Who’d be northern, eh? Anybody in their right mind

Who’d be northern, eh? Who’d want to live in that pestilent, tier 3 wasteland where the vowels are as flat as the sombrero is high, where you can drive for miles without seeing a Pret, where buses come once an hour if you’re lucky, where the good die young and obese, with a pie in their hand and a fag in their lips?

On the Covid heat map of the UK, the north glows red and angry, a traffic light that shrieks “Stop! Stay in the south!”, a boiling, roiling ball of flame that warns, “here be dragons”, plague-dragons at that, attended by feral quaranteens who spread the gospel of coronavirus at house parties and raves.

Their upstart leaders refuse to play the game, Angry Joe Anderson in Liverpool and Bolshie Andy Burnham in Manchester setting aside local rivalries to stick up two fingers – like Billy Casper on the poster for Kes – at the Southern government’s demands for economically, socially and psychologically crucifying top-tier lockdowns, all the while knowing that capitulation is inevitable.

Inevitable, because we in the north have been here before. Many times. We’ve seen the north-south divide ebb and flow like a tidal watercourse pulled and pushed by the lunar gravity of Westminster.

We’ve watched your plans for money-pit high-speed rail links that stop short of going anywhere useful, while getting a train from Leeds to Manchester, which should take an hour, becomes an endurance test of cancelled trains, crowded carriages, abandoned timetables and painfully elongated journey times.

We’ve nodded graciously as you send your Channel 4 to Leeds and your BBC to Salford, and even your Conservative Central Office to Yorkshire, grateful for the job opportunities even as we know half of them are only available because many current incumbents would rather die than leave the comforting girdle of the M25.

We’ve watched, amused, the outpouring of outrage and grief as London and parts of Essex are moved into the second tier of coronavirus restrictions, wondering if you’ve read or watched anything at all about how we have been living under these lockdown conditions in most parts of the north for months now.

And we sit in our red-hot Covid hotspot and imagine yellow plague crosses lining the Watford Gap and we watch the telly with our takeaway food and shop-bought beers, the restaurants and pubs dark and silent on our streets, and see you partying in packed Soho streets, and we might wonder why things are always so much worse in the north.

And then we remember. We’ve had this for the best part of a thousand years.

Pretty much the first thing that William the Conqueror did when he’d settled in properly after taking England off Harold at the Battle of Hastings was to, in the words of our region’s poet laureate Mark E Smith, hit the north. The north at that time was still rich with Viking blood, and they weren’t for having this upstart Norman king telling them what to do.

It’s unsurprising that the Anglo-Saxon kings of the north weren’t too enamoured with the man also known as William the Bastard, and doubtless other choice epithets across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Northumberland.

Hastings wasn't the only decisive battle in 1066. Harold had already led a large force against invading Norwegians at what became known as the Battle of Stamford Bridge (up in East Yorkshire, not where Chelsea play, for any southerners still reading). Barely three weeks after driving the Norwegians back into the North Sea, Harold was turning out with his armies against William I, this time taking an arrow to the eye for his trouble and giving up the sovereignty of England in the process.

So by the winter of 1069, William the Conqueror decided to teach the continually uppity north a bit of a lesson, which is putting rather mildly the events that became known as “the harrying of the north”.

Modern academics have suggested that what happened at William’s hands was nothing short of an act of genocide. His armies descended first upon Yorkshire, destroying whole settlements, burning crops and killing livestock. Villages were torched and their inhabitants slaughtered en masse. The north was systematically laid to waste, survivors and rebels were forced to hide out in the hills. More than 100,000 people died of starvation, according to the chronicles laid down by the Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis. Many, it is said, had to resort to cannibalism to survive.

The Domesday Book lists whole swathes of the north – up to two thirds of it – with the sobering phrase "hoc est vast" or “It is wasted”.  

So, we’re used to it, see. If the north had an anthem, it would be Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, a band forged in the crucible of Burnley at the very heart of the north, a place where heavy industry overlaps with witchcraft. We get knocked down, but we get up again. Which isn’t to say that we particularly like getting knocked down, but what’s the alternative to getting up? They say that in Lancashire, women die of love, but that doesn’t mean we in the north take things lying down. And sometimes when we get to our feet, we hit the road as well.

It’s easy to imagine, that after the harrying of the north, the south would happily have built a wall across the country and let the lands they wasted rot. But in the 17th century the north suddenly became an attractive proposition, thanks to the discovery of large deposits of coal under those wasted lands. With technology advancing to allow industrial mining of coal in the 18th century, the north was useful, as the place that could power Britannia’s ambitions to rule the waves.

There was work to be done in the north, and the region adapted quickly. Perhaps a little too quickly. People flooded to the coal fields for employment, and previously quiet villages were expanded quickly and often non-too-efficiently, slum properties thrown up to accommodate workers.

Conditions weren’t particularly good, either in the homes or the mines. Workers had punitive terms imposed on them, safety was not a huge issue, and as well as the frequent explosions and collapses in the mines, diseases such as cholera spread through the tenements.

But the mining beget more industry, and even when the coal seams were exhausted in some areas, the people adapted to different work. That happened in Jarrow, on the banks of the Tyne. In the same year that the mine owners abandoned their pits, the first shipyard opened there, in 1851. Heavy industry was the north’s thing, now.

 If Kent was the garden of England, we were its workshop. Not as pretty, nor a place you’d want to spend much time, but providing a vital service nevertheless – until the 1930s, and the advent of what became known as the Great Depression, a global recession that threw industry off a cliff. Just as the mines had shut almost half a century before, so the shipyard that had been Jarrow’s lifeblood closed in 1934. Except this time, there was nothing to replace it.

In 1936, with hundreds thrown out of work in Jarrow, the town’s leaders appealed to the government for help. Westminster couldn’t even be bothered to talk about the problems. So the unemployed stood up and in October that year set off to London to make them listen or, said David Riley, the chairman of Jarrow Borough Council, “turn the military on us”.

In the event, the military wasn’t required. A petition was handed over. The government nodded, and listened briefly, and sent the marchers home. The north had spoken; the government had dismissed them. What became known as the Jarrow Crusade was initially seen as a deflating failure, but in subsequent years it was granted the legendary, heroic status it deserved.

We might not always get our way in the north, but by god we won’t go down quietly. Not even when you try to take away the industry you imposed on us that was killing us early and painfully. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries we dug the coal that powered the empire, we forged the steel that clattered on your plates, we were delivered of the cotton picked by slaves in foreign lands and turned it into the textiles to make the clothes on your back. It was often dirty, thankless, dangerous work. But by the end of the century we knew little else. So when Margaret Thatcher’s widespread programme of pit, steel and shipbuilding closures bit hard in the 1980s, we had to fight for our right to put our health and our lives at risk to do the work. Because there was nothing else to do.

If there is such a thing as the north-south divide, it is a scar that came from the wounds slashed by Thatcher across the country as the north was abandoned by decision-makers in the South. Whereas the harrying of the north was widespread death and destruction on its most basic scale, the 1980s saw a second harrying that, while perhaps not as bloody and visceral, was just as devastating.

The north was not only stripped of the industries that had dominated for two centuries, but it saw its local politics reorganised under Thatcher, metropolitan county councils wiped away and the power handed to smaller, less influential district and borough councils that didn’t have the same political clout, while services that had been carefully controlled at local level were thrown out to tender in a privatisation free-for-all.

And now, in 2020, it feels for all the world that we are in the third phase of the harrying of the north. Should we refuse to comply with regulations that are designed to stem the spread of Covid? Perhaps not, but why the most punitive restrictions in the north? Why plant the seed across the country that the north is non-compliant, that we don’t want to help the fight? Why have those big, boiling hot red markers pulsing across the north, telling the rest of the country that we are the plague-ridden rebels delaying the return to normality?

If Dominic Cummings is sitting imp-like on one shoulder of Boris Johnson, then surely the ghost of William the Conqueror lurks at his other. The politics of division are rife. Turn the south against the north, then turn the north against itself, with contradictory lockdown policies announced within days of each other, Liverpool facing one set of restrictions, Lancashire another, despite supposedly being in the same tier.

If it sounds like we have a chip on our shoulder in the north, then so be it. A big, fat old chip, cooked in beef dripping, and dipped in gravy you could weatherproof your fence with. But then, we’ve had this for nearly a thousand years. You can’t really understand unless you’re northern.

And while we’re at it, what is northern anyway? Whitby, Warrington, Widnes, Wigan, Windermere, for sure. Scotland is as north as can be, Wales too. The Midlands? Derbyshire? Nottinghamshire? Sure, why not. The north is a state of mind as much as a geographical location. Hell, you Millwall fans, with your refrain of “no-one likes us, we don’t care”, you can be Northern too, if you like.

Throughout the various harryings of the north we have, by and large, lost. William the Conqueror laid waste and then imposed his will… there were no monasteries or abbeys in the North until after the harrying, as though the remnants he left behind were savages who needed civilising. The shipyards and the pits and the steel factories closed. Despite the tubthumping of Andy Burnham and Joe Anderson, tier 3 will inevitably be stamped across the north.

Yeah, we lose. We get knocked down. We get up again. And we’re not as green as we’re cabbage looking. We know the score. The politics of division. It’s OK, we’re used to it. No hard feelings to the normal folk down south, whatever you might think of us. We’ve known what that lot in charge are like for a millennium now.

Who’d be northern, eh? Anybody in their right mind, if they got the chance.