Industrial decline began in the 19th century, when scorn for manufacturing set in. But delusions of greatness continue
The Australian writer and academic Donald Horne is best remembered in Britain for his vivid summation of one of its largest divisions – that between the north and the south. Writing in 1969, Horne decided that the Britain of what he called the northern metaphor was “pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious and believes in struggle”; while in the southern metaphor the same country was “romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition”. The north’s great sin was “a ruthless avarice” rationalised in the belief that humanity’s prime impulse was “a calculating economic self-interest”; the south matched it with “a ruthless pride” that believed “men are born to serve”.
Horne included Scotland with northern England as “the north”; and, if he’d thought about it, he might well have included Wales too, because what he considered to be northern qualities had matured in the places most affected by the industrial revolution. But it was not as though Horne believed these attitudes were strictly defined by geography, as though the traveller left the village ponds of Sussex in fuzzy Technicolor and arrived at Manchester’s mills in stark black and white.
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