University data confounds the post-Thatcher myth of progress – in fact the UK's social and economic divisions are growing wider
The news that Surrey contained almost as many successful Oxbridge applicants last year as Wales and the north-east of England combined is as predictable as it is saddening. Those of us who don't subscribe to the post-Thatcher myth of progress – the idea that the UK has been somehow "rescued" by Margaret Thatcher and her successors over the last three decades – can only sigh at this new instance of staggering inequality in the pro-money, anti-poor nightmare that is modern Britain.
But these education statistics offer a new twist to the inequality narrative. They make plain a truth that millions of people all over the country have known for some time: in economic, social, and political terms, Britain is partitioning. On the one hand is the flourishing city-state of London and its pastoral commuter belt – places like Surrey and its fellow home counties. On the other hand, increasingly, is everywhere else.
Outside the London megalopolis, in Britain's marginal regions, the recession is a deepening reality, funding cuts are decimating resources and unemployment remains worryingly high. While London has a fair claim to being the world's most prosperous city, many other parts of the country have been abandoned and ignored in the rush to accommodate global capitalism. One young entrepreneur hit the nail on the head when he commented that "a 23- or 24-year-old Londoner is more likely to be concerned about Mumbai than Newcastle".
Was it ever thus? Yes and no. For well over a thousand years, of course, London has been the centrifugal hub of English culture, money and power, while Britain's peripheries have suffered from varying degrees of contempt, indifference and outright violence at the hands of the London-based political establishment. Like France – but unlike, say, Germany and Italy – England was for centuries effectively a one-city nation.
However, a major reversal of Britain's skewed geography occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when northern cities like Manchester and Scottish powerhouses like Glasgow became central to the global economy. By the 20th century, the growth of Britain's industrial heartlands led to the empowerment of a unionised working-class and the mainstream breakthrough of its political embodiment, the Labour party, a party that derived, and still derives, the greater part of its strength from Wales, Scotland, the Midlands, and the north (as well as, we shouldn't forget, the working-class fringes of London itself). Historically, the more Britain's regions have flourished, the more leftwing and the more egalitarian the country as a whole has become.
But since Thatcher we have seen the flipside to this. As the country has drifted to the right, areas outside of the south-east of England have been progressively sidelined. In the neoliberal period, our former industrial regions have continued to decline. Meanwhile London has become something like a new imperial capital, a place where the world's financial elite congregates to make safe-bet property investments and enjoy the support of a political establishment that has for 30 years now been supremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. Labour, a party that has consistently directed its policies at the swing voters of the south-east since the 1990s, must share the blame for this geographical apartheid with the Conservatives.
Back in the 1960s, one of the symptoms of the very tentative form of socialism then being implemented in Britain was a noticeable increase in regional voices in the dominant institutions of cultural life. On the radio, in parliament and in the hallowed quads of Oxford and Cambridge, one of the most obvious signs that power had been spread more equally across the country was the fact that you could expect to hear working-class, regional accents resounding amid the braying of the old boys and the Etonians. In recent times, after the egalitarian reforms of the postwar period have been largely rolled back, our central institutions have become places where the regional voices have been purged to make way for a new south-eastern elite.