Sunday 3 February 2008

It Must Be Grim Down South

It seems to be open season on the North today, with snide references both from Nick Cohen (high praise indeed) and from Peter Hitchens (many of whose views are widely shared across the political spectrum here). Hitchens even suggests that the BBC is anti-Southern, which will certainly come as news to anyone living outside the South, and indeed outside the South East specifically. To Cohen, Northern Rock was and is unworthy of Government help specifically because of its Northern-ness.

I cannot help feeling that the penny is starting to drop in and around London that that is simply not where General Elections are won and lost. If it were, then there would now be a Tory Government with a large majority. Rather, they are won and lost in the political (and historically also economic) British Heartland: Lowland Scotland, the North, the Midlands and Wales.

That is where the class and other interests most rub up against each other. It is where other features (such as Catholicism, and historically also Nonconformity) are most pronounced. And it is where the fight between Labour and the Tories (until better parties come along) has been fiercest. That there are now almost no Tories in the Heartland is why there are now almost no Tories at all.

Also important is the battle between the Tories and the Lib Dems in the West Country, a battle which is almost completely ignored nationally even though its outcome makes the difference between a majority Government and a hung Parliament every time.

The same may be said of the Lib Dems’ even more neglected struggles against all comers in the North of Scotland and in parts of the Heartland such as Mid-Wales, the Borders, and areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire. And the rise both of UKIP (although now definitely on the wane as a national force) and of the Greens in East Anglia is one of the great untold stories of contemporary British politics.

But for all its wealth, the simply electoral importance of the South East would seem to rank only above that of Northern Ireland. I do not say this in any anti-Southern way. It is just a fact. And a fact that only the people of the South East can change, most obviously by declining to vote Tory, and thus killing off that party once and for all.

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