Cast your minds back to May 2019. Most of us were swarmed with exams, the weather was warming, and Theresa May announced her resignation – this was also the time where the nation was introduced to Conservative MP and Pret a Manger brand ambassador, Rory Stewart. Stewart, a failed 2019 Conservative leadership hopeful, quit the Party on the 3rd October to run as an independent candidate for mayor of London. Prior to this new-found fame, Stewart was an MP for Penrith and the Border, a northern constituency on the border with Scotland. His forthcoming attempt at a London mayoral campaign stems from a larger epidemic of north-south division within politics and the wider English culture.
Rory Stewart has been an MP for a northern constituency since 2010. Despite the fact that his mayoral campaign has only just begun, it seems difficult to correlate the struggles of rural northern England with the struggles of the capital city. Not only is there no correlation in terms of geography, but in population and ethnic diversity.
Rory isn’t alone in this. Former chancellor George Osbourne, after serving as an MP for Tatton (a constituency near Manchester) between 2001-2016, stepped down to pursue a career as the editor of the London Evening Standard. Whilst I can’t judge an individual for pursuing their own career prospects, it demonstrates how members of northern constituencies may feel left behind. It appears these politicians will pretend to be all for advocating the issues of the north, however will forget the people who gave them this power as soon as a tempting offer for a metropolitan job is placed before them.
Osbourne’s career at the London newspaper seems especially ironic considering his push for a Northern Powerhouse since the coalition government began in 2010. This policy aims to boost economic growth in industrious cities such as Leeds, Newcastle, and Manchester, by investing in better transport links akin to those in the south, and the implementation of devolved political powers. The policy that he pushed as Chancellor would have had direct positive effects for his constituents, for international business, and for his popularity, but has fallen off the policy bandwagon since he left Westminster in 2016. Of course, other issues now have more national and international salience , but the imminence of Brexit hasn’t swept every other policy proposal off the table, so why has the Northern Powerhouse all but vanished?
At first glance, this hardly feels like an issue we should care about – LSE has no real ties to the north of England, and our university culture is targeted towards opportunities right on our doorstep. However, that’s exactly the point – investing in a Northern Powerhouse would not only increase the scope of opportunities in the UK (especially in a post-Brexit world), but would also increase LSE’s reputation beyond the capital As a student from Yorkshire, I can count the number of LSE students I know who live further north than me on one hand. Futile as it seems to some, it adds to the ways in which students can feel alienated here.
As anyone who has taken pretty much any course at LSE will know, correlation is not causation: I don’t want to argue that Stewart and Osbourne were just using northern politics for individual gain. However, these cases are textbook symptoms of the north-south divide. This goes further than policy, with countless examples from media representations and statistical evidence of disparity within government spending. This did not start with George Osbourne, nor will it end with Rory Stewart: it is intrinsic to the psyche of both areas that there is a regional divide that affects us all.
