German reacts to "England's EVIL North vs South Divide" by JimmyTheGiant

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]England's evil north versus south divide. Hi, hello, welcome everyone to a new reaction on this channel. Today, we're going to be watching a video of a channel called Jimmy the giant, and he is going to talk about the evil north versus south divide. So, does he say that only the north is evil and the south isn't? And they're divided because of the north? I don't really get it cuz north of England would mean Scotland, right? If I'm not mistaken. Hi, editing Nicole here. What can I say? I'm embarrassed and I feel sorry for what I just said there. I want to clarify that I am not stupid. My brain just didn't work in that second of the day.

[00:00:49]I do know that England is England, Scotland is Scotland, and England and Scotland together are Great Britain. And if you include Wales and Ireland, you get the UK. I do know all of that.

[00:01:07]Somehow, just my brain didn't process it.

[00:01:11]Because you have to know, I'm recording all of my videos very early in the morning, and sometimes my brain just didn't really load up all the information that it usually knows when I do feel not so tired anymore.

[00:01:26]So, I'm sorry. Please cut me some slack here. I hope I'm never going to do that again, and you all know the truth. I do indeed know what is what.

[00:01:39]Let's get back into the video. Oh, by the way, please don't roast me in the comments. Please don't. Please don't. I don't deserve it. Anyways, this sounds like a really interesting video, but again, it's 26 minutes, so this is going to be a three-parter probably. And today, we're going to watch the first part. Let's get into it. Northerners with their shorts in the winter, community spirit.

[00:02:07]And then southerners with their Waitrose and lack of eye contact.

[00:02:11]>> has been accused of terrorizing London by walking around saying hello. England has long been split in two. However, behind all the jokes and the stereotypes lies a story of the >> context.

[00:02:24]>> [laughter] >> We've got the interest of the working miners to consider, 78,000 of them. Two different Britains and two different ideas of how this country should be run.

[00:02:33]And a brutal division that has spanned the course of history. Today, we will explore England's north and south divide. Basically, when it starts getting really That's when you really know. Being a northerner, we're northerners. And I don't care what the southerners think of us. I don't know.

[00:02:47]Every Every time you meet a northerner, they have a finger gun stance. I don't know what it is.

[00:02:52]Wow, okay. I didn't really know about that.

[00:02:55]>> Let's spin the wheel.

[00:02:58]First up is the north-south divide. All right. So, a question that plagues every Brit is Where does the north Where Where does it Where is it? Where does it begin? And it's kind of a hard question because as much as we might ask for one, they haven't built a wall. I believe we should build a wall and make it official. I do. There's no loading screens, there's no official sign posts, even though our motorway signs point that's, you know, it's somewhere in that direction. And so, yeah, it really kind of depends who you ask. If you ask a Londoner, they might say north of Watford and you're in cannibal country.

[00:03:26]And if you don't know, Watford's here, so that's their imagination for where the north [laughter] is. If you want your boy's opinion, all right, I'm based here. I consider myself a southerner, obviously. Listen to me. And to me, the north is kind of like where your accent changes. If you start saying bath, you're a northerner.

[00:03:41]So, to me, I would probably consider it somewhere around Peterborough or like Leicester or something like that.

[00:03:46]However, if you were to ask someone from Scotland, where does the north of England start in your opinion?

[00:03:53]Edinburgh.

[00:03:53]>> [screaming] >> Where is Edinburgh? There is a smart boy by the name of Danny Dorling who did some serious academic things. He plotted the north and south divide as here. So, you know, I guess that's it. Case closed because Danny told us so. Thanks, Danny.

[00:04:07][ __ ] nerd. Okay, so that is a very weird way of deciding where north or where south is, to be honest. Because I would never like divide the country into north and south like that. I would like pick the middle of it and just like go from left to right instead of from bottom left to top right. That doesn't really sound right.

[00:04:32]And I don't know that guy that he's talking about, the one that did this. I don't know who he is.

[00:04:39]And I feel as if I should have more knowledge in order to understand everything that's going on in this video because the stuff that he's showed us is really weird at times. And I I feel like I'm missing some of the context of what's going on and who the certain person was that said that exact sentence. And also, when I watched a video about the UK and the one guy said that like the one that did the video said that the the parts of the UK, the different parts, hate each other, my comment section was full of people tell me otherwise and they're like, "Nah, not really. This is just like a banter that's going on. It's all really hatred.

[00:05:20]We don't really not like each other.

[00:05:23]We're just like playing with each other and making jokes about one another, but it's nothing serious. Just when it comes to football, things might get a bit more serious. So, it's really surprising for me to hear him talking about this divide that's going on and how like all the stuff that people have said, the ones that he showed, and how they are really like hating the other side, [laughter] which I don't like. I really don't.

[00:05:53]Also, this is a really cool video. Thank you so much for the recommendation. This is fun, and also, I feel as if I can learn a very much from that.

[00:06:02]So, let's continue.

[00:06:04]Guess that's it. Case closed, because Danny told us so. Thanks, Danny. [ __ ] nerd.

[00:06:10]Nerd. There are some foreigners that are coming over and taking our jobs, yeah, and not even working. How can they take our jobs if they're not working? Because they do it. They do it over They do it.

[00:06:20]Simple as that.

[00:06:21]>> On a very surface level, the obvious difference between the north and south of the country is Seeing this right now, it's like uh deja vu to the last video that I've watched for my members, where I watch a video about racist being exposed in London, and the one guy was like, "Yeah, they're taking all our jobs." And I talked about how it's not possible to um take away the jobs, and sit at home and live from the money that they get from the working people. Like, it's only one or the other. You can't have both, and I love that he put this into the video. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. Just It doesn't.

[00:07:02]Accents. Northerners have like a ton of different accents, you know, you got your Manchester accent, Liverpudlian accent, Yorkshire accent, Geordie accent. Proper naughty boys. All with their own little intricacies and differences. In the south, it's much more simple. We have two accents, rich and poor. If we're just going to paint general strokes, it it tends to come down to how we pronounce certain vowels.

[00:07:23]So, words like bath, path, laugh, half, northerners will say it like bath, path, half, and laugh. Silly northerners. But, accents aside, what about behavior?

[00:07:32]Northerners, generally, are seen as friendly, a bit tougher, you know, they're a bit more hardy. And we also kind of see them as like less educated.

[00:07:39]>> Yeah, I It wasn't I didn't say it. It wasn't me. But this is interesting, right? Because like Northerners chat to each other, chat to strangers much more than Southerners do. And that's why if you're like a super duper deluxe mega multinational corporation and you want to like seem as though you're a family-run business, typically in their adverts they will use Northern accents because we perceive like the Yorkshire accent as just more trustworthy.

[00:08:02]The last one around will be on my big in this place. It's like taking bread to the top of the world. But you know, when they do the technical smart stuff at the end of the advert, they'll use a Southerner, obviously. Yes, Peter, we'll we'll take it from here. Thank you. This still has many times more wheat germ than ordinary bread. So yeah, Southerners are generally seen as like more educated, ruder, more arrogant, more stubborn, stuck up.

[00:08:27]>> I mean, like come on, Northerners at least they have all the friendly, nice, happy-go-lucky stuff. For us it's just bad things. Up their own asses aren't they, a little bit?

[00:08:34]>> Pretty mean, Londoners.

[00:08:35]>> Not got a full grasp on reality, do they?

[00:08:37]>> Posh [ __ ] Posh. Don't matter where they're from, they always sound a little bit posh. I'm just like, "Ugh." But you know, at least we're richer, so I can cry in my Ferrari. Or more likely an overpriced Waitrose meal deal.

[00:08:48]>> Right, who's from London? Give us a cheer.

[00:08:50]>> [cheering] >> Quite a few, quite a few. That was probably the longest conversation you've ever had with a stranger, I imagine.

[00:08:57]Right, look. Now we've done the stereotypes, that's kind of the cute, fun, friendly chat story. Now if a Northerner and a Southerner were having a beer together in a pub, >> This is what they would talk about for the first one, maybe two beers.

[00:09:07]>> What's that, mate? No, it's it's pronounced half, not half. Cob. It's a bread roll, mate. Football references.

[00:09:14]But you see it being around about point number three or four, where things would start to get interesting and the conversation would take a turn.

[00:09:23]Okay.

[00:09:25]>> Without London. Well, before we get into this new chapter, I just want to say that these things sound very similar to the stuff that we say in Germany about the people in East Germany and the other way around. I wouldn't say that we don't like each other, but to be honest, I think many of the western German people don't like eastern German people, but not because they really know them. I do know one person that now lives in western Germany, but has lived in eastern Germany before, and I do like that person. But me thinking about eastern Germans in general, I feel like I have so many prejudice about them that I have heard from other people. And also, I mean, the one thing that is actually something you can see is, for example, their voting behavior and that they vote more far right. You can actually see that because there are numbers that exist. And also, there is a divide between western Germany, also southern Germany, and Bavaria. I feel as a German, and this is only my point of view, but I feel like there is another divide. So, we have the east and western divide, and also the Bavaria rest Germany divide. It feels like those are the divides in our country from my personal point of view. So, it's not really surprising that there is a a felt divide between northern and southern England. I feel as if a country has a certain size, there are different parts within a country. There are different accents that build, and there are different behaviors and cultures that that just grow in different parts of a country. So, it's not really surprising to me, but I don't understand why people start talking bad about the other ones.

[00:11:21]I guess that's just a human thing to do, right? So, if you don't know somebody, you just assume that you're better than them, and you you think all those bad things about the other side without really knowing them. That's weird and I think this should be studied because it feels as if this is a topic that is very interesting. Like how does human behavior work? And that's also I don't want to go too far right now, but there's just some something that comes to mind when I watch The Walking Dead. I don't know how many of you have seen it.

[00:11:54]You can kind of see behavioral changes on a smaller scale where you have different people that find each other and build these groups and then later on they build these like smaller cities and all of a sudden when they're a community, there are other communities and they are just against the other community and they start fighting over resources over land, over anything. So it seems as if this is something that's really deep integrated into human roots that we kind of tend to form groups and everyone that's not within our group is the enemy before we get to know them and then find out, oh they're just human beings like us and they just talk different and maybe do some cultural things different but they're humans just like us and we can accept them for who they are. Okay, so I don't really want to give a whole lesson about humanity, the behaviors of humans in a society.

[00:13:00]That was a nice rant though. So now let's continue on with the video. Just wanted to tell you where I stand. GDP per capita of the UK would be less than the state of Mississippi, the poorest of the United States. Put simply, the south of England is richer than the north.

[00:13:17]However, has this always been the case?

[00:13:19]Has the south always been richer than the north? No. You see, the way it worked historically is that before the Industrial Revolution, we had the Agricultural Revolution. And in this time, both the north and the south were toiling the land, growing carrots and potatoes, and raising animals. And in general, in this period of time, the south was like more forgiving when it came to farming. The land is flatter, the weather is marginally more reliable.

[00:13:43]And so in this time, many of the aristocrats who owned all the land, a lot of them would have these really large estates in the south of England.

[00:13:49]And whilst of course there were giant estates also up north, if you kind of look at these sort of maps of castles and manor houses, etc., you can really see like the concentration of all of these buildings are closer in the south, and a bit more spread out in the north.

[00:14:02]And so yeah, historically, the south was a bit wealthier, and it would have the big wealthy cities like London, Oxford, Cambridge. And with its location being closer to Europe, it meant that we could trade across the seas. And so the south tended to have easier access to more like luxury goods. But then, one day, the boys would log on, load up the server, and there was a major update.

[00:14:22]The Industrial Revolution. In unison, the boys grabbed their diamond enchanted pickaxes and headed for the mines in search of one material, coal. The Industrial Revolution completely flipped the tables. Now the north was wealthy, and it's to do with coal. If we look at these maps, you can see how much coal is up north versus the south. This was all tied together with like the invention of the steam-powered engine, the steamboat, the steam train, all of which required coal to operate. It had this ripple effect where they became like the hub for shipbuilding and like heavy engineering. The north had [ __ ] risen. And now, the south were the brokeys. Baz, what are you holding? What the [ __ ] is that? Don't be a dick, mate.

[00:14:59]You know what it is. It's It's a carrot.

[00:15:01]What's that, Baz? I can't hear you over all this [ __ ] coal. However, this success wouldn't last forever.

[00:15:09]Okay, so what changed?

[00:15:12]Hello. I just want to take 1 minute here, lads. Just stop the video for a You know these videos, they're pretty They're pretty smooth, right? They look good. They look polished. But I'm going to be honest, they take a ton of work.

[00:15:23]Like, a ton of my time is editing. I couldn't make these videos without today's sponsor, Storyblocks. I've been using Storyblocks long before they reached out to me saying they were sponsored and happy to advertise on my videos. So, there's a huge office with unlimited downloads of a wide range of stock videos, music, sound effects, templates, animations. And genuinely, they have saved me hours when it comes to editing.

[00:15:46]Like, things, especially when it comes to animations. In the past, I used to watch YouTube tutorials if I wanted to learn how to do a tiny little animation.

[00:15:53]Now, I just go to Storyblocks. And the beauty is that it has a plugin that can directly be used in your editing software. I use Premiere Pro, but it works with many others. And what's really important to remember is it's all 100% royalty-free. So, keeping you legally in the clear when it comes to licensing for your videos. So, to get started with your unlimited stock media downloads, head over to storyblocks.com/gregthegiant, or you can click the link in the description. Anyway, back to the video.

[00:16:22]interwar period So, at some point, the North falls off, right? And a lot of people kind of debate when this happened. A lot of people say that during the interwar period, so between like the '20s and the '30s, the Bogdanoff brothers came in and absolutely [ __ ] the North's economic However, according to this paper called The Political Economy of Britain's North-South Divide, it claims it was even earlier. It was 1914, where the idea of the prosperous North had already come to an end. Also, this paper is more specific. It splits the North into two different categories. So, it groups together the manufacturing heartland, which is the West Midlands, Northwest, and Yorkshire Humberside regions. And then it groups together the industrial periphery. This includes Wales and Scotland, as well as the Northern region. And if you look at some of these graphs, it actually shows that the industrial periphery was already on a gradual decline long before. But, you see, while all this turmoil was happening, quietly sat back waiting for its opportunity.

[00:17:19]>> That's a creepy guy. The first problem we got to get rid of is that [ __ ] upstairs. The South was different, right?

[00:17:24]>> Yeah, we had very high unemployment and we didn't have coal and yeah, we were generally poorer, but we did have London. And that means that we had them rich boys, you know, them prancy bros with their just I don't know what they do to be honest. And so while I think about it, whilst the northerners were down in the mines filling their inventory full of coal, working themselves to death, creating these massive ships, by the early 1900s the South was getting into all these sexy new industries. I'm talking light engineering, you know, electricals, consumer goods.

[00:17:55]>> As well, London had become our capital for commerce and finance.

[00:17:59]>> It became the only city only. national trading hub. Big corporate headquarters, research and development centers, they were in the South. You see, the North had completely tied itself to coal and heavy engineering. It got all whole towns were literally built around mining. The South's economy was much more modern and much more diverse. And so while the northerners were toiling in the mines, the South taking those spoils and building their rocket ship to the moon.

[00:18:26]Wow, okay, this feels like everything that I'm feeling at the moment here in Germany cuz it feels like we as a as a country, we have been standing still for about 20 years now. Nothing has developed in this country that will do a change for the better. Like for example, look at Asia, like China or Japan, they're improving so much in those last years when it comes to renewable energy for example or electrical cars. It feels like they're 50 years away from our development here in Germany. So, we had a prospering country for the last, let's say, almost let's say 80 years maybe, 70, 80 years after the Industrial Revolution, our country was really, really well. And now it feels as if we're losing the grip because we do not develop anymore, because we're standing still for 20, 25 years now, and the world is still changing, developing, engineering, improving, and we're not doing anything about it. So, it feels as our country each year gets poorer and poorer. You can feel it, you can see it, and it doesn't feel good. And I wish we could get, after so many years standing still, we could get a progressive politic that tries to improve things in our country and tries to change things for our companies as well. Like the fourth and back for electrical cars, for example, is the worst for the companies because they don't really know what to do. And now they're worse and worse every single year. So, I feel like what has happened to northern England is happening right now here in Germany and has been for the last 10, 15 years.

[00:20:24]I don't know, because you can have a country that's standing still for 5 years. It's not a problem. But when it's 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and other countries develop more, like faster than you, and when it comes to a new technology that could change everything about the world, like if you improve, I don't want to go too deep into the topic, by the way, but if you improve the renewable energy market, it improves everything because if you don't have to pay for energy anymore, your sources are almost unlimited. You can do so much better and progress so much faster. So, this is the way to go. And if you as a country, you hold back, you're like, "No, we're not doing that thing. It's not the coal in our country." But, well, then again, it kind of is. We're still subsidizing coal in this country. So, yeah, we are holding on to these old technologies and the old car technologies, we don't want to let go. And this will cost our country its wealth, and it already does.

[00:21:30]So, I can't really see what he's talking about. This is feels It feels so close to home, to be honest. I don't want that happening, but I don't know how to prevent it, either.

[00:21:42]It's not in my hands. I'm not a politician. The South taking those spoils and building their rocket ship to the moon. Liftoff. We have a liftoff.

[00:21:54]The source of life has suddenly dropped away from the whole community. They fought lingering on unemployment allowances, but the place is dying. So, look at this graph.

[00:22:04]>> That's what's happening there.

[00:22:05]>> and you see this massive fuck-off spike.

[00:22:08]>> [laughter] >> That means bad. During the interwar period, unemployment, it went insane.

[00:22:12]Poverty is absolutely rotted, and the vibes were very unchill. Can I tell you something? Yeah, bro. Yeah. The vibe's off, man. And the people of Britain in this time were speed-running political extremism. The commies and the fascists were out in full force, and it was Yeah, it was pretty touch-and-go for a minute.

[00:22:26]>> And like, a lot of this anger and animosity was >> The worse a country gets, the more I blame people in seeing industrial output. This here is really interesting because it shows >> Hence, we're going to be ruled by the AFD in the next years. So, our nation got very rich first, and all of our wages went up. However, when wages go up, that means people have more money, and that means the cost of living goes up. And so, that means the lives of the working class, the labor force, they need more money, they need higher wages to sustain their life. And like, yeah, the workers were loving it. This is great, you know, more money. It means we We eat sugar.

[00:23:01]"Oh, try this, Billy. It tastes like dreams. However, there is a problem.

[00:23:06]You see, as these less developed nations had finally got their tech tree to the Industrial Revolution, they now had all the technology that we had, but their wages were much lower than ours. So cheap that it would be much cheaper for us to [ __ ] send the pigeon to tell them to put their coal in a boat, hawk that boat all the way to Britain, than for us to use our own coal and pay the wages they need in order to mine it. And so, basically, the north got [ __ ] Mhm. You bought. Okay.

[00:23:37]Who is that guy? I don't know him. The third is this, we have to buy abroad in order to live and prosper. We can only buy abroad if we sell abroad. Let's pull together for prosperity. After the war, Clement Attlee and the Labour government come in and just save Britain from fascism, basically. And how they do so is by moving us away from this extreme free market capitalism. A system that will always look for the cheapest supply and pay the lowest wage to make the most profit. That's just the name of the game. And so, after the war, our whole country moved into what was more like a social democratic system, where the government was to ensure that all people were employed and paid a living wage.

[00:24:16]And so, they would do this by nationalizing industries such as mining and manufacturing. And to prop this up, they would impose things like tariffs and subsidies. These were protectionist policies to make sure that foreign imported goods didn't out compete our own goods. And so, these policies, whilst they were not economically efficient, they would stave off unemployment, poverty, and also reduce poverty. And the hope was that the people of Britain wouldn't elect a Hitler or a Britler, if that's better for you. And these policies, these were radical policies and they worked. The UK economy boomed. Britain as a whole gets massive investment and inequality shrinks. And like, yeah, maybe the south was doing a little bit better than the North was getting a bit more investment.

[00:24:59]But the thing is everyone was winning in general.

[00:25:02]>> this change again then? And then some absolute [ __ ] [ __ ] happens. Okay.

[00:25:08]No.

[00:25:09]Ah, shoot. We're at half of the video so this only going to be a two-parter. But we have going to have to wait for the absolute [ __ ] [ __ ] >> [laughter] >> We're not going to watch it today even though I'm so intrigued right now. Our country is doing so good and please no spoilers in the comments down below. I mean, it's history so it shouldn't be a spoiler but for me it is cuz this is not the country I grew up in. So, we had socialism or something similar to socialism and the country was prospering and then something must have happened to take that away again and I wonder what it could have been. He points to 1970s, okay.

[00:25:53]There There is not not a single bell is ringing in this head of mine right now when it comes to that number.

[00:26:00]So, I'm going to have to wait for the next video but it seems as if this must have been something really big because if the country was stable and prospering, like what could that change?

[00:26:13]What could have happened? What could have possibly happened to change that? I don't know.

[00:26:17]However, this video is so freaking good.

[00:26:21]It is entertaining. Okay, it's a little a little bit fast-paced because like there is no pause in between where I could have said one or two sentences without missing something important that is in the video cuz he's talking very fast and the pacing of the video is very fast and I didn't want to like stop every two minutes. I could have said so much more to that video but I Sometimes people are like in the comment section that like, "Oh, could you please pause less in your reaction to this video?"

[00:26:49]I'm like, "Okay, um if you want to see the whole video without being interrupted, there is an original video in the video description, first link down below. So, it's not far away. You can watch that and then that's how I do it usually and then I watch a reaction after that. So, it doesn't bother me to see a reactor stopping the video every single minute. Not every single minute.

[00:27:11]I'm trying to avoid that, but sometimes there's just things that are being said in the video that I do want to pick up and say something about it. So, sorry about my little rant, but that's just one thing that bothers me when I read in the comments. I'm like, "Yeah, this is a reaction video. I'm going to react. I'm going to pause it. I'm going to talk about it. Thank you very much."

[00:27:29]>> [laughter] >> Where is all of this coming from today?

[00:27:32]Why am I so frustrated? I feel as if I'm so frustrated or not frustrated, but on edge because there is going to be something that's going to happen within the next 2 weeks at work and then also next month. For you, it's not going to be next month. Like for you, it's going to be probably just a few days, but at the 6th of June this year, I'm going to marry my fiance. And planning this marriage >> [laughter] >> it like I've been on edge for the last weeks >> [laughter] >> due to that fact because there's so much planning that goes into it and now the stress of my job as well. I like oh, I don't know. I might be more on edge now than I'm usually. So, please forgive me. Cut me some slack and I'm going to be a little nicer >> [laughter] >> like in a month when everything's over, when I can relax again finally.

[00:28:33]It's nothing to do with the video at all. I'm sorry about that. But what I did want to say about the video is like it's really entertaining and he puts a lot of stuff in the video that me as a foreigner, I don't really understand because I'm missing some of the context or I'm not I I don't know those people sometimes that he showed on the screen.

[00:28:55]I'm like, "Okay, this feels like a joke, but I don't really get it cuz I don't know the person." But, I feel as if I am learning so much from this video, and that's such a cool feeling. I feel as if I do understand the English people a little more now. So, that's something good, and I can't wait to watch part two and find out what actually happened to destroy all of this. See you in part two. Have a nice rest of the day. Bye.