‘It aye like London, you know’: The Brexit Novel and the Cultural Politics of Devolution

Chloe Ashbridge

doi:10.16995/olh.463

Abstract

This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press as a fictional response to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. I provide a discussion of what I term the ‘cultural politics of devolution’ in Cartwright’s text, suggesting that it offers a critique of the British centralised state form and makes demands for the decentralisation of political power. Focussed on a small deindustrialised town, The Cut is an English regional polemic exploring how uneven development played a decisive role in the outcome of the European Union referendum. Building on Doreen Massey’s insight that places are not simply physical locations but ‘articulations of social relations’ (Massey, 1994: 22), my discussion of Cartwright’s novel is concerned with the way a discursive, cultural version of ‘the North’ was mobilised ideologically as a fulcrum of the Leave vote within Brexit media and political discourse. I trace the ways in which The Cut responds to this manoeuvre in an ambivalent deployment of nostalgia as both a vehicle for regional devolution and a literary mode associated with a parochial version of ‘the North’ that continues to exist in the national imagination. As this paper demonstrates, the text equivocates between a radical nostalgia that highlights the need for constitutional reform and a reactionary turn to the industrial past. Ultimately, I propose that The Cut forecloses its own devolutionary potential in an aesthetic and thematic reliance on cultural stereotypes of Northernness, suggesting the limitations of nostalgia as a resource for constructing alternatives to the present.

Highlights

During one of her first public appearances as Prime Minister, Theresa May drew attention to the threat of nationalism to what she perceived as the important relationship between the constituents of the United Kingdom
[b]ecause we voted in the referendum as one United Kingdom, we will negotiate as one United Kingdom, and we will leave the European Union as one United Kingdom
I will never allow divisive nationalists to undermine the precious union between the four nations of the United Kingdom. (May, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

During one of her first public appearances as Prime Minister, Theresa May drew attention to the threat of nationalism to what she perceived as the important relationship between the constituents of the United Kingdom. This tension is reinforced by the novel’s socially realist narrative perspective, a style ‘heavily associated with the depiction of (especially) northern life’ (Head, 2002: 5) and ‘authentic’, gritty working-class cultural representation.17 In this sense, regional dialect is a stumbling block for the novel, signalling an impasse in its devolutionary politics; it is both politically enabling and a self-exoticising lens that perpetuates uneven power relations between the North and South of England. During the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of Mersey Beat, the films associated with the British New Wave, early Northern Soul, and the Angry Young Man movement contributed to a sub-genre of Northern cultural and literary production often described as ‘Northern grit’ This category was characterised by a formal reliance on social realism and centred on racialised stereotypes of white working-class masculinity, a ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude, authenticity, nostalgia, and a strong sense of community identity associated with manual labour, all of which were said to represent the everyday lives and voices of England’s ‘ordinary people’. This served to function as a response to Thatcherism’s dismantling of manufacturing industries but simultaneously contributed to a vision of the North as an urban-industrial monolith marked by dispossession and alienation

Nostalgia and Deindustrial Space

The Limits of Nostalgia