And is there honey by the Tees?

Ravaged by manufacturing decline, infuriated by southern ignorance, the north still feels like another country. Robert Chesshyre reports

Somewhere between the Bristol Channel and the Wash - or is it along the banks of the River Trent? - a fault line stretches through the heart of England. To the north, Andy Capp, whippets, mills, mines, pints of bitter and Coronation Street; to the south, Arthur Daley, Estuary English, toffs, "one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge lizards" (George Orwell), white wine spritzers, house prices to make your eyes pop and EastEnders.

In pop-cultural terms, the north/south divide is good knockabout stuff, born of the diversity one might expect in a nation of 48 million people. Stand-up comics have thrived on it for a century. As a young man in my first job, on a paper in Yorkshire, I was harmlessly teased, over the dominoes and Stone's bitter, about my "soft" southern origins. At a slightly more elevated level, the divide takes the form of harmless regional pride - red and white roses.

Neither north nor south is the outright winner. You might trade a house in Islington (or even Hackney) for a street in South Shields, but who wouldn't prefer to be a nurse or local government officer in a town where you don't have to pay £100 a week for a one-bed flat on an arterial road? Who wouldn't choose the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District over the Surrey commuter belt or the Essex badlands? What, in short, is all the fuss about, and does it, on any serious level, matter?

The government would have us believe that the divide itself is a myth (just what Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit asserted in their pomp). Last December, the Prime Minister toured the north telling his audiences that "poverty and prosperity are neighbours in every part of Britain", and that the gap the government is working to bridge is not between regions, but between the haves and have-nots, wherever they live.

Yes, but . . . it is hell to be poor in Peckham or destitute in Dagenham (when I went north to research this article, several northerners told me how shocked they had been on forays south by the proximity of extravagant wealth and distressing poverty), but it so happens that the fewest jobs, the poorest health and the lowest standards of education remain in the north. The erosion of manufacturing (the strong pound and all that) may nibble at employment in the south, but it gobbles jobs in the north.

A quarter of a million northerners voted with their feet (or with their Ford Escorts) during the 1990s and moved south. Since the Glorious First of May (1997), nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs - people making things, steel, machine-tools, kitchen units - have been lost north of the Trent. Such jobs as have replaced them are largely in service industries such as call-centres and warehousing. As ever, the profits made in the north are mainly spent in the south. And working in a call-centre (visits to the loo monitored by computer) cannot be a vastly different experience from being a Victorian mill hand.

I visited the George Orwell pub at "Wigan Pier", where a list of regulations from an 1856 mill decorates the walls. One read: "All persons wishing to leave our employ shall serve four weeks' notice. But the Masters shall, & will, sack without notice." It may have been a spoof, but the sentiments had a depressingly contemporary ring to them. Tens of thousands of northerners who are too old or too isolated or whose accents are not user-friendly enough for call-centres have been abandoned. Many villages in the former coalfields of Durham and Yorkshire are dumps of unwanted people, left to fester alongside decaying shops, abandoned houses, drug squats. Disraeli's two nations persist, and the losers - "fed by a different food . . . ordered by different manners . . . not governed by the same laws . . ." - still largely live north of the Trent.

I am not suggesting that every northerner lives in a cardboard box at the bottom of an abandoned pit. The opening of Harvey Nichols in Leeds is endlessly cited as evidence of affluence and civilisation. A group of BBC-accented Cheshire professionals said they are deeply offended by the assumption they encounter south of Watford that they will talk like Dennis Skinner and keep racing pigeons in their lofts. There were, they said, more millionaires within five miles of where we sat than in the whole of Surrey, and the millionaires weren't all Man Utd superstars with their brains below their ankles.

The media, as ever, got much of the blame (and, for once, I agreed), not so much for misreporting as for ignoring. In my salad days in Sheffield, there was a thriving "Fleet Street" in Manchester to which northern journalists aspired; local reporters scoured their home patches for stories; and what went into the Manchester editions of the national papers was selected by northern editors. Today, rain at the Chelsea Flower Show is more likely to make the front page than half a dozen Yorkshire towns cut off by raging floods.

Decisions like the recent one to site the new synchrotron laboratory (a specialised X-ray facility vital to the future of molecular biology and genome research) in Oxfordshire rather than Cheshire (where its predecessor is) are bitterly resented across the north. A manufacturer once told me he would never move his operation north, despite considerable financial advantages, because "my wife would never leave Surrey".

I asked Frank McKenna, the deputy leader of Lancashire County Council and an enthusiast for regional vitality, to assemble a group to kick the north/south divide around over a pint of beer. We met in a pretty pub on the edge of a small town. Old farm implements hung in the bar and fields lay through a hedge from the car park. But it was only a mile from the Liverpool overspill town of Skelmersdale, blighted by high levels of child poverty and low levels of literacy.

One of the group had just been south to a wedding that had left a deep impression. All the guests had been utterly confident in their futures - something, he said, you would not find at a similar gathering in the north. Although he is a successful politics graduate, he said that his northern accent made him feel "very working class".

McKenna added that, when northerners open their mouths at London meetings, the immediate assumption is that "we're all stupid". "It is incredible to them that a northern politician can grasp the complexities of an issue and put across a coherent point of view. If you wear a suit and can say 'entre- preneurship', they're gobsmacked."

When I told a London PR that I was going to Liverpool, she suggested that I might visit Tyneside "while I was there". The pub group were in stitches about a map produced by a government department that misplaced Preston by 100 miles. "Yet we're expected to know where the Isle of Dogs is," said one man.

The population of the north-west is as big as the populations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland rolled into one and, now that each of those has devolved government and London has what is in effect a regional assembly, the north feels vulnerable and under-represented. There is also a strong movement for a regional assembly in the north-east. McKenna insisted that it isn't just power-hungry politicians who want devolved government. There is support across the community. Who is there to go in and bat on the north's behalf with the clout of Donald Dewar, Rhodri Morgan or even Ken Livingstone?

The group stressed (they were all on the left) that life under Blair is far better than life under the Tories, and that they understand the government has to tread carefully with the dreaded "Middle England". But they objected to the metropolitan bias of decision-making and were openly scornful of new Labour apparatchiks straight out of Oxbridge and snugly ensconced at the heart of government. "They've no experience of anywhere else," said one. "No experience. Full stop," muttered another.

Enticing government ministers to travel north is as difficult as it was when the Conservatives were in office. "You send out 50 invitations, and you're lucky to get two acceptances," said McKenna. Again, the media were blamed. Speeches in the north, he said, attract a fraction of the notice devoted to speeches in London. "If it's not happening in London, it's not worth talking about. People in the north are pissed off with that."

They are also pissed off by the inequities of the National Lottery. Redundant miners and shipbuilders, with non-existent prospects, besiege corner shops to buy their tickets to a dream. And where is the money spent? Mainly in the south. Dome moans are legion - not about its banal and egregious contents, but about the decision to place what was supposed to be a national attraction in one overpopulated corner of the country and then throw money at it like confetti at a wedding.

If the Dome millions had been evenly spread, every major community could have had a millennium event and memorial. Those there have been, such as the Lowry Museum in Salford, get but a whisper in the media compared to the din created by the Dome. Manchester would have loved a few more bob for staging the 2002 Commonwealth Games. "The attitude was," said McKenna, "'you wanted it: you get on with it'."

The populations of places such as Easington in County Durham are dropping like dot-com shares, as the ambitious and desperate head south. While hundreds of thousands of new homes are needed within striking distance of London, abandoned terraces on the Wear and the Tyne go to rack and ruin. Negative equity is rife, as derelict housing or worse (drug-dealers and prostitutes) destroy property values.

Which doesn't mean that everyone is lurking in M1 service areas, thumbs aloft, looking for a ride south. I met two young northern professionals who had rejected chances to work in London. They were deterred by the lack of friendliness (one, an IT consultant, said that his colleagues wouldn't even go to London on short-term contracts) and by how, when they open their mouths in the capital, they are treated as a breed apart. "They think we're all miners on a night out: 12 pints of bitter and fish'n'chips."

Some who do go resent what they see as an element of compulsion. An educationalist who had reached the top of her tree in the north said that, if she wanted to develop her career, she would now have to go to London. Why, she lamented, can't there be more organisations with their national headquarters in the regions?

For some, the south is Sodom and Gomorrah. A Durham miner once told me: "I've got a 16-year-old son. I would chain him by the ankles and nail him to the floor before I'd let him go south. Not into that exploitation. Lads who go to London fall into vice." It was, it seemed, better to stew in an abandoned mining village than risk such corruption.

In one respect, the north perpetuates its own myths. Wigan is a good example. Some years ago, it decided to exploit its Orwellian fame and become a tourist destination. So it tarted up the area round the canal, opened a museum called "The Way We Were" and put hulking pieces of industrial machinery on display, thus emphasising the cloth-caps-and-clogs image that teams of development officers spend millions trying to dispel.

Occasionally, someone suggests the capital should be moved, but that's just a version of the Irish joke: "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here." In the real world, the north/south divide exists, and it is damaging. As the shaming gap widens across the nation between the haves and the have-nots, an increasing proportion of the have-nots (Harvey Nicks notwithstanding) scuffle a living north of the Trent.

If a Labour government does not assume its historic responsibility to look to the welfare of the world beyond Watford, who will?

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