The Greatest City on Earth.
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“[British] is actually a shorthand that people use [for English], because of the alliteration” said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons just before Christmas in 2022.
Few British papers seemed to spot the issue with the line, so I picked it up via the nationalist press in Scotland and Wales. I thought it best to check the original source given the tendency for exaggeration at the expense of unionist politicians in those publications.
Confused about Britain.
Rishi Sunak really did say it. And then he and the English chair of the committee struggled desperately to understand why this frustrated Joanna Cherry, their Scottish colleague. She was pointing out that the proposed new Baccalaureate style qualification for England would be English and not British. They didn't get it.
This confusion is not rare. My favourite economics podcast series is Econtalk. Its incredibly intelligent host Russ Roberts, despite having written a book about proudly Scottish Adam Smith, often conflates and confuses England, Scotland, and Britain. He even apologises for the frequent error in the comments to his episode on Churchill admitting that “I have trouble keeping this straight”.
Quite a lot of the fault for this confusion lies with Britons and Britain.
For example, when Liverpool’s White Star Line needed a lager beer for their ocean liner The Titanic they called upon Britain’s oldest lager brewery just down the road and over the Welsh border in Wrexham to brew it. But thinking that few of the international passengers on board would know where Wales was, they suggested that the brewery label Wrexham as being in England.
The poster is both famous and infamous. I use the picture I took of it on a pub wall in Wrexham, while drinking the lager, to troll my most Welsh friends every now and again.
Similar confusion is inevitable if we call the team that we send to the Olympics Team GB. GB stands for Great Britain, a name which excludes Northern Ireland, despite the team including Northern Irish athletes. If we choose to use the wrong name for our country in one of the world’s biggest shows we shouldn’t be surprised that people are confused.
What I thought until recently was rarer was failing to distinguish between London and Britain. Or worse still, to claim British history as London history.
The Industrial Revolution.
I remember clearly listening to the Works in Progress Podcast on How Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution. It was a Friday afternoon, I was loading the dishwasher in the office, replying to the Teams messages I’d missed through the day, and then cycling to the pub just down the hill from where we live via the shop to buy spinach. Three bunches for a pound.
I remember arriving at the pub late and wet because I sat in the drizzle in the car park outside that shop listening to ever more of the episode in disbelief.
The podcast episode on the industrial revolution mentions London eleven times. It mentions none of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds, and Sheffield — the seven cities that I, and ChatGPT for a less biased sense check, associate most strongly with the industrial revolution.
The podcast is clear enough about what it’s doing. It intends to “question the whole concept of, or name of, the industrial revolution” and drag it back in time from the late 18th Century and the early and mid 19th Century all the way to the 1500s. And it aims to take the birthplace of this new industrial revolution from South Scotland, South Wales, Cornwall, North England, and the English Midlands and relocate it firmly in London.
I don’t know enough to question the history of the episode. I’ve long found the guest Anton Howes reasonable and interesting. I suspect his scholarship will evolve since his move from London to Edinburgh and I look forward to that. I understand the desire to be edgy and break out of the confines of established economic history and offer an alternative timeline and naming system for the industrial revolution, but it didn’t sit well with me.
I didn’t realise at the time, because I hadn’t listened to the episodes before, but my reaction was remarkably similar to, though less informed than, Melvyn Bragg’s in his pair of episodes of In Our Time on the Industrial Revolution (of the late 18th Century and early 19th Century). In the episodes he eviscerates the academics he has invited on to his show who refuse to give much credit at all to the innovators of Britain, especially its North and West, in starting the industrial revolution. Bragg thinks, influenced no doubt by having grown up not too far from the home towns of both, that great Britons like George Stephenson and James Watt are being insufficiently credited for bringing forward the great thriving of humanity we enjoy today.
It seems to me very possible that London in the 1500s and 1600s had a great role to play in something leading up to the industrial revolution. But I am unlikely to ever concede the phrase “industrial revolution” to whatever that thing was.
London and Britain.
Stealing a phrase is one thing. But stealing history itself is another.
In a City AM opinion piece on 3 November titled “London should be the engine that saves us from decline”, Lawrence Newport the co-founder of Looking for Growth recounts the energy and optimism of that organisation’s recent event in London aimed at rallying fans to start turning Britain’s relative decline around.
The opening paragraph is as follows,
“London is like nowhere else on earth. As Matt Clifford said last week at Looking For Growth’s event Make or Break, London is the city that birthed the electrical age, the steam locomotive and the stock exchange. Its institutions created modern policing, public sanitation systems, and underground train networks; its principles formed the basis of numerous legal and electoral systems worldwide.”
Matt Clifford did not say that. You can watch the complete video of what he did say and read the transcript. He talks about Britain.
The Dutch would strongly push back about the stock exchange, but most of the other claims check out, if we’re talking about Britain.
But if we’re talking about London, as written in City AM, they’re mostly wrong. Modern policing in Glasgow is older, as is modern sanitation in Liverpool. Most certainly, London did not birth the steam locomotive or the railway.
The steam locomotive came to London long after it had been pioneered by the Cornishman Trevithick in South Wales and improved in Shropshire and Northumberland. The railway came to London after Murray in Leeds improved it yet further and then Stephenson in Newcastle proved first with Stockton to Darlington and then Liverpool to Manchester that it was the future of transport. Adding in the essential contributions of Watt in Glasgow and Birmingham much earlier, the steam locomotive was one of the most broadly British of the great inventions of the industrial revolution.
Later in the piece it is claimed that London is the city of Stephenson. I hope that this is a reference to Robert and not his father George Stephenson, the father of the railways, who famously found London a home of pompous experts who talked a lot and built little.
The Greatest City on Earth.
London does not need to steal glory from the rest of Britain. It is a great city with a great history of civilisation-changing achievements. I find the claims of some of its residents that it is the greatest city on earth a bit cringe, like New Yorkers insisting that nowhere else has bodegas, but if that’s what they think then fair enough. Plus it gives the rest of us something to tease them about.
London is also fortunate in many ways within Britain. In the past five decades, while most of Britain’s other large cities have declined economically compared to their peers, London has bounced back strongly, partly on the back of support and preference by the British state and national institutions. A large economic gap has opened up and deepened. Much of the UK is now dependent on London. Because it the capital of the most politically centralised large country in the rich world it cannot be ignored by Britons. This causes substantial resentment and tension within Britain towards London and an understandable defensiveness among Londoners about that.
One my biggest concerns about London’s growing pro-growth movements is how little the people involved with them seem to think about the rest of the country, and how low their aspirations for the rest of the country are if they do. This would be fine if they were arguing for local government fixes to their problems, but they seem mostly to want national government fixes to problems that they experience locally and which they imagine to be national.
In that case, if they are to avoid damaging Britain like similarly minded people damaged Birmingham from the centre in the 1950s and 1960s, they will need to think about, understand, and relate to much more of Britain much better. Arguing that the industrial revolution started in London or writing that the steam locomotive was invented there are not good signs that they are doing so.