I have been hesitating throughout this week about writing a post on the comprehensive spending review.  Since most of the posts and articles I've been reading have been CSR-related, I haven't posted any of them here whilst I contemplate.  So, this handful of links is a bit of a CSR black hole. 

Having said that, the Inequalities blog have a good article on how the coalition has 'found it so easy to cut benefits for the poor'.  This is more about social attitudes than the CSR itself and it's very much worth a look. 

The North-South divide has been cropping up in the news with concerns the CSR cuts will aggravate it.  So it must be John Bulmer time.  Still, oldies but goodies: John Bulmer's North.  (Vaguely related note: I've just started reading Helen Jewell's book about the North-South divide, and I had never before twigged that Northumbria = North of the Humber.)

The Heritage Crafts Association are reporting that skills minister John Hayes has highlighted support for craft skills in a recent speech at the RSA.  This is good news for the HCA, but 1) how seriously do we take this as an indication of potential government policy? and 2) if we do, and we read it alongside the Browne report on higher ed (and do read Stefan Collini's article in the LRB on that front), should we be worried about it as a vision for education which isn't really doing any favours for the social status of traditional crafts? 

Completely unrelated to any of the above (unless we get into spectral ethnography; but that's only my new favourite thing on Tuesdays), Peter Ackroyd has a new book out about the English ghost.  Related to the spectres of English Catholicism, apparently.

And speaking of ... the CofE blogosphere has been firing busily over news not only of the ordinariate but of every women-back-in-the-kitchen brigade charging out to form their own non-secret society.  As I imagine it, a Society of St Teatowel and St Nappy meeting would consist of a chorus of "more tea, vicar?" from 1950s housewives.  It could all go horribly wrong when the housewives turn out to actually be Sharon's Dita Von Teese-themed hen night. 

So I promised earlier in the week to talk a little about a couple of Grim Up North articles that I came across.  It was a rash promise made in the hasty assumption that I would actually have something to say about them.  Something academic and analytical, like. 

Well, that hope turned to custard.

The North has existed as a recognisably different part of England since around Tudor times.  And, Dave Russell has argued, how it is thought about today was cemented around 1840.  Yep, this is when the industrial towns are really taking off: we have a new working class, and we have massive migration for industrial jobs.  And of course this all happens against a backdrop of industrial landscapes.  So when Dickens serialises Mrs Gaskell's new novel in 1854, he talks her out of naming it for her heroine Margaret Hale.  Instead, it gets a name which expresses the social divide of industrialism: North and South.   

Andrew Martin's bash at the North looks at the 60s resurgence which Russell also identifies, but which Russell characterises it as a blip in an otherwise continuous process of stereotyping. 

Jackie Ashley's article on the decline of the North is far more interesting and without the grumpy old man factor, reflecting instead on her father's documentary on Hartlepool 50 years ago. 

And for something lighter, a review of The Road to Coronation Street.