Haus Curiosities

What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City

Jack Brown

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913368159
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Brown reflects on anti-London sentiment in the UK as the capital continues to gain power. The United Kingdom has never had an easy relationship with its capital. By far the wealthiest and most populous city in the country, London is the political, financial, and cultural center of the UK, responsible for almost a quarter of the national economic output. But the city's insatiable growth and perceived political dominance have gravely concerned national leaders for hundreds of years.
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This perception of London as a problem has only increased as the city becomes busier, dirtier, and more powerful. The recent resurgence in anti-London sentiment and plans to redirect power away from the capital should not be a surprise in a nation still feeling the effects of austerity. Published on the eve of the delayed mayoral elections and in the wake of the greatest financial downturn in generations, The London Problem asks whether it is fair to see the capital's relentless growth and its stranglehold of commerce and culture as smothering the United Kingdom's other cities, or whether as a global megacity it makes an undervalued contribution to Britain's economic and cultural standing.

1

People and Place

Before we attempt to unravel the many different threads of historical and contemporary anti-London sentiment, we must first understand what ‘London’ and ‘Londoners’ really are. Both the city’s people and the place itself are often stereotyped, misunderstood, and misrepresented, both wilfully and accidentally. While the reality is of course complex and multifaceted, a little more understanding about the capital itself – from its historical origins to its place in the UK economy today – is important. So, too, is an understanding of the much-maligned people who live there.

Londoners

At the start of 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, London was home to nine million people, and this figure was expected only to increase. London’s growth has been driven primarily by ‘natural change’ (births exceeding deaths), but also by new arrivals from overseas. In terms of domestic migration (that is, movement within the UK), more people tend to leave London for elsewhere in the country than arrive each year, with over half moving to the neighbouring southeast or east of England regions, often when reaching their thirties, perhaps to start families outside the city.¹ Somewhat relatedly, the average Londoner today is almost five years younger than the UK average, although the number of Londoners over the age of sixty-five is also increasing.²

Today’s Londoners are also incredibly diverse, in every sense of the word. Over a third were born abroad, which is more than double the UK-wide proportion.³ However, an estimated three-quarters are British citizens.⁴ London’s population is 41 per cent BME, which compares to 11 per cent nationally. However, the proportion of BME Londoners varies hugely by borough: from 13 per cent in Richmond upon Thames to 69 per cent in Brent.⁵ London is also the most religiously diverse region of the UK.⁶ One in five Londoners count a language other than English as their main language – this is closer to one in twenty in the rest of England and Wales⁷ – and as many as 300 different languages are spoken by children in the capital’s schools.⁸ London looks, and sounds, different to the rest of the UK. But then, parts of London also look and sound entirely different to one another.

The capital’s residents are quite at ease with their differences, overall. Some evidence suggests that the capital’s diverse communities mix slightly less than in other parts of the country.⁹ But over three-quarters of Londoners report that people from different backgrounds get on well in their local area.¹⁰ Almost one in twenty Londoners are of mixed ethnicity, and one in five London house-holds contain people from different ethnic groups living together.¹¹ Residents of the UK capital generally identify most strongly as ‘Londoners’ ahead of being ‘British’ or ‘English’.¹² This identity appears to be both inclusive and easily acquired; an increase in the percentage of Londoners who were born abroad has not reduced the strength of the London identity over several decades.¹³ Of course, no city is perfect, and integration and inclusion require constant effort. But London’s ‘melting pot’ is a remarkably successful one.

London’s diversity does not mean that the average Londoner has more liberal views across the board, though. In fact, Londoners have more socially conservative views on average, regarding issues such as pre-marital sex and homosexuality, than their counterparts elsewhere in the UK. The fact that Londoners are more likely to identify as religious than the rest of Britain seems to go some way towards explaining this.¹⁴ When religious affiliation is taken into account, these differences between London and other UK regions vanish.¹⁵

London not only looks and sounds different to the rest of the nation but it votes differently too. Over the last four decades, London has become an increasingly Labour-voting city, diverging further and further from England as a whole.¹⁶ In 2016, it was also found to be a heavily ‘remain’ city, famously voting 60:40 in favour of staying in the EU while England as a whole voted to leave by 53:47 and the UK did the same by a slightly smaller margin. London is home to seven of the ten strongest remain-voting areas in the UK. But it is also true that five London boroughs voted leave, as did 40 per cent of all Londoners.¹⁷ The capital also contains several safe Conservative seats and elected a Conservative mayor in two of five mayoral elections at the time of writing.

The capital is not a homogeneous place. Its residents are diverse, and many look and sound different to their counterparts elsewhere in the nation. To some extent, Londoners think and vote differently too. But the differences between Londoners and the rest of the UK can be exaggerated. Furthermore, Londoners are also different from one another, whether from borough to borough or community to community. Any claim that ‘Londoners’ think or act in a certain way requires several layers of caveating. Londoners tend to manage their differences with relative ease and feel a strong attachment to the city. But while some Londoners have arrived in the capital from elsewhere in the world, most are British citizens. Many are born and bred in the city; others come from elsewhere in the UK, and more still will live elsewhere in the UK in the future. In this sense, they are of the country as much as of the capital.

A global city

As well as being a place in its own right, London is the capital of both England and the UK. But it is also part of something global.

At the start of 2020, London was one of a handful of true ‘world cities’ on Earth. It fought for the top spot in various international city rankings, particularly those measuring the relative power of financial centres, the ability to attract the most mobile, highly skilled global talent and to draw foreign investment. In 2013, a ‘Big Six’ of global cities had pulled ahead of the rest: London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In 2016, Seoul joined a ‘Big Seven’. London was not only firmly in this elite league but at its forefront: in 2019, it was ranked as the most economically competitive city in the world based on an analysis of indices of over 500 different criteria.¹⁸

London tended to fare somewhat less well in ‘quality of life’ rankings, not quite making the global top forty.¹⁹ Yet its magnetism endured regardless. The new millennium had seen the UK capital’s population and economy grow like Topsy. London’s ‘brand’ was recognisable and respected worldwide, its economy dynamic and highly internationalised, and its population diverse. And while the UK’s status as a welcoming and outward-looking place for talented migrants may have been diminished by the result of the EU referendum of June 2016, some evidence suggested that London’s reputation for openness had endured, having decoupled from that of its nation.²⁰

As 2020 began, the UK’s capital was recognised around the world as a world-class place to do business, a cultural centre of great influence and ‘soft power’, and an international tourist destination thanks to a near-unique blend of 2,000 years of history and cutting-edge technology, ideas, and dynamism. Despite negative stereotypes earned over several hundred years, London had even begun to be seen as a good place to get a quality meal.²¹

The engine room of the UK economy

At home, London’s economy was strong as it entered the 2020s – arguably too dominant, in fact, in the national context. While home to only 13 per cent of the UK population, the capital accounted for a quarter of the national economy.²² Economic activity in London had stormed ahead of the UK average since the 1990s, with the gap between capital and country growing wider each year.²³ The UK capital was responsible for one-third of all taxes raised across the nation, more than the next thirty-seven biggest cities combined.²⁴ In 2017, Chris Giles observed in the Financial Times that ‘if London [were] a nation state, it would have a budget surplus of 7 per cent of gross domestic product, better than Norway.’²⁵

In other words, London’s success helped pay for public services across the UK. The Greater London region had a sizeable ‘fiscal surplus’, contributing more in taxation to HM Treasury than it received in public spending. The only other two regions with fiscal surpluses were the neighbouring south-east and east of England regions, both of which have strong economic ties and substantial commuting patterns into the capital.²⁶ Together, these three regions create a combined ‘wider south-east’ mega-region of 24 million people, over a third of the UK’s population.

In 2019, London had a net fiscal surplus of public spending per head of £4,369. Northern Ireland had a net deficit of £4,978 per head.²⁷ But this is not to single out Northern Ireland: outside the wider south-east, every other English region, plus Scotland and Wales, had net deficits. And London is undoubtedly the engine that drives the whole wider south-east megaregion: in 2018/19, London’s total fiscal surplus stood at £38.9 billion, compared to the south-east’s £21.9 billion and the east of England’s £4.2 billion.²⁸

London’s dominance of its nation is far from unique among global capitals. Cities like Tokyo and Seoul are home to a much larger share of their nation states’ populations than London, while Moscow, Mumbai, and São Paulo are responsible for even greater shares of their national economies than London. Closer to home, the economic gap (in gross value added, GVA, per capita) between Paris and France is also larger.²⁹ But the London–UK gap remains cavernous: other UK cities lag notably behind London in terms of productivity. Of the twelve UK cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants in 2016, only three – London, Bristol, and Portsmouth – were more productive than the national average. In Germany, which is often lauded as a more successful ‘multinodal’ state, the comparable figure was nine out of fourteen. What’s more, eight of these German cities perform better than the European average, whereas London is the only UK city to do so.³⁰

It is a matter of fact, then, that London overperforms and other UK cities (and regions) underperform. Whether the former is responsible for the latter is much more debatable but, as this book will show, it is safe to say that the gap between London and the rest is desirable for neither capital nor country.

International magnet

London’s global city status generates taxes that pay for public spending across the UK, but it also brings other benefits. It is the number one city in the world for foreign direct investment in headquarters for multinational corporations.³¹ It draws investment worth billions into the UK that would otherwise go to one of the world’s other great global hubs. In doing so, London competes with Singapore, Dubai, and Hong Kong – rather than Manchester, Birmingham, or Edinburgh. But that’s not to say London alone reaps the benefits: aside from the national tax benefits that such investment generates, foreign direct investment in the capital also leads to spin-off investment elsewhere in the country. More than one in ten such projects outside London stemmed from an initial investment in the capital, generating billions and creating tens of thousands of jobs.³²

Similarly, London’s draw as an international tourist attraction has knock-on effects for the national economy. In 2019, Heathrow airport was the busiest in Europe, with over 80 million passengers passing through it.³³ London alone attracted 22 million overseas visitors, who spent nearly £16 billion in the UK;³⁴ 15 per cent of those went on to visit another UK location in the same trip.³⁵ London’s universities also produce world-leading research, drawing over 100,000 international students into the capital each year.³⁶

London’s global magnetism brings positives for the entire country. But the capital’s growth also depends on intra-UK trade. As successive mayors of London have pointed out, much of the capital’s infrastructure is built or supplied by the rest of the UK.³⁷ London’s leaders have sometimes expressed this hard economic truth in more or less tactful language, depending on sensitivities to the national feeling towards London, but the unvarnished truth is that the UK economy is (or, at least, was before the pan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• About the Contributors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. People and Place
• 2. Politics and Policy
• 3. Perceptions and Prejudices
• 4. Pandemic
• 5. Possibilities
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Backmatter