"There is a huge antipathy in England between the north and the south, the working class and the owning class"
About this Quote
"Antipathy" does a lot of heavy lifting here: not a mild rivalry, not a quaint regional quirk, but a lived hostility that structures how people move, vote, date, get hired, and imagine their futures. Martin C. Smith frames England as a nation split along two overlapping fault lines - geography (north/south) and class (working/owning) - and the quiet provocation is that these aren’t separate arguments. They’re the same argument wearing different clothes.
The intent feels less like sociological accounting and more like a warning about denial. England is famous for its stories of cohesion: the stiff upper lip, the shared pub culture, the monarchy as a national center of gravity. Smith punctures that myth by implying the social map is closer to a border dispute than a community. The north/south divide isn’t just about accents, rain, or football; it’s about capital, opportunity, and who gets to be treated as the default citizen. Pairing "working class" with "owning class" sharpens the critique: it’s not merely that some people earn more. It’s that ownership - property, businesses, institutions, political access - confers a different kind of personhood.
Contextually, the line lands in the long shadow of deindustrialization, London’s gravitational pull, and policy choices that concentrated wealth in the South East while exporting precarity elsewhere. The subtext is bleakly contemporary: when resentment is organized by place and class, it becomes combustible. It’s an explanation for why cultural wars find such dry tinder in England - and a reminder that unity slogans don’t dissolve material divides.
The intent feels less like sociological accounting and more like a warning about denial. England is famous for its stories of cohesion: the stiff upper lip, the shared pub culture, the monarchy as a national center of gravity. Smith punctures that myth by implying the social map is closer to a border dispute than a community. The north/south divide isn’t just about accents, rain, or football; it’s about capital, opportunity, and who gets to be treated as the default citizen. Pairing "working class" with "owning class" sharpens the critique: it’s not merely that some people earn more. It’s that ownership - property, businesses, institutions, political access - confers a different kind of personhood.
Contextually, the line lands in the long shadow of deindustrialization, London’s gravitational pull, and policy choices that concentrated wealth in the South East while exporting precarity elsewhere. The subtext is bleakly contemporary: when resentment is organized by place and class, it becomes combustible. It’s an explanation for why cultural wars find such dry tinder in England - and a reminder that unity slogans don’t dissolve material divides.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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