Where is the North - South line in England?

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Nearholmer
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Nearholmer »

The idea that Starmer is defined as “posh” by his voice is daft. He speaks pretty much like anyone else who grew up in the SE and did well at school …. I probably speak not far different, having grown up c20 miles from where he did.

It’s akin to contending that Melvyn Bragg is the archetypal horny-handed son of toil because he has a northern accent.

In some ways they’re the same: clever lads from ordinary backgrounds who’ve acquired a veneer of RP over their native accents as a result of their educations and professions.
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Paulatic
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Paulatic »

Nearholmer wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 9:24am
It’s akin to contending that Melvyn Bragg is the archetypal horny-handed son of toil because he has a northern accent.
It might be northern but it’s certainly posh northern. :D A lad from Carlisle 'eh' .
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Nearholmer
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Nearholmer »

Hmmm ……. I guess “posh” is like north/south, it all relates to your own personal grid reference, in this case on the hugely complex map of English social standing.

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” (GBS)

But, my point is that “south-eastern” doesn’t equal “posh”, any more than “northern” equals “working class” (pronounced with a short “a”).
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Lance Dopestrong
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Lance Dopestrong »

I've flushed posher things than Starmer.

Conversely, I went to prep school, will inherit a landed title (a real one), and I'm about as posh as Aldi own brand Pot Noodle substitute.
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Cugel
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Cugel »

mattheus wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 9:09am
Tangled Metal wrote: 7 Mar 2023, 11:39pm As an added incentive to get this right, what if regions of England got devolution Scottish style? Where would you define the edge of a hypothetical northern England parliamentary boundary?

BTW I'm coming around to that idea personally the more the two main parties get headed by useless posh men like Boris, richi and Starmer.
This is such a widespread idea that I can't resist rebutting it:

Daft idea. Look how many people in any of the home counties (or the rest of the "South" of England) would vote these people out. You can't simply assume that Westminster represents the surrounding area very well, far-flung regions not at all.

(same goes for Brexit referendum, it's nonsense to say that only the Scots voted against it. etc. etc and indeed, etc ... )
An interesting thought arises - if the north south divide is not really geographical so much as cultural, then we can reframe the question along the lines of: how many distinct divisions of The British are there and what are the dividers between them?

The Brexit debacle certainly underlined the fact that there are such divisions; and that some of them are rather fundamental. But they're not geographical. Even the nationalist divisions are not necessarily determined by where the nationalist lives or was born.

In politics, we still seem to have something of an unseparated conglomerate in that they all sit in Parliament and tend to adhere to the same fundamental and rapidly becoming defunct socio-economic dogmas. But are there, in the Blighter bonces, far more distinct political divisions besides the nationalists; and those of political parties that appear now as merely several varieties of mouldy cheddar that have slightly different colours but are the same cheap-cheese thing from an old Victorian cheese factory that adulterates the cheese with shoddy of various kinds?

Myself I often feel whatever the opposite is of nationalist. (What would that be, eh)? I have no real adherence to a geographical region even though I like some more than others; and prefer some local cultures associated with various regions rather than others. I suppose I'd much rather be in the sparsely populated countryside (or right on its border) than in a big town or city.

I have a strong Geordie accent, which in class-ridden Britain is often used as a down-marker. I counteract agin' the posh ones inclined to look down their noses at me with the use of many long and arcane words, enjoying their attempts at pretending they know what I mean. :-)

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Biospace
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Biospace »

Tangled Metal wrote: 7 Mar 2023, 11:34pm Whenever i visited Derbyshire and the peak district I've always thought the accent was Southern or a bit Midlands,

Possibly a bit contentious but I don't really consider England to be split into North, South and Midlands. I see it as North or south without a third area. Although Birmingham is possibly a foreign country to me more than the south is. Call it midlandshire and give it it's independence! That'd wind the Scots nats up a bit!
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Nearholmer
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Nearholmer »

Cugel,

I think I’m right in saying that if you created a seven dimensional matrix, each dimension split into ten zones, there would be more than sufficient points of intersection to allow every member of the UK population to have one each (although it’s likely that there would be clumping onto far fewer intersections).

So, seven possible dimensions

- age
- gender (self-identied)
- location of birth (simplified to ten zones)
- location of residence (ditto)
- location of work (ditto, one zone being “no paid employment”)
- annual income
- number of dependants
- level of education
- level of intelligence (measured how I know not, but IQ might be at least part of it)
- nature of secondary education (fee-paying, grammar, comprehensive, secondary modern etc)
- nature of employment for greatest part of adult life to date (goodness knows what the markers on this scale are!)
- how Brexit or not are you?
- to what degree do you think private enterprises need to be regulated?
- to what degree do you think human activity is negatively impacting the climate/environment?

Oh, that’s more than seven dimensions already, and I can think of loads of others …..

What I was hoping was to plot all of us on this matrix, then see if that led to significant clumpings, around which bags could be put to create revised political parties.
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Biospace »

Cugel wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 12:55pm
An interesting thought arises - if the north south divide is not really geographical so much as cultural, then we can reframe the question along the lines of: how many distinct divisions of The British are there and what are the dividers between them?

Cugel, from all points of the compass (physically & metaphysically).

There are probably thousand upon thousand distinct divisions and as Nearholmer asks, where do the commonalities lie? I feel that the system we use from Westminster doesn't adequately represents Britain, could some federal system work better? Or is it more an increasingly inept and corruptable class of politician - does Hancock's behaviour make a good case for handing over all power to the WHO the next time government panics over a virus?
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Lance Dopestrong
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Lance Dopestrong »

Biospace wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 1:45pm Or is it more an increasingly inept and corruptable class of politician - does Hancock's behaviour make a good case for handing over all power to the WHO the next time government panics over a virus?
Not a bad thought. Roger Daltrey couldn't do worse than the politicians.
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Nearholmer
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Nearholmer »

There are probably two distinct problems:

- “right sizing” the area/population governed, so that the institutions can remain properly connected to the practical concerns of people. I’ve long thought that c8 Million bods seems to be about right for many things, but then we need “little ones” too, maybe unitary and parish at c500k and c10k, for other things, and we utterly desperately need some really big one(s), with legislative and enforcement powers, to deal with huge global concerns like climate change, war-avoidance, regulating global capitalism etc, which personally I think is better done by “zonal representatives” (1 per 8 Million would give a Parliament of 1000 “global senators”) than by direct election; and,

- how a government should be formed from among the elected representatives at each institution. The party system within the UK constitution, and our system of arriving at a PM, isn’t the only, or necessarily the best option.

FWIW, my take is that the UK is badly the wrong size, too small to be of any real use in world affairs, despite us famously “punching above our weight” (history, nukes, and big mates), and too big to work properly in the interests of its inhabitants.
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Cugel
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Cugel »

Nearholmer wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 1:23pm Cugel,

I think I’m right in saying that if you created a seven dimensional matrix, each dimension split into ten zones, there would be more than sufficient points of intersection to allow every member of the UK population to have one each (although it’s likely that there would be clumping onto far fewer intersections).

So, seven possible dimensions

- age
- gender (self-identied)
- location of birth (simplified to ten zones)
- location of residence (ditto)
- location of work (ditto, one zone being “no paid employment”)
- annual income
- number of dependants
- level of education
- level of intelligence (measured how I know not, but IQ might be at least part of it)
- nature of secondary education (fee-paying, grammar, comprehensive, secondary modern etc)
- nature of employment for greatest part of adult life to date (goodness knows what the markers on this scale are!)
- how Brexit or not are you?
- to what degree do you think private enterprises need to be regulated?
- to what degree do you think human activity is negatively impacting the climate/environment?

Oh, that’s more than seven dimensions already, and I can think of loads of others …..

What I was hoping was to plot all of us on this matrix, then see if that led to significant clumpings, around which bags could be put to create revised political parties.
Such a schema, perhaps with an associated nomenclature describing the many slots in the resultant taxonomy, is to my own taste. I have noticed, though, that many who prefer things nice and simple have cut this more than Gordian knot of N categorical permutations into an easy to grasp "us" and "them". I believe they model the technique on the old Whig-Tory and/or left/right divisions.

Since the "us" and also the "them" tend to be very large groups, containing all sorts of attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and their various sources in class, geography, nature, nurture and several other aspects of humans, it becomes quite easy for a member of "us" to find many things "wrong" with a sample of "them" .... but also easy to select a sample of "them" with attributes we users can grok, if we have to, in order to get "them" to give us summick we want. Once we've got it, we can go back to selecting the sample of "thems" that justify persecuting all of "them".

This works after a fashion but soon gets confusing as we find ourselves uncertain as to whether we are still one of "us" or have somehow jumped ship to themdom. Of course, it's always possible to redefine our new group as "us", making the former group we belonged to "them", against which we can apply the fervour of the converted as we go about vilifying "them" in time-honoured fashion.

There is another method for deciding who one is. You go about finding "like-minded people". These often form clots in pubs of the more plasticky kind, clubs full of older men of a certain socio-economic class and in loon-gatherings such as those found in facepuke and its ilk. Here many shared attributes are evidenced and can form the definition of the like-minded group, such as "reactionary old bigots" or "fan-hooligans of Yobville football team".

There are also "Old boys of Poshthug Hall" and similar establishments specialising in inducing a certain brain-conformity from an early age.

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Jdsk
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Jdsk »

Nearholmer wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 2:25pm There are probably two distinct problems:

- “right sizing” the area/population governed, so that the institutions can remain properly connected to the practical concerns of people. I’ve long thought that c8 Million bods seems to be about right for many things, but then we need “little ones” too, maybe unitary and parish at c500k and c10k, for other things, and we utterly desperately need some really big one(s), with legislative and enforcement powers, to deal with huge global concerns like climate change, war-avoidance, regulating global capitalism etc, which personally I think is better done by “zonal representatives” (1 per 8 Million would give a Parliament of 1000 “global senators”) than by direct election; and,

- how a government should be formed from among the elected representatives at each institution. The party system within the UK constitution, and our system of arriving at a PM, isn’t the only, or necessarily the best option.

FWIW, my take is that the UK is badly the wrong size, too small to be of any real use in world affairs, despite us famously “punching above our weight” (history, nukes, and big mates), and too big to work properly in the interests of its inhabitants.
There's a democratic issue, as above, and England is very centralised and has very weak local government.

There's also a big economic issue: we have very little regional policy. The traditional comparator is Germany. If you throw large amounts of data at some form of cluster analysis you won't get North/South. You'll get London and the Southeast/ everywhere else.

Jonathan

PS: Global collaboration is possibly the most important of all, but opens the problem that dares not speak its name.
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Tangled Metal »

Lance Dopestrong wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 6:49am
Tangled Metal wrote: 7 Mar 2023, 11:39pm BTW I'm coming around to that idea personally the more the two main parties get headed by useless posh men like Boris, richi and Starmer.
Starmer, posh? :lol:

Nice idea re English devolution though. Never thought of it that way. If that ever happened I wonder if the regional assemblies might take on more significant roles and whether that might affect either the notional or actual location of the divide?
He is now courtesy of the social mobility grammar schools, Leeds uni and Oxford uni provides! The very type of school most labour bigwigs scrapped or tried to scrap when in power but still benefited from! 😆

As to devolution. I think it should happen for the North and southwest England. If it did happen out should have the same powers as Scotland or it's a waste of time. In fact devolution should actually be federal system with northern being one of the federal states with equal powers as Scotland and Wales. No unequal devolution or federalism. If something is considered democratic for one region of the UK then it is for all. And there's many regions of the UK that need power to actually develop and catch up with the capital of the UK.

PS and while they're doing that get rid of constitutional monarchy too. All fantasy. Westminster cronyism won't allow power to shift north any more than it has so far.
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Tangled Metal »

Decades ago I got on a train at Leeds to go to an institute do got student members in London. I remember being excited at the idea of a trip to London. As the train went south i got this strong feeling that I was going from an area with lots of countryside to an area without much at all. I started to hate my journey. The further I got on my way to London the more I had of the idea that I couldn't live down south and especially south east.

There's just too many buildings and what countryside I saw wasn't very nice imho.

Then j got there and went up Portman Street to the institute past all the old white buildings like the old BBC building. The sun was shining off the white stone and my mood lightened a bit. Still glad I got home at the end of the day.
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Lance Dopestrong
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Re: Where is the North - South line in England?

Post by Lance Dopestrong »

Tangled Metal wrote: 8 Mar 2023, 4:41pm Decades ago I got on a train at Leeds to go to an institute do got student members in London. I remember being excited at the idea of a trip to London. As the train went south i got this strong feeling that I was going from an area with lots of countryside to an area without much at all. I started to hate my journey. The further I got on my way to London the more I had of the idea that I couldn't live down south and especially south east.
Beautifully put. I feel exactly the same way and wouldn't want to be a mile further south than I am now because of this. I feel sorry for my descendents a generation or two hence when there is no countryside left.
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