North and South, a thread.

Now look...one Elizabeth Gaskell got there well before me in 1854 and wrote a beautiful novel about place and love in the two halves of England, but I feel compelled to write about that strange, continuing divide as pandemic and politics reveal the same old madness.

For all Boris Johnson waxes lyrical about this great nation’s blah blah blah, this govt doesn’t seem much interested in the blah blah blah that is the gold standard public health history of the North of England.

From casualty units on the Manchester Ship Canal to Newlands’ fresh water flushing systems in Liverpool that doubled the life expectancy of a generation previously doomed by disease. By shit, in fact.

James Newlands happened because the local council created three key local posts, the Medical Officer of Health, the Inspector of Nuisances, and the Borough Engineer.

He set about creating large scale maps of Liverpool, building a water-based sewerage system, making provision for bath houses, wash houses, swimming lessons, minimum sizes for rooms, paving and street lighting. He was a local genius is what he was.

Beyond establishing whether they’ll vote for you at a push, when it comes to understanding places and people this Conservative Government is as bad as the one that Michael Heseltine evangelised when they were lazily, cruelly consigning great Northern cities to dust.

Now they seem to want to lazily, cruelly consign the same places to Covid measures that make only partial sense, have an as yet unseen scientific basis and threaten the public and private corners of millions of lives.

England is a small place. It has huge political strengths but my goodness it has a strange faultline between North and South. I’ve straddled that line all my adult life. Liverpool, Durham, Hull, Bristol, Sheffield, London and Liverpool again.

That we haven’t yet seen Number 10 - or whatever we call The Government that lives in a few streets in SW1 - harness and fully use the public health and local connectedness of English councils is plain weird. Negligent and weird. Wakey wakey, lads.

I fear there is no Heseltine this time.