I’m part of the Northern Diaspora, the generation of Northern Britons who growing up in the 1970s and 80s saw their traditional homelands economically, socially and politically harrowed. We left for better lives overseas.
Forty years is a long time to wait for things to improve, but narrowing the regional disparities of wealth and opportunity is still not high on the Westminster agenda. The affluent establishment has written off large parts of the UK.
So now our children are leaving.
Politicians tell us that immigrants from Eastern Europe are admirable for their ambition, for their get-up-and-go. Then they tell us Northerners are lazy and unambitious, even as, bearing these same traits, we pack our bags. Insult to injury.
The mid-1970s were a miserable time in America, and for most of the rest of the world for that matter. In 1975, the US was in recession, unemployment was at 9.2%, and the year started with inflation at 11.8% yoy. It was a violent time too: terrorists were setting off bombs in New York (3), Washington DC, Oakland, and President Ford escaped assassination attempts in Sacramento and San Francisco. The murder rate was heading up to its 1980 historic high of 10.4 per 100k. New York hot-housed with bankruptcy, and in Gotham violent crime was running at 42.8 per 1,000, burglary at 77.4 per 1000 households. Overseas the Vietcong took Saigon and the US helicopters rescued the lucky few, and left many many others waiting to become boat people.
What a bloody awful time. And, no surprise, it hit some harder than others. The national unemployment rate was 9.2%, but for black Americans, they were looking at 15.4% in September. Much much more in New York.
Musical reaction? James Brown had got in early with ‘The Payback’ in 1973. Listen to ‘Mind Power’ : ‘We’re dealing with a very critical and crucial time - the most crucial and critical time I’ve ever witnessed, being as young I am. . . . . A brother, you take to a ghetto and find a whole lot of crime. . . Brothers need jobs: you don’t work, you can’t eat.’
‘The Payback’ remains an astonishing album, not only because it is quite possibly JB’s tightest band at its incomparable best, but also because it was probably the last time JB could plausibly be ‘relevant.’ But it’s hardly a happy event.
Black music got even more down in 1974, with Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’. Musically great, philosophically wrist-slitting. ‘Nobody’s fighting ‘cos nobody knows what to say. . . ‘
But then in December 1975 this happened:
As a response to hugely justified despair, George Clinton gave us . . . . AfroFuturism. Black men in silver platforms boogying in space and bringing funkmanship to a weary planet. We his grateful children.
‘Put a glide in your slide and dip in your hip and come on to the mothership. . .’
George Clinton with Parliament/Funkadelic (including personnel from the JB Experience) was suddenly partying on the mothership! ‘If you hear any noise, it’s just me and boys - hit me!’
“Swing down sweet chariot, stop, and . . . . let me ride.”
(In my dreams, how good would it be for Twickenham to learn George Clinton’s version.)
If you can’t be happy with the P-Funk, you simply can’t get funked up.
The scene: the lounge of an old-people’s home in Huddersfield, 1988. The lounge is populated by the very elderly and frail: it’s the worst sort of waiting room. Daytime, but curtains and shadows, horrible swirling rust-coloured carpet.
Dramatis Personae: me and my great-grandmother, aged 101 and beginning to lose her hearing.
Me: ‘Nan, I’m going to go to work in Hong Kong’
Gran: ‘You what!?’
Me: ‘I’m going to WORK IN HONG KONG!’
Gran: ‘CAN’T YOU GET A JOB NEARER HOME?’
And of course I couldn’t. This was the 1980s. West Yorkshire’s political, social and historical soul had first been harrowed by Ted Heath’s 1972 local administration reforms - an appropriately timed UK version of destroying the village to save it. And then in the late 1970s and early 1980s its industrial base had been destroyed by what we’d now call ‘globalization’. With no functioning local version or vision of society with which to work, there was a vacuum where the response should have been. There was no recovery.
DNA testing shows that both sides of family had never roamed far from the valleys of West Yorkshire - I don’t even have any Viking, German, Irish, Scottish or French blood in me. But this was the 1980s: so I was on my way. To Hong Kong.
It didn’t wholly surprise me. When I was 12, my father took me round one of the knitting sheds of Taylor Livesey. Threads of every colour form spiders’ webs around the columnar Italian knitting machine, dust. ‘Take a look around son, because. . . one day, none of this will be here.’
Approximately 20 years later, I’m in Guangdong, and courtesy of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, I’ve been selected for a guided tour of the province, with my translator being a Beijing student rusticated after June 1989. He shows us into a knitting shed. Threads of every colour form spiders’ webs around the columnar Italian knitting machines, dust.
Could be the same machines. Literally, the very same machines. From Huddersfield to Dongguan.
The other day, I had this from by a very nice and well meaning British lady: “I don’t understand: if housing and wages are so cheap in the North, why aren’t factories locating there? What’s the matter with the place?” (Implied: What’s the matter with them?)
It’s a very good question. Actually, it’s The Crucial Question.
My answer was the one I usually give: ‘We simply have had no infrastructure investment for decades: the Treasury’s Green Book rules for public investment has effectively channeled all Britain’s resources into London and the prosperous parts of the South East, and everywhere else has been ignored and allowed to run down.”
And whilst that’s true, and in my view not only a crime but worse, an error, it felt lame. Why haven’t firms come and reinvigorated the North? Why haven’t we done it ourselves?
Here’s one part of the answer: prolonged poverty and disadvantage teaches people terrible lessons. It teaches them they are personally worthless, and are also powerless to change their fate. After a time, personal worthlessness and powerlessness tend to default into depression, self-neglect, illness. Parts of the North are stuck in poverty because of the prevalence of disability; parts of the North are stuck in disability because of prevalence of poverty. In a political establishment as centralized and as indifferent to regional inequality as Britain’s, the perception of powerlessness is justified.
Do that for long enough, and a population is not just disenfranchised, it is ill and dying, and nobody’s idea of thrusting workforce ready to forge the future.
Meanwhile, those in the prosperous niches of Britain look on and think: ‘hopeless’.
Forty years is too long. It’s just too long.
In less than 20 years, I’ve seen China go from grinding, immiserating and corrupting poverty, to material decency. Hundreds of millions have worked their way out of the sort of poverty the West cannot even imagine. You can do it in 20 years.
Forty years is too long. It’s just too long.
But we can’t copy China, we can’t copy Japan, and we could perhaps copy aspects of Singapore, but we won’t.
Yet where else should we look? Asia is, after all, where the modern world is being born and constructed.
Europe is an old-people’s home, America is a cautionary tale, with London following.
There are no examples to follow, no countries to emulate. We’re going to have to work this one out for ourselves.
Musical interlude: There's this moment in the David Gilmour 'Remember That Night' concert of 2006, when David Crosby and Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) are given a spot. They sing, and sing beautifully, a hymn to the noble cause of fighting for freedom:
‘Find the cause of freedom, buried in the ground.
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.’
And it’s a jarring moment, because it’s so completely out of time and place.
The cause of freedom. Whatever happened to that?
I was alone in the newsroom of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong in early 1989. Me and an atlas, opened at the Europe page. I was ecstatic, hardly able to believe it: I was sticking post-it notes all over the page: Poland, free!; Hungary, free!; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, free!, and freedom surely coming in Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany. Maybe some day the Soviet Union!
The Cold War ring-fenced my future as I was growing up. At times, it looked like the ring-fence could be leading us to the abattoir - ‘duck and cover’. And I didn’t know until much later that I was closest to getting nuked not in 1962’s Cuban Crisis, but 21 years later in NATO’s Able Archer exercises.
Nevertheless, there was a profoundly cheering aspect to the Cold War: it provided a near cast-iron guarantee that you could tell right from wrong. On the one side, the USSR with its grotesquely murderous back-story and love of domestic repression, and on the other side, US and freedom & democracy.
In those days, it was not only possible to see the US as a model through which we could aspire to richer, more expansive and more free life, it was the natural default position. Yes, we could say, the US clearly had its faults (segregation, Vietnam) but it was offered a decent blueprint for the future. Everyone knew that - even commies.
The cause of freedom! Whatever happened to that?
“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.”
Shelley was writing about Britain in 1819, but it seems some things keep coming round, even in a republic.
Here’s another part of the answer to the Crucial Question: in the 1970s and 80s we left. Like Fiona Hill, I am from the ‘There’s Nothing for You Here’ generation. I have spent most of my working life in Asia, coming back to England, to Yorkshire, when it was time for my children to go to school. Now they are leaving, have left, and (though no millionaire, alas) I’m living in Barbados.
Out in Asia, or in the US, the British people you came across were disproportionately from the parts of the UK which didn’t share in the prosperity of London and parts of the South East. The North and Scotland principally. There’s a reason why Huddersfield Town has an overseas fan-base quite out of proportion to the town’s size, and certainly to its track record of cyclical failure. There’s a reason why the best and most raucous St Andrew’s Ball I’ve ever been to was in Beijing.
And a few decades down the line, it’s even the same here in Barbados. The other day at the Barbados Hash House Harriers, three of us were getting to know each other, with ‘where are you from’. ‘I’m from Huddersfield,’ I said, fairly confident this was a pretty good opening bid in the hard town stakes. He replied: ‘I’m from Wigan.’ Trumped: Wigan is harder, without a doubt. We turned to the third. He wasn’t cowed: ‘I’m from South Armagh.’
So that’s why we’re in Barbados.
And our children. Well, guess where they aren’t. For the young, once again, ‘There’s Nothing for You Here’, so why would they stay?
My youngest daughter is living in Tokyo. Last week, she sent me her phone-video of a concert she’d just been to. Who? George Clinton, of course.
"The desired outcome is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funkmanship."
Whilst Parliament/Funkadelic’s AfroFuturism may have seemed just a lot of funky fun coming out of the deep darkness of 1970s North America, it also represented a radical and positive re-framing of the Black experience in a way which succeeded in expanding its future potential.
And it is in that perverse and positive way I think we need: Northern Futurism.
Here’s an idea being pushed by another exiled but economically aware Northerner who’s looking for the future: why not build a maglev train across the Pennines: Hull - Leeds - Manchester - Liverpool? Link the great Northern ports and would-be industrial heartlands. Here’s another idea: monorail the maglev 30ft above the M62 to avoid tunnelling. Design it so it’s roll on, roll-off for TEUs. The gains from improved linkages should be exponential, the rewards to agglomeration immense. Spurs later to Sheffield and Newcastle.
Andrew Collingwood writes: “Leeds centre and Manchester centre are only 36 miles apart as the crow flies. Yet the average train time is one hour and 17 minutes. The very fastest train is 47 minutes (if running on time) and the express train norm is 50-60 minutes. The Leeds-Manchester route is barely faster than when men walked in front of trains waving red flags.
“Leeds has a population of 800k, even before accounting for its hinterland (Bradford alone has 500k), has no tram or metro system or even dedicated light rail. Is there a city in Europe of a similar scale in this position? Not to my knowledge.
”The Shanghai Airport maglev, based on Siemens technology, travels is 18 mile route in seven minutes. This suggests the available technology could do the 36 miles between Manchester and Leeds centres in around 15 minutes.”
“So let’s create a NorthernFuturism transport system that allows anybody to get from anywhere in Leeds to Manchester city centre, or vice versa from anywhere in Manchester to Leeds city centre, within an hour. This would make Manchester and Leeds effectively one economic unit. The positive agglomeration effects alone would be extraordinary.”
So it’s never been done? Good. Doncaster and York will find a way.
“Once upon a time called right now!”
AfroFuturism, though, was about more than music, and NorthernFuturism must be about more than infrastructure. AfroFuturism didn’t dismiss the multiple problems of black America, it simply vaulted over them. So too, NorthernFuturism need not disown its industrial, sporting and social heritage, but it must transcend them so we can define the future, define the modern, in our own Northern way. We don’t want to be London - hell, we want to be waaaay better than that!
So Northern Futurism will need its inventors and its investors, schemers and dreamers, magicians and statisticians, punks and philosophers, philanthropists and capitalists, musos and technos, foodies, roadies, architects and greens.
People who can plan a ball, and people who can kick a ball.
Look closely and the seeds are already showing up in, for example, the way Joshi Herrmann is re-inventing news media with The Mill in Manchester. And in a different way, it’s in the north that the SDP is quietly re-inventing what politics can be, with Wayne Dixon as our Leeds-Kwan-Yew.
Musical Coda: Ralph McTell is the greatest living British songwriter. He is also so utterly uncool that no-one has ever managed - or tried? - to fashion his very uncoolness into something cool. Still, that doesn’t stop him from being the greatest living British songwriter. One of his more recent songs has this:
‘Sometimes I wish I could pray
Sometimes I wish I could pray
Most of the time, I’m doing OK
But sometimes I wish I could pray.’
Me too, brother.
This is an excellent article Michael. Exporting the surplus from a capitalist economy has a Marxist ring to it, although in this case it is surplus people rather than goods and services. London has used this labour for decades and not worried itself about the ones that got away. It makes sense that the number of escapees is rising, as you've written before about how the cost of housing makes it increasingly hard to migrate to the capital.
It is a disgrace when we have a Minister for Levelling Up and a government elected on the basis they would focus on the north that we are still discussing how to get started. Tearing up the Green Book is an easy place to begin. The description of it as "approved thinking models and methods" on the government website is scary enough and has the whiff of communism to it.
I like MT's stuff, if a little too long to read for many. Oop North is probably far more prosperous now than it was in the 1970s. The deserted or repurposed satanic mills of Victorian England were cruel temples of wage enslavement. Where did the investment for them come from? London and Liverpool as a result of either the infamous triangle of Sierra Leone, Jamaica and Liverpool or the East India Company. Where's the incentive to invest in fast local railways to move subsidised students and OAPs about? £Billions were spent to move people from Hull to Manchester by road. I can't work out the relative cost per mile but convenience is the deciding factor when rail is so expensive now and run by bolshey trade unions. WFH and the Internet has eaten deeply into commuting and we gave our manufacturing away to China. I'd go for a Spaceport and a scientific Silicon Valley set up. They'd be flying to work. The downside? Expat oligarchs, Oil countries and China would be there before our 'entrepreneurs' got out of bed.