seen in London and the South East. Language and dialect Although younger generations may be less likely to use speech that is specific to a particular town, there is still a clear difference between north and south; young Northerners are more resistant to sounding as if they are Southern than sounding as if they are from a different Northern town. The division is sometimes used for comedy, but has its serious side as well. The London media are sometimes claimed to look down upon those with northern English accents. For example, Ken Livingstone (a Londoner) suggested that the press's unsympathetic treatment of John Prescott was partly because he is one to "speak like ordinary people". Some linguistic research has concluded that many people in the North of England have a dislike of the vowel in BATH words. AF Gupta wrote, "Many of the northerners were noticeably hostile to , describing it as 'comical', 'snobbish', 'pompous' or even 'for morons'." On the subject, K. M. Petyt wrote that several respondents "positively said that they did not prefer the long-vowel form or that they really detested it or even that it was incorrect" Mark Newbrook has assigned this phenomenon the name "conscious rejection", and has cited the BATH vowel as "the main instance of conscious rejection of RP" in his research in the West Wirral. Religion Within the Church of England, there is the Province of York in the North and the Province of Canterbury in the Midlands and the South. While this has a separation of sorts, it is not a North–South divide, as the Midlands is included. The North was also a stronghold of religious Nonconformism during its industrial heyday. In the 18th century people in the North were also much more likely than those in the South to remain Catholic. Data from 1715 to 1720 shows that the most Catholic counties were all in the North, and the least Catholic counties were all in the South. With the exception of the southern county of Sussex, which had a higher proportion of Catholics, all intermediate counties were in the Midlands, and, except for Sussex, a line from the River Severn to The Wash marked a divide between more Catholic and less Catholic counties. Explanation Industrial decline is most usually given as an explanation for the north–south divide. During the Industrial Revolution, many northern cities underwent a process of intense industrialisation,