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Eugene Milne, Ted Schrecker, Lots of planets have a North . . ., Journal of Public Health, Volume 36, Issue 2, June 2014, Pages 181–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdu036
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Extract
Stuart Maconie's splendid examination of England's North, Pies and Prejudice, is prefaced with an exchange between Rose Tyler and the Doctor from an early episode of Russell T. Davies's regenerated Dr Who: ‘If you're an alien, how come you sound like you come from the North’ asks Rose. ‘Lots of planets have a North’ replies the Doctor, in a definitive Mancunian tone.1
Indeed they do, though sometimes the North is the East, or a specific locale, or the poor.
Owen Jones, author of Chavs – The Demonization of the Working Class, recently dismissed the English North–South divide as a myth.2 There is one division that matters, he argued, ‘those who have wealth and power, and those who do not’. If wealth and power are concentrated in the South, the point would seem rather to be that territorial divisions reflect and reinforce socioeconomic ones.
Responding in the New Statesman, James Maxwell pointed to the disproportionate impact on the North of public sector cuts, and to the long-standing disparity in infrastructure investment within the UK.3 London and its surrounding areas, according to IPPR North, receives over 80% of all planned transport spending, and an estimated 15 times greater share of arts and culture funding than other English regions.
