Tag: London

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Yorkshire/Humberside

Millisphere: a discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population – around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

Choosing the millisphere of Yorkshire highlighted for me the arrogance of attempting to describe a region the writer has never been to. It would be easy to trot out the oft quoted trope: “A Yorkshireman is a Scot with all charity wrung out of him” or to list some famous people from “God’s Own Country” but I was looking for something deeper.

Yorkshire Captain James Cook constructed an early link to the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) by putting up the Union Jack for the United Kingdom but also from Yorkshire are: Jeremy Clarkson, Joe Cocker, Mark Dawson, Judi Dench, Guy Fawkes, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Frankie Howard, Henry Moore, Michael Palin, Diana Rigg, Jimmy Savile, Harold Wilson and Ernie Wise, to name a few.

The Yorkshire anarchist philosopher, poet and art critic, Sir Herbert Read, once said: “poetry is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.” The millisphere is concerned the geographical “truths” – a region’s distinctive character and its relationship with other millispheres.

The EU administrative region of Yorkshire/Humber (pop 5.3m) covers most of the historic county of Yorkshire. York comes from the Viking word for town and it was the last English kingdom to be incorporated into the United Kingdom. The Wars of the Roses are symbolically contested to this day with the football match between Leeds United (white/York) and Manchester United (red/Lancaster).

In the 1980s thousands of miners and police faced off for bare-knuckle battles before Margaret Thatcher closed down the Yorkshire coal mines. At the time geographer Doreen Massey (Manchester Open University) in Geography Matters pointed out that poor regions tend to be blamed for their own poverty. “Northern regions are told to stand on their own feet while in the south, around London, the government subsidises development,” she said citing London’s Canary Wharf development and the channel tunnel.

During the 2008 “Global Financial Crisis” (GFC) British bankers unloaded (pound symbol) 1.3 trillion worth of derivatives that, at the time, they referred to as “crap” and “vomit. In the process every British man, woman and child handed over (pound symbol) 19,721 to the bankers. Like South Canterbury Finance in New Zealand, the robbers got bailed out and paid out by the government, the rest got austerity. It was the working class and middle class who paid, leaving seven million Britons in “precarious” employment; setting baby-boomers against millennials and the metropolitan elite against everyone else.

In the recent Brexit referendum Yorkshire/Humber voted to leave – London voted to stay. Since the GFC a regionalist party has emerged in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire Party (originally titled “Yorkshire First”) got only 1% of the votes in 2014 and 5% in the 2017 parliamentary elections, which is insignificant in a first-past-the-post system; their platform is “If Scotland can have their own parliament, why not Yorkshire?”

Sir Herbert Read believed that “the poet is necessarily an anarchist and that he must oppose all organised conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.” Read was also an advocate for the importance of art in education.

Like Read, film director Francis Lee is the son of a Yorkshire farmer. Currently screening in cinemas around the county, Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country has won first prize at Sundance and at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

Described as Yorkshire’s Brokeback Mountain because it depicts a love affair between two men, it also depicts the Yorkshire Landscape. “I want to see the landscape’s effect on the characters, rather than the landscape,” Lee said.

To illustrate the difference between rural Britain and metropolitan London Lee recalled being youngest family member (with the smallest hands) on a pig farm. “My mother talks about me with one hand up a pig’s vagina pulling out piglets and the other hand holding a bacon butty.” You don’t do that in the city.

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London

“Citizens of nowhere,” the millisphere of London post-Brexit.

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

Two of our friends who live and work in London were visiting Wanganui last week and I was interested to quiz them about London post-Brexit.

London, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted in the 2016 referendum to stay in the EU, while almost all the rest of the UK voted to leave.

“I remember the night it happened, it was so negative and depressing,” said Jocelyn who teaches at the Camberwell School of Art. “ At work the next morning the students were in tears, I had to take them all out for a cup of tea, it cost me a lot of money,” she recalled.

Change would be dramatic she thought, for example, in terms of fees, her EU students would now be seen as “foreign students” not “home students” anymore. “It will take a lot of intellectual effort to untangle from all sorts of areas.”

Of the 8.5 million people living in Greater London almost one million of them are from the EU and don’t have British passports.

“We are living through the death-knell of Great Britain,” said Celia who once worked at Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery and now works at the Tate Modern. “It’s going to be pretty tough, I think they will lose Scotland in the end.”

“London is a very tolerant city, and very mixed, on the number twelve, which is my bus, they’d think I was the only English person, and I’m not,” Jocelyn observed. “My co-worker is Greek with two children born in London, but didn’t have a British passport, which costs a thousand pounds, therefore she couldn’t vote in the referendum, people are already getting letters telling them to prepare to go home.”

London’s status as a global financial hub can no longer be guaranteed.

HSBC is planning to move a thousand workers to Paris over the next two years and Lloyds of London has announced setting up a new European base to retain privileged access to the single European market. On the other hand Google, Apple, Facebook and Snapchat are setting up offices in

London.

Sadiq Khan, the Moslem mayor of London, at Davos this year, has warned that a “hard Brexit” won’t necessarily benefit European financial centres like Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt but rather will benefit global centres like Hong Kong, Singapore and New York.

Journalists living in “university, internet and travel bubbles” and looking at the UK through a “London lens” didn’t see Brexit coming. Elite Londoners saw themselves as “citizens of the world.” British nationalists called them “citizens of nowhere.”

Brexit has unearthed a polarisation in the UK along the lines of age, education, class and geography. Between those who were able to move freely and embraced globalisation versus those dissatisfied with the political establishment and saw the future with fear and alienation. Between those caught up in lower wages and rising house prices since the 2008 financial crisis versus the financial elite who mostly came out of crisis richer than when they went in.

Jocelyn and Celia still maintain a home in Castlecliff and call Whanganui a “relaxed and lovely” place. For all its faults they still find London “staggering” with “layers and layers and layers of meaning and opportunity” for those working in the arts.

What attracts them to London is that it is open and tolerant, that there is interaction across diverse communities, and continues to attract the “Dick Whittingtons” of the world, although, these days, young New Zealanders are more likely to do their OE in Berlin (where it is cheaper to live) than in Earls Court, where their parents did their OE.

They are concerned with the rise of the right and nationalism and xenophobia in the UK. “The frightening thing is that Teresa May looks like Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump,” they agreed.

“One of the pleasures of living in London is taking the train out into the surrounding countryside to look at the stunning English landscape,” said Jocelyn. “A landscape maintained with EU subsidies,” added Celia, and they both laughed.

London, which has traditionally been open to foreign immigrants, which needs them both to do the work that the British won’t do, as well as for skilled workers in the finance, technology and pharmaceutical sectors, voted to remain in the EU. On the other hand regional Britain where immigrants generally don’t go, voted to cut the ties with the EU and send foreign workers back home.

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Swessex

In the 1960s and eccentric English aristocrat, Alexander Thynn, the seventh Marquess of Bath, proposed that the world should consist of a thousand roughly equal population states.

Alexander’s father had been wounded in North Africa in World War II, and his father had only become the previous sixth marquess because his older brother had been killed in the Belgium trenches in World War I. Empires cause wars young Alexander reasoned – better to dismantle empires.

At the time New Zealand along with 70 other states such as Austria, Cuba, Israel and Laos – fell into that order of magnitude. Let’s call them millispheres – a state inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the total world population.

Since then another 20 states have joined the list of millispheres. Newly independent states such as Belarus, Turkmenistan, Bosnia and Croatia have appeared after the sundering of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, while Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Newly independent colonies such as Papua New Guinea have become millispheres. Most recently South Sudan voted to become one, while Syria is trying to break up and to illustrate the marquess’ original observation, the main suppliers of military hardware to that conflict are the United States, Russia and China.

In India there are aspirant millispheres such as Bodoland and Gorkhaland, and there is the Chin state in Burma, and the millisphere of Kashmir straddling the India-Pakistan border.

Indonesia, after the fall of Suharto, devolved political and economic powers to their regions, many roughly the size of millispheres, to placate independence campaigns in regions such  as Banda Aceh.

China, on its periphery, has aspirant millispheres such as Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang and in Europe there are independence movements in the Basque country, Catalonia and Flanders.

In all, the geo-political trend since World War II indicates the move to a world of “millispheres” along the Marquess of Bath’s lines. Even the United States is not immune. In June 2016 when a 52-48 majority in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, using the hashtag #Brexit, there was renewed interest that Texas formalise efforts to secede from the United States, using the hashtag #Texit.

The UK, after their historic Brexit vote, faces renewed calls for Scotland’s independence. During Scotland’s recent vote on whether to leave the UK and form an independent Scotland but still be in the EU, the “Yes” faction believed Scotland should take back responsibility, secure funds from North Sea oil and stop building nuclear weapons, and use their resources and finances to create jobs, with more equal wages and a fairer social system.

Meanwhile the “No to independence” faction ran a campaign of fear. Scotland can’t make its way in on its own, they  said, adding that independence created an unsure economic future with doubtful benefits for the individual.

They theorised that it was doubtful whether the UK would remain in the EU (which came to pass). The pro-uk bloc followed the military line that in a dangerous world it is better to have strong partners and nuclear weapons.

Should the Marquess of Bath’s prediction of a world of one thousand independent “millispheres” come to pass, what would this mean for the UK?

It would mean an independent Scotland and Wales, and Northern Ireland would have no option but to join with the rest of Ireland. The millisphere of the Greater London urban area would probably continue as one of the great global financial centres and to the north there would be another largely urban millisphere centred on Manchester, with the rest of England divided into four or five rural/urban millispheres.

To the southwest of London there would be the millisphere of “Swessex” (Wessex and the Southwest) where the Marquess of Bath, now in his 80s, still lives.

The disintegration of the world’s superpower states and the creation of more millispheres probably wouldn’t mark the end of the world, and it might just put and end to war.

In the meantime the millisphere is merely another lens to examine human geography.