There’s an old joke that starts with the question why should you never ask someone whether they are from Yorkshire. Answer: if they are from Yorkshire, they’ll already have told you. If they aren’t from Yorkshire, they’ll be embarrassed.

Which is to say that, seeing as you didn’t ask, I’m from Yorkshire. Born halfway between Valley Parade and the Bronte parsonage to be precise. Or in ‘The North’ if you want to be more precise.

Now I live in North Devon. Strictly speaking, North Devon is in the South West of England, but in reality, it is also in ‘The North’. As in ‘on the right side’ of the North-South divide that still exists in the UK, despite the best efforts of the current ‘government’ to ‘Level Up’. Efforts that so far don’t seem to involve either sending some of the money people in the South have to people in the North, or sending some of the work that people in the North do to the idle rent-seekers in the South.

I have to say that it has been something of an uphill struggle to convince friends that still live in the geographic North that my geographic south-westwern map location is also on the North side of the Great Divide.

Finally, I found the answer to the problem. All it took was a sixteen hundred year journey back in time to a point in history when the North and South looked something like this:

A map that makes clear the North-South Divide has its roots in deep tribal differences. The South from these tribal perspectives means the Anglo-Saxon south-eastern corner of the land; The North means the Britons and Picts occupying everywhere else.

Suddenly, all feels right in the world again.

Now all we need to do is shift the current political arguments for Scottish and maybe also Welsh independence to the far more sensible split of the Union into a south-eastern Angland, and everyone else into a United Britain.

That way everyone will be happy. The golf-club and cravat conservatives in the South West can put their lying populist Clown back in charge (or the two current also-lying replacement candidates*), and the rest of us can install a system of proportional representation and begin to work together for our benefit instead of theirs.

This politics game is a piece of piss.  

* both candidates are making claims that they are from The North right now. Liz Truss keeps describing herself as a ‘Yorkshire lass’ when she’s actually from very-Anglo-Saxon, Oxford; and Rishi Sunak thinks that because he represents a Northern constituency that it makes him Northern by association. Not when he lives in a keep-the-plebs-out, trillion-dollar walled-mansion it doesn’t.