The North-South Divide - define your terms

I've been pondering the north/south divide.  The reason for the ponderage is that I don't believe it exists - not in the simplistic and rather offensive way the term implies anyhoos.

If you're not from England, a quick precis is in order.  The north is an ill-defined and loose coalition of disaffected English people who hate "the south", and believe that "the south", and southerners generally, have got it in for them, and that this displeasure manifests itself by their hoarding all the money and coal at the country's disposal for their own ends.

Now, the first problem with this north/south thing is that no-one from the south (myself included) believes "the south" to exist.  We do not define ourselves as southerners; the demographics of southern England are far too complicated and diverse for us to do that.  What possible overarching sense of self links me, a Londoner, and a farmer from Somerset?

Also, it ignores the geographical arbitrariness of the designation.  Penzance is 400 miles west of Ipswich; these are wildly different places.  One looks like the west of Ireland; the other looks like The Netherlands.  Penzance is in Cornwall, the poorest county in England.  Ipswich is commutable distance from London.  But according to the orthodoxy of the NSD, they are of a piece - southern, and, therefore, equally guilty of raping the north.

Sheffield, on the other hand, is 180 miles from London, but is apparently a victim of the south's economic conspiracy.  The logic would appear, then, to rest on not absolute distance from London, but the degrees of latitude crossed by that distance.  Longitude has no bearing on the matter (pun intended).  What absolute sheight.

Also, whither the midlands?  Are they in the north?  Generally they're not considered to be.  But they're certainly not in the south either.  No Black Country denizen would thank you for suggesting that he or she is a southerner.  But all would agree that they fit the material criteria: north of the capital, former industrial heartland of England, laid low by de-industrialisation and recession.

This implies that the north is a cultural construct.  That also explains why the Scots and the Welsh aren't counted.  As far as the Scots are concerned, the northern English are just the same as the rest of us.

And the final point is this.  The term assumes that southerners contrive to do down northerners.  This fails to recognise that the south is home to plenty of northerners.  If the south gets more money than other regions, it is due to this economic internal migration as much as anything.  The south east of England is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.