The Harrying Of The North

First In Our Time on the Norman Conquest and the strong resistance to it in the North, and then The World At One on the ongoing difficulty of David Cameron in picking up support here.

Even the election of Tory Councillors here, as in several (even most) other parts of the country, is in no sense a Cameroon victory, since those who are or who become such Councillors are almost without exception as unlike David Cameron, and as unsympathetic to David Cameron, as it is possible to be.

And so what if Brown does badly in local elections two years before the General Election? That is normal. Who cares?

But my real point is this: it was the North (and the West Country) that resisted Norman, Henrician and Cromwellian tyranny. The North was the heartland of English Jacobitism, is increasingly recognised to have seeped into every corner of what was in fact (and contrary to how it has been presented) a deeply divided and discontented Kingdom during the period of the Whig hegemony, providing a unifying principle among many disparate and even rival subcultures (the recusant Catholics and the Nonjurors, for example). The North has always been the centre of English Catholicism, and was (again, with the West Country) the centre of English Nonconformity.

And now, out of the North has come this.