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14