The poet who invented Burnham’s North

On Monday we said hello to Britain’s first born-and-bred Northern prime minister since Harold Wilson. It would be fair to say that Andy Burnham has not been shy in heralding this fact. In his speeches, interviews, and campaign literature, references to New Order and the Stone Roses, Northern Soul music, and the poetry of Tony Harrison are never far from the surface. Meanwhile, in a more concrete, structural sense, tackling regional inequality with schemes like No. 10 North looks set to be the grand theme of his premiership. Though Burnham is probably unaware of it, there is in fact a striking literary precedent for his pro-North viewpoint in the figure of the 20th-century modernist poet Basil Bunting. An older, less accessible figure than Harrison, Bunting was one of the inventors of the i