The Home Counties. Just an echo of a quaint past along with the likes of the light programme, Dixon of Dock Green and Lyons tearooms? Not at all. They are still hugely significant.
Home is where the heart is. And the Home Counties are still, most definitely, the heart of the UK.
It's good old Boris Johnson who's reminded us about the Home Counties. The other week he was advising those who have "amassed colossal wealth" to give to charity rather than spend squillions on "great schlosses" in the Home Counties. It's a giveaway assumption that the Home Counties are the location of choice for such plutocrats.
Boris knew that ignorant plebs like me would have to look up "schloss" to discover it is German for stately home. He, of course, would be very familiar with the term. His parents own a 500 acre farm while he has a London townhouse worth several millions as well as a country retreat in Oxfordshire which he bought ten years ago for £750,000.
Ian Duncan Smith, the man who dreamt up the bedroom tax, lives in a £2m Tudor house on a sprawling Buckinghamshire estate. It has at least five bedrooms.
No doubt, the likes of Boris and Ian share with fellow Home Counties resident, Lord Howe of Guildford, the belief that the north is full of "desolate" areas, of value only for energy reserves. Or for "the most colossal grouse moorlands" which, as Boris pointed out, the selfish super-wealthy are as likely to buy as great schlosses in the Home Counties.
By the way, Boris didn't get too carried away with the philanthropy thing. He suggested the filthy rich give more to charities…in London. Charity, after all, begins at home.
Gordon Wilson recently described London's malign effect on the rest of the UK as a 'cancer'. Iain McWhirter followed up with a brilliantly detailed analysis of the horrendous harm London causes the British economy. But it's worth remembering that London has a hinterland. The economy of the Home Counties is wholly tied up with London. Just as important, it's where so many of the London rich and powerful relax and recuperate away from work.
Until the twentieth century, the Home Counties needed other parts of the British Isles. Their influence was reined in to some extent by regional power centres. So, for example, during industrialisation, the Home Counties needed the coal, iron and engineering skills of Scotland, Wales and the North of England. After the First World War though, they were freed from that dependency. The only thanks the regions received in the inter-war period were slag heaps, slums and broken communities.
The Home Counties didn't care much. Thanks to new industries like motor vehicles and new technologies based on electricity, they flourished. While the regions suffered mass unemployment and poverty, the Home Counties experienced a housing and consumer boom.
In the decades after the Second World War, some efforts, with varying degrees of commitment, were made to patch up the relationship between the Home Counties and the rest of the UK. But it was during the Thatcher years that the Home Counties were finally freed to pursue their own destiny. October 27 1986, the Big Bang deregulation of financial markets, could serve as the Home Counties' independence day.
Manufacturing went down the plughole as the UK economy was reconfigured to serve the needs of London finance and banking. The forelock-tugging saps in Scotland provided the oil wealth to pay for this economic transformation. The regions of the UK have now been reduced to little more than colonies serving the Home Counties' needs. And imperial powers are not run by philanthropists. Even Boris Johnson complains about that.
So London, still basking in its Olympics bonanza, will get even more: a third runway, HS2, new mega shopping malls and ever taller sky scrapers to melt cars and blot out traditional landmarks. The Home Counties flourish while their economics are imposed on the rest of us to dire effect: unregulated, barely taxed commerce, bloated profits and declining wages, debt-fuelled retail and housing bubbles.
The "loadsamoney" values of the Home Counties have become the UK's moral orthodoxy: thrusting egoism, calculating self-interest and a self-centred focus on the present and to hell with future generations. The communal solidarity of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern English colonies is held up for ridicule.
The future of the regions outside the Home Counties looks bleak. All roads lead to London. No doubt Boris would recommend to us all the example of his predecessor, Dick Whittington. But while Wales and the North of England are stuck with the Home Counties for the foreseeable future, Scots do have the opportunity to change things. For us, 2014 could be the Year of Homecoming in more ways than one.
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