Britain’s Unbridgeable Divide
Britain today is a poor and divided country. Parts of London and the southeast of England might be among the wealthiest places on the planet, but swaths of northern England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are among Western Europe’s poorest. Barely a decade ago, the average Brit was as wealthy as the average German. Now they are about 15 percent poorer—and 30 percent worse off than the typical American.
The great project of Boris Johnson’s government is to “unite and level up” the country, bringing the rest of Britain into line with the southeast. This is a mission explicitly tied to Brexit and the threat of Scottish secession, the two great revolutionary challenges facing the British state.
Johnson is not alone in believing that the division between the south and the rest is so big that it threatens the very integrity of the United Kingdom. Yet for him, Brexit was both an expression of Britain’s great divide—a vote against the status quo—and an opportunity to fix it, by giving the government new “freedoms” that it did not have within the European Union.
In the 2016 Brexit referendum and then in the 2019 general election, Johnson offered voters the chance to “take back control” of their destiny, to rebalance the country and to pull it together again. On both occasions, he won.
Six years on, however, we can safely say his project is failing. His government is busy trying to wrest back more control rather than exercising what it has regained. It has not united the country. It has not even begun to level it up.
The truth is, this government won’t accomplish any of that. Until Britain stops trying to restore a vanished past—whether the one imagined by its pro-Brexit Leavers or its anti-Brexit Remainers—and begins to construct a viable future, the country as a whole never will.
“S Cardinal Wolsey asks Thomas Cromwell in the opening pages of, her fictionalized biography of Cromwell. “Filthy,” Cromwell replies. “Weather. People. Manners. Morals … Oh, and the food. Five miles inland, and no fresh fish.” Appalled, Wolsey asks what they do eat up there. “Londoners,” Cromwell says. “You have never seen such heathens.”
