Talking about Northern Independence

Centuries of marginalisation and decades of economic and social neglect have left the North of England with some of the highest rates of poverty and health inequality in Europe, where it's easier to get from Liverpool to London than it is from Leeds to Manchester. In the face of Labour’s silence and the Tory’s frankly insulting attempts at economic and governmental rebalancing, the newly founded Northern Independence Party has one answer - a free, independent, social democratic Northumbria and the end of England as we know it. In solidarity with secessionists from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the South West, and London, Luke Blaylock of the NIP argues that the only way decades of neglect can be redressed and transcended is through democratic, anti-racist Northumbrian self-determination. 

It’s really interesting that the Northern Independence Party has popped its head up now. What is British Identity?  What is English Identity? I think “what is English Identity?” especially in contrast to Northern Irish, Welsh or Scottish identity.  A lot of these questions have been incipient in the UK in the last 50, 60 years. I was born in England, I would probably consider myself nominally English, but I’ve never identified with the British Flag. I’ve got no interest in that, and I basically feel like the British State is a hollow lie. But for a lot of us at the same time it’s the only kind of nominal national identity that we can lay claim to. As much as we might balk at the idea of the nation or of mobilising that nation as a political force, there’s still something quite important in terms of interventions that we can make there.

Yeah 100%, so whereabouts are you from if you don’t mind me asking?

Not at all, I was born in South West London but I grew up in West Wiltshire, on the Somerset border.

I was going to say, it's funny seeing the difference between the Northerners of Jamaican descent in Manchester. They feel very strongly about being Mancunian Northern but they also don’t mind being English. But the London crowd - I’m assuming, this is just me making assumptions, I’ve never lived in London and I don’t know that much about it - it’s the centre, it's the metropolis, it's a bit more cosmopolitan or whatever so they might feel a bit more British than they do English elsewhere in the South, the Midlands, and parts of the North where people feel strongly about being English.  I’ve got a similar background on my Mum’s side where they’re from the Continent so she’s got a very different opinion of when it comes to different relationships to national identity. Whereas my Dad’s a Geordie, like he would call himself English but he kind of rejected British national identity. With strong ties to Scotland and Ireland and being Northerners, we were always aware that we are quite distinct and that we we don’t quite fit into Englishness. 

When people talk about England they don’t really describe us. And this goes for the rest of the North, but especially when you’re from what is essentially a borderland and what was a borderland for hundreds of years until the Union of the Crowns and the The Union. It’s easier for me to go towards my Northern identity or my English identity just because of that. And speaking to the Scouse it’s sort of similar for them, a lot of them have got Irish and Welsh heritage so they sort of see England, see the United Kingdom, for what it is - hollow. Sort of meaningless, but then Englishness… the lines are blurred now for British and English, they’re both the same thing, and they’re both kind of hollow and empty and meaningless if you know what I mean.

You ask anyone walking down the street “What’s Englishness?” you’re not going to get a clean constitutionally derived, historical answer.  They might say something about Yorkshire puddings or Saint George. 

It's always with these boring things.  People say that it’s the countryside and it’s like, every country has a countryside. Because it's so part of that myth of England, and when you look at who came up with this myth it’s the middle class and upper class people that tend to be in the South East, or who ended up moving down to the South East because that’s where power and wealth are. And this is one of our arguments - centralisation - everything gets funneled down near to Westminster because that’s where power is and that’s potentially why Britishness and Englishness have melded and become incoherent. 

Think about it -  we’ve got Irish and Scottish connections to certain cities like Newcastle and Liverpool and other places, not only do you have the upper class sort of intermarrying and taking over land in other places but they end up coming back to the motherland, in England, being based where power is. But on the working class level we’ve had the same working class people who came here because this was the centre of the Empire. The middle classes in Scotland and England who saw themselves as having a common identity, common interests melded together to form this distinct British identity. Over the years - ideas, people, resources - it’s all funnelled into England, particularly the South East. It’s all become one big incoherent mess.

Working out the actual history, how knowledge about Britain has been formed is very important, but tapping into people’s experience of their local pride or their ideas of what their regional identity is is very important. In the South West there’s not much going on for us really, we’re another backwater of the South East.

“We’re the Northern Independence Party, this is what the North is, this is what we want, we’re a distinct people and think we should have our own country”. It sort of boiled a lot of people’s piss from other parts of England, people from the Midlands kicking off, and people from the South West, in the West country they’ve got a distinct identity. So essentially there is something there to kick off a kind of regionalism but I just think it takes someone to have that discussion, because if you read our Launch Article, if you read some of the other stuff we have done, I’ve obviously mentioned centralisation. But one of the reasons we’re calling for independence is because we don’t think that Westminster will break up the country along regional lines. They’re not going to devolve powers to the extent that we need because it’s not in their interest. So they’re certainly not going to talk about Wessex, Wessex regionalism, East Anglian regionalism and having a Cornish Assembly/Parliament.

There are all of these coalesced very comfortable little spots that kind of make up the outline of what we call the UK - the Union, the Monarchy, the Union Jack, British “Democracy”. But when you start to approach them everything gets very difficult. I’m not one for divining the future, but I would imagine that if the NIP wins this by-election the national attention is going to come to you, and a lot of these questions are going to be pitched to you. Like “Well, you’re anti-British”, “Well” - and even though we know the White Working Class is a myth - “You just haven’t learned the lessons of the 2019 election, you’re going to fail like Corbynism”. You’re even dangerous, maybe, like the IRA, or the way that they consistently try to paint Sinn Fein, regardless of their parliamentary strategy, as parallel to terrorism.

Oh we’ve had all sorts of conspiracy theories coming out on twitter on who’s backing us and the IRA gets mentioned quite a lot. Because obviously, we’re Northern Separatists. Russians too, if there was any Russian money I’d like to bloody see it. If we manage to make back our deposit that’s a victory in itself. Because this is all, the party started with shitposting. Twitter shitposting. Yeah we were all pissed off with the scenes with Andy Burnham on the news. Lads who grew up on bloody Maggie’s farm - who grew up Thatcher’s children -  most people I know aren’t really that political except for my old man who worked in the mines. All of a sudden lads who normally would only talk about Football on the whatsapp group are talking about how pissed off they are with Westminster. Some of the lads were saying they were watching Nicola Sturgeon’s press conferences instead of Boris. They were saying to me - “Why haven’t we got our own party?” And then obviously all of the shitposting on twitter going on about King in the North, and then next thing you know there is a party. And it turned out there was an appetite for Northern independence, or certainly to put the question out. The disillusionment, the anger, next thing you know it’s all “Maybe we should get our act together and become a proper party”. And then here we are. Here we are, and we’re going to contest a by-election in Hartlepool. 

How do you conceive of this consensus building around Northumbrian secession? 

In terms of building inroads, attracting all the different Northerners to our cause? So my argument is that even if you are pro the United Kingdom, you’re pro-English and you feel quite strongly about that. Even Geordies who support England and wear Gazza on the back of their bloody shirts, no one’s going to deny that the North needs representation. There’s a reason why we’re in the mess that we’re in, there’s a reason why we’re so disillusioned, there’s a reason why the poorest areas in the North voted Brexit for example. So that’s the one thing, because I know people for example in Scotland who were pretty much reluctant SNP voters because they feel their voice isn’t heard in Labour and they're definitely not going to vote Tory. And more and more are coming around to the idea of independence. So that would be one thing. 

So the next part of it is making the argument, why we need to take the idea of Northern Separatism seriously. And it’s for the reasons I’ve said. And you know hopefully this ends up building into a nationwide debate about things like federalism. Because I didn’t realise the extent of how centralised this country is, and it's on so many different levels - it's not just politics, it's also the economic side of things. So for example the economics team have been talking about how the [Northern] economy on our current measurements is roughly the size of Sweden, yet we have some of the poorest regions in Northern Europe. And you’ve got a lot of economic activity happening in the North but the companies are based in the South so it only gets recorded there.

Yeah so everything gets funneled down.

Yeah and that’s one example, but even with things like cultural stuff. London, like we said is the metropole, it’s the centre of the world in many regards, so it gets things more than we do. The transport, I think they’ve got cheaper transport. Buses are just a rip off and they’re shite if you don’t mind me saying. Absolutely crap. And I remember when I was down in Hampshire and they were fucking awful there as well.

Here the bus service is absolutely shit, you compare it to London, you’re taking what could be a 20 minute journey and it’s taking you 50 minutes and it's costing you like £3. You end up paying way over for a journey that could be so fast and cheap on TFL.

Yeah like with Newcastle, Manchester the transport’s not too bad in the cities, I say not too bad like it’s alright.  But like to travel between Leeds and Manchester is a joke. If you’re from rural areas especially up in Cumbria it’s awful. In Britain everything runs down to London. Even when they want to pitch stuff to us like the High Speed Rail and that it’s only really for the benefit of London. And that’s not to say there aren’t poor people in London, we know that, it’s this relationship that we call the North-South divide. It’s historical and it takes different forms. We’re at a point now where we feel like the UK’s irredeemable, it’s not going to reform itself, and to take power in order for us to reform it is very unlikely - we’ve tried.

I voted Labour, my ancestors were part of the Labour movement, you look at what Labour’s achieved in terms of the welfare state. It’s all brilliant, but they didn’t fundamentally change how power worked in the UK. Labour’s a hindrance now, it’s standing in our way so that’s why the North needs its own party, and that’s why we’re talking about separatism. Labour don’t want to have the conversation, the Tories certainly don’t want to have the conversation.  I’m not a politician, yet it has taken people like us to try and form this party so we can have these conversations, and figure out what we need.  Clearly they aren’t working.

What you were saying about economics is interesting, because with HS2 it’s not the idea that areas in the North can be economically productive on their own terms - it’s the idea that economic development in the North always requires that connection to London. It emanates.  Which as you’re saying number one isn’t accurate, number two it’s not a sustainable way of building an economy. 

And it’s not natural either, it’s been done on purpose. Because we’re Northerners we’re focused on the North, but it also works between East and West.  And again it all goes back to power being situated in Westminster and it always has been. I’m not a medieval historian - so someone please correct me if I’m wrong - but even by medieval standards England was highly centralised. That’s what we’re up against. But as soon as you mention these things like people do start to realise. Talking to people in the party whether its regional issues, talking to economists, or historians, they’ll bring up a new bit of information that I never knew. I knew we were struggling compared to the South but I didn’t realise health inequality was so bad. We don’t live as long as Southerners. It shouldn’t surprise me but it was shocking to see it in statistics.

The historical divide, and I suppose this is where we picked Northumbria because a country needs a name. We wanted to be apart from England and Northern England basically equals Northumbria before it was taken over by England. It does play on that nationalist nostalgia and from the left we can counter the far right, but it’s also about history. Like this is a historical phenomena that has gone on and developed in a strange way. Obviously the North-South divide we talk about today is different, we’re talking about the industrial period and how we transition to a post industrial settlement.

The South East, and particularly the financial sector in London, has managed to keep its place whereas the North has been absolutely decimated. And I suppose this doesn’t help other parts of England either. If you’re working class in London that’s where the billionaires buy their bloody luxury flats and push up the prices so it has this knock on effect.  So in that way I suppose we’re doing Southerners a favour really by breaking that power.

I really feel like in the UK we need some of these huge, constitutionally epochal moments - like Scottish Independence, Northumbrian Independence - to really give us a kick up the arse. Starmer’s shafting his own future.  There’s so much talent, so many organisations, passion, people around Labour and he’s fucked it. It’s to his detriment and to ours. But the great thing is that for the rest of us on the left, that’s not lost to us. And tapping into that on a radical regional basis or in a way that actually confronts this idea of Britishness, or this idea of Englishness as something that holds Britain together, holds also our colonial memory together, could be incredible. I almost feel like England is to the Union what Britain was to the Empire. An endlessly expanding black hole which we’re led to believe has a crown on top of it, but it’s not that. 

No I agree with that. These debates are going to be on different levels aren’t they. When it comes to Labour it kind of saddens me in a way because it's the party of my family, of my ancestors, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn twice. If it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t be here, because when I was getting into politics and realising things were fucked I followed the 2015 general election and voted for the Greens as a protest vote. South Manchester was a Labour stronghold, so I thought well “Fuck this prick I’m not voting for him” and then Jeremy Corbyn was elected and change looked possible. But let’s be honest it wasn’t that radical. 

Certain things it’s easy to back. You can talk about funding the NHS. Well the Tories are talking about funding the NHS as well. You can talk about needing to rebuild but it wasn’t as catchy as “Levelling Up”. That’s how the Tories play their game. But they can’t play that game with us..  and the bigger we get, the more threatening we’re going to get, and the bigger the conversation will become. Hopefully we can steer the political debate, especially away from the right. Well saying that the Tories have outflanked Labour on the left anyway.

Absolute insanity. And things like the Overseas Operations Bill, the Spycops Bill.

I mean look at the guy they put in for Hartlepool.  He was talking about how progressive Saudi Arabia is, and how Libya was such a success so “let’s do Zimbabwe next.”

What the Labour party never did, what Corbyn never did, was view those 8 years as an opportunity to take over the party. With things like not backing mandatory re-selection, not implementing party democratisation as well as they could have. Whatever is left over of that moment exists with more than a foot outside of the party now. There’s a lot to tap into.  When you’ve got Socialist MP’s in the Labour party not feeling like they belong, you’ve got people you can talk to along with the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein..

Yeah so I mean we’ve talked about this before - what are our chances? We’re grounded, we’re viewing things realistically. Sure if we took every seat in the North we’d be talking about coalition and we’d hold the government to ransom basically. If you want power you need us. And that’s something people in the North need to realise - they have power. Without the poorest areas in the North voting for Brexit, Brexit wasn’t happening. If Labour or the Tories want power they need the North. But that’s a long way off - to emulate the success of the SNP. 

But we might smash Hartlepool. And even if we don’t win anything, as long as we can steer the debate and actually talk about what the North needs we’ll be doing well. We feel like over the years obviously Labour tried palming us off with regional assemblies. If you want to save the United Kingdom then the North, which is a distinct entity with distinct regions; an economy the size of Sweden; 15 million people, needs its own bloody parliament. It needs to be recognised. When you read certain debates in parliament about what needs to be done, usually The North, Scotland and Wales get lumped together. And when you even look at travel writing for posh people in The South, they talk about Southern working class people as being savages, and talk about it in colonial terms almost.  

Even as late as the early 1900s there’s travel writing about visiting the North and it’s like they’re visiting some colonial possession in Africa or somewhere. The way they romanticise parts of Scotland and Wales, the same thing happens in the North. Fast forward today and all of a sudden we’re part of England, and we’re worse off, just like we were worse off back then. The modern version of Northern travel writing is the bloody Pizzeria shop owner in Leigh that the Guardian wrote about, the symbol of the working class. “This is the working class, they’re white, and they wear flat caps, and they’re racist”. I suppose it’s evolved the way they talk about various people who don’t fit into their mould of what a British or an English person should be.

It’s also interesting how the genre of travel writing was applied to the UK, the racial aspects of it aren’t as clear as writing of a similar period about folks in the Carribean, Desi and Arab people where it’s very very striking. And in a way we can think about this reinvention of the white working class post-Brexit, post-2019, as a knee-jerk reaction by the Westminster Elite and by the pseudo-aristocratic elite that we have in this country for no good reason. They see elements, potentialities of radical social shifts and their immediate reaction is to reproduce whiteness, to reproduce those structures of racism that work so well in the UK because they can be used to aligned “working class” interests (more like latent popular white supremacy), and bourgeois interests with those of the British Elite. I was very pleased to see the party really pushing back against the idea of the white working class in the North. 

It doesn’t really exist, does it? I could be accused of not being working class because my mum’s family are foreign, or because I drink oat milk, or because I drink coffee instead of tea. It’s all these daft things as well, some of the narratives. Who is this white working class? Usually a man, they’ve got a regional accent. You look at the red wall, you look at all of the propaganda - the red wall was a big thing. The red wall voter doesn’t exist. Yes there are people who are racist, there are white people who fit that stereotype. With the first past the post system they know they just need to hold onto enough votes here, they don’t care about accuracy. 

This is something we’re keen to combat. There are people of colour in the North who need representation, the Gypsey, Roma and Traveler (GRT) community. In Newcastle we have more Romany words than a lot of other dialects. We have connections to these communities. We have Muslims in the North. We have a lot of trans people join because they feel like they’ve been pushed out of the party that should represent them that claims to be left wing. Our co-leader is a trans person so we’ve become a home for them almost because they feel safe to talk to us. We’re trying to do the same for the GRT Community because quite rightly they don’t really trust anyone.

I mean who can blame them, they’ve been shafted for how many centuries?

And they need representation now more than ever because for the GRT Community who haven’t settled they’re holding onto their lifestyle, and with some of the measures that the Tories are putting in the traveler passports and vehicle registration... 

I think it’s in the Policing Bill. If you pitch down on a place where you haven’t received express permission your family could receive a £2500 fine, prison time, and have your trailer confiscated. 

Basically having their homes taken off them.

Literally, they’re just going to dispossess people like that.

I know people, I can't even say how close they are to me because they keep their identity hidden.  People close to me that are Romany, Travellers, who are now settled or have been born settled but obviously that’s their ethnic background, and they feel they have to keep it hidden because they fear for job prospects, even things like violence.  Eastern Europe and places like Italy have seen horrific things, but travellers in the UK always have that fear, getting their caravans set on fire. Roma people in Britain were sent to the Caribbean as slaves I believe. There’s only a few cases. But with the Pharrajimos (The Roma Holocaust) the Nazi’s didn’t even take photos of them as they were being processed in the camps. They didn’t view them as human enough to even record that.

With this government our record is terrible, we’re probably better than others, but that’s not exactly redeeming. There are a few Labour GRT groups that I follow but I think most of them have left Labour now because of abuse and discrimination that they’ve had whilst being in Labour - the Labour party is meant to be the party that represents them. So with the Northern Independence Party we have to step in to help them.  A party needs to do that, and I suppose that will be us. Same with refugees, I feel quite strongly about it. When I served in the army I met refugees - I saw what they go through.. And you come back and see the anti-refugee rhetoric from people that are repeating stuff they’ve seen in the papers. We need to counter that, counter those narratives, not double down on flag shagging.

If you’re interested in the Northern Independence Party, you can find their website here, Twitter here, and Instagram here.  Keep your eyes posted for more coverage of the NIP on Fourth Floor as the events of the Hartlepool by-election play out.

Interview by Bertie Gmaj