Fortress London: Why we need to save the country from its capital

By Sam Bright

A vividly written and timely polemic tackling the burning injustices shaping British society today.

‘Intelligently written and powerfully argued.’ Paul Mason

‘Witty, scathing, and entertaining.’ Danny Dorling

Journalist Sam Bright is a Northerner living in London. He is just one of the millions of people clinging on to the coattails of the capital, sucked in by the prospect of opportunities that the rest of the United Kingdom does not enjoy.

Our capital is a vast melting pot of languages, cultures, and ideas, and rightly celebrated for it. For many, though, there is no other option. The only place to access the opportunities this country offers is London. Banking, law, politics, advertising, architecture, the arts and the media are all concentrated here. It is almost impossible to reach the heights of any profession without joining the grey hoards queuing for the next tube. As the economic, political, and cultural epicentre of the country, Fortress London acts more like a renaissance city-state like Florence or Venice than the capital of a modern nation-state. And the gluttony of London, compared to the malnourishment of our regions, dramatically affects life chances in Britain.

Fortress London argues that to address Britain’s manifold problems, we need first to end the hegemony of its capital. Enriched by a vast array of interviews and statistics, it will examine how our individual destinies, from childhood to death, are determined by the disproportionate power of London. It will explain why regional inequality has fallen off the Left’s radar, even as the Right pays lip service to it, and it will draw on international comparisons to show where we have gone wrong and, crucially, how we can fix it.

Sam Bright’s clear-eyed intervention will convince you that regional inequality is the problem — and that now is the time for change.

Featuring exclusive interviews with: Andy Burnham, Lisa Nandy, Steve Rotheram, Aditya Chakrabortty, David Blunkett, Jess Phillips, Andrew Adonis and more…

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Apr 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008474232

Sam Bright

Sam Bright is an investigative journalist who has written for the BBC, the New Statesman, The Spectator, The Telegraph, VICE and other outlets. Sam is from Huddersfield, and this is his first book.

Book preview

Preface

The Fortress

If you stand in the foyer of King’s Cross station at approximately 7:30 p.m. most evenings, you will witness a unique natural event.

When the boarding call sounds for the 7:48 p.m. train to Bradford Interchange, a flock of people move in unison to the platform, expelling a melodic Northern hum as they reach the sanctuary of the waiting train.

Yes, daily migrations of Northerners happen across London every day, but the 7:48 p.m. to Bradford Interchange is different. It surges out of the capital and does not stop until it crosses the Yorkshire border; an elongated, steel snake gliding back to its nest. Other trains on the eastern line pause in Stevenage, Peterborough and Grantham. But not the 7:48 p.m. to Bradford Interchange. This train is in such a blind hurry to deliver its cargo to Yorkshire that it ignores the rest of the country.

This creates a strange, rare atmosphere on the train – a kinship forged among people broadly from the same place, escaping an alien city. I’ve had a number of conversations with people on this two-hour journey, sat on the geometric grey and orange upholstery. I have made friends with people who would probably never make eye-contact with a stranger, much less strike a bond with them, in any other environment.

Often, we talk about London. We sit upright and fold our arms across our chests, like teachers reproaching an unruly student, talking in earnest clichés about how unfriendly the city is, how expensive it is and how busy it is. When we reach our respective endpoints, we hit the platform as strangers again – two people with seemingly little in common.

The 7:48 p.m. to Bradford Interchange is a rare forum for frank conversations between random people about place, region and nation; a form of social engineering or a psychological experiment. On this train, our differences seem trivial in comparison to the foreign world that we are departing.

Our towns are proud and the people are plucky. Even as our high streets degenerate and the people seem greyer and poorer than they used to be, there’s a residual belief that we could still punch above our weight – as we did in the past.

London, by contrast, is the switchboard of Britain. A dizzying array of lights, noise and bodies emanate a thick perfume of money, stress and opportunity. One of the most noticeable aspects of London to an outsider is the sheer number of people. Before the Pandemic, rush hour tubes were so busy that stray body parts had to be forcibly pushed into their respective carriages, like pickles in a jar. Navigating every pavement is an Olympic slalom event, finding the pockets of air in a seemingly infinite human wall. London is a vast, sprawling metropolis, little resembling the rest of the country; a towering, bulbous ant-hill.

Our capital houses nearly 9 million people within the limits of the city and the entire metropolitan area covers 14 million. Birmingham, the second largest conurbation in the UK, has a population of just over 1 million. Bristol, the largest city in the South outside London, has a population of barely 500,000.

London is exceptional; an anomaly against any yardstick. Its economic output is 30 per cent higher than the rest of the country. Its education system reaches higher standards than other regions, particularly from secondary level onwards. Its house prices are nearly double the England-wide average. It is considerably more diverse than anywhere else: the non-White British population constitutes 55 per cent of the capital, compared to just 20 per cent in the second most diverse region, the West Midlands.1 Government (Westminster), the economy (the Bank of England and the Treasury), finance (the City), the performing arts (the West End), the media and ‘the professions’ are all headquartered in London.

There is no denying that London deviates from the norm. The question is whether London’s unique position is a good thing, for both the country and the capital. Given that you have presumably glanced at the cover of this book, there’s no use in setting up an elaborate cliff-hanger. You already know my position. So, let’s get to the point.

Among the most developed countries in the world, the UK is the most regionally divided – by virtue of the economic gap between London (and in some regards the broader South East) and everywhere else. London is so dominant – in terms of output, income and wealth – that Britain is now more divided than Germany, a country whose eastern bloc was under Soviet patronage until the early 1990s.

Shortly after the Second World War, geographer Jean-François Gravier wrote of his home city that Paris was suffering from ‘congestive swelling’.2 The same can be said of present-day London, which has devoured the nation’s assets over the last forty years. Yet London hasn’t just eaten from its own plate; Britain’s bloated gut is the product of regional cannibalisation.

Traditional industries were crushed by the invisible hand of the free market during the 1980s, only ‘free’ in the sense that it offered no compensation for its vandalism. Industry and manufacturing were consciously and rapidly depleted, a new economy constructed in their wake. Thatcher’s post-industrial settlement was fostered by the growth of professional services and deregulated high finance, based in the capital and stocked by the graduates of Britain’s burgeoning academic factories. This balance of power has been underwritten by disproportionate levels of government infrastructure spending in the capital – new Tube lines, rail networks and cultural institutions – on the basis that London is the engine of the British economy through which our collective prosperity is ensured.

Yet, when the finance bubble burst in 2008, the provinces were called before the jury. Stripped of their assets by Thatcher two decades earlier, former industrial areas were asked to account for their reliance on the public sector. The jurors, Prime Minister David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne, handed down their punishment: government austerity. State services were starved of resources, punishing nurses and low-wage workers for the problems stoked in London’s banks. And while the wealth of homeowners in the capital has mushroomed over the last decade – properties flogged to luxury development companies and offshore billionaires – wages have stagnated for the longest period in 200 years.3

Bankrupting traditional industries and concentrating national resources in London has created extreme regional imbalances that have intensified over time. As businesses and public institutions have assembled in one place, amassing vast amounts of wealth, more and more people are encouraged to join the throng. As London expands, so does its gravitational pull – reducing opportunities for work and prosperity elsewhere.

The end of every university year sees an exodus of students from their university towns to the capital. London is now the only viable destination for us. All of the main career paths in the post-industrial economy cascade to the metropolis. Banking, law, politics, advertising, architecture, the arts and – in my case – the media, all inhabit this one place. You can of course work in these professions outside the capital, but it’s next to impossible to reach the top of your field without joining the grey hoards queuing for the next Tube.

Given the state of the London housing market, the capital therefore has a profoundly damaging effect on economic and social mobility in Britain – returning the country to a previous stage of development. In an aristocracy, status is drawn from patronage, typically provided by parents in the form of wealth or inherited titles, but also through private, elite schooling. In modern Britain, we now have an aristocracy of place, whereby success is dependent on the patronage of London. If your parents own a home in the capital, for example, you can extract London’s riches without having to worry about paying for a roof over your head. London is a launchpad for your career, and your later wealth (a healthy inheritance almost guaranteed).

Yet, if you’re not part of London’s asset class, your opportunities are obstructed by the mountain of cash required to enter the capital’s rental market. In the year prior to the Pandemic, the median monthly rent in London was £1,425, more than double the England-wide average.4 By 2030, the average price of a property in London is expected to exceed £1 million, benefiting the current and future inheritors of this wealth, while excluding those trapped outside the property bubble.

However, public discourse about London neglects the issues of inequality, opportunity and injustice. Instead, it focuses on the city’s ‘wokeness’. For those of you who are (blissfully) unaware, right-wing figures commonly accuse London of propagating a liberal, left-wing, ‘woke’ attitude that is cosmopolitan, multicultural and supposedly anti-patriotic. The capital voted against Brexit, by a healthy margin, and has consistently supported Labour in recent elections – facts that have been used by Conservatives who seek to divide the country into competing cultures. London is the home of the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ according to the likes of Nigel Farage, who was ironically educated at one of London’s poshest private schools, Dulwich College. This debate is an intellectual desert; it entirely and consciously misses the point.

Yes, London is the most diverse city in Britain – and its politics is currently orientated towards left-wing liberalism – even if the relationship between ethnic diversity and liberalism is complicated. Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford describe in their book Brexitland how immigrants typically hold more socially conservative beliefs than British-born liberals, often due to their religious convictions, but tend to vote for liberal parties that defend ethnic minority groups from xenophobia.5

However, rather than rejecting prevailing narratives about London, the Labour Party has danced to the Right’s tune. The Left has valiantly defended London as a bastion of enlightened politics, suggesting that Britain would be improved if it were more reflective of its capital. Conservatives strategically exaggerate the political and cultural differences between London – supposedly an avocado-eating Remainer paradise – and the anti-Brexit peripheries. Yet, instead of rejecting this false dichotomy, the Left has deployed its soldiers to the trenches of the Right’s Culture War. The Conservatives have led Labour from its heartlands to the banks of the Thames, and the party has dutifully plunged into the electoral abyss.

In the process, the Left now occupies an ideologically ludicrous position – aggressively defending a central artery of global capitalism. London is the international capital of property speculation, financial deregulation, money laundering and inequality. In a report released by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in July 2020, MPs described London as a ‘laundromat’, due to its popularity among Russian oligarchs seeking to clean their dirty money.6 Yet, it is politically risky to raise these concerns; to criticise the almighty capital, even from a social justice standpoint. Critics are accused of smearing London and bolstering the rhetoric of the Conservative Party. The Left has become so tangled in its own contradictions that it now instinctively attacks those who protest regional inequality.

It is also ironic that a group of liberal-minded ‘lefties’ – so avidly opposed to the border walls advocated by right-wing populists – have constructed a figurative wall around London, as not merely a place but an idea that should be defended and protected.

Those who criticise London are roundly attacked by the capital’s foot-soldiers, but as economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 1958: ‘The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. [Yet] something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.’7

These are the political circumstances in which recent elections and referendums have taken place. Vote Leave’s victory and the Conservative Party’s success at the 2019 general election have been attributed to a political rebellion in Labour’s former industrial heartlands – a revolt against their loss of status and wealth over the last forty years, and the perceived neglect of Westminster.

This sense of injustice, rooted in certain parts of the country, did not suddenly and spontaneously detonate; Labour’s support had been dwindling in these seats since 1997, while apathy has risen dramatically. The EU Referendum triggered a landmine that had been lying just beneath the surface for years, foregrounding political chameleons whose ability to exploit regional inequality far outranks their appetite and imagination to fix it.

Ever since the shock of 2016, the same journalists who failed to predict these political reverberations have been diagnosing their causes from the same Westminster hideouts. As Robert Peston writes in WTF?, his psycho-political analysis of what happened in 2016, ‘we fucked up, didn’t we, all of us who prospered in a borderless world for capital and labour? We ignored the complaints of those whose way of life was being dismantled.’8

Peston and others were chastened by their failure to predict Brexit, they admit. The outcome is a further lack of insight, for the writer is fearful of being wrong again. Predictable explanations are reiterated; the writer’s guilt assuaged. It was assumed that Boris Johnson – the primary beneficiary of recent regional anger – was capable of fixing the inequalities created by his political and ideological predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. In all cases, London’s role is marginalised.

In large part, this is the product of a media ecosystem that has been captured by London. Covering national events, the media squats in a city that bulges with the sites of political, economic and cultural importance. The decimation of advertising revenue in the industry over the last two decades has created a crisis in journalism, exacerbated among local and regional outlets that have always drawn their revenues from a limited readership, compared to national titles. Journalism is therefore one of the professions that has been swallowed by London – staffed by the city’s inhabitants, stifling voices outside the metropolis.

‘We all know what life is like in London, because it’s on every single TV programme,’ says Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. She recalls watching a segment on a national news programme a few years ago about the fabled Garden Bridge – the proposed £200 million floral walkway over the River Thames, keenly supported by then London Mayor Boris Johnson – causing her to launch a cushion at the TV in frustration. ‘It didn’t even get built!’ she says. ‘Seriously, we can’t afford to pick up the bins where I live and you’re quibbling over a bridge. Take it to your local news station – I have no interest in hearing about this in Birmingham. I have kids living in abject poverty; fuck off with your bridge on my national news.’

London is depicted as a microcosm of the nation, as journalists fill their columns with convenient stories and interviews from the capital. In reality, the opposite is true. London is an outlier – an alternate universe – and the media is stuck in its orbit. ‘Journalists go out of their own door to cover stories,’ says Dorothy Byrne, the former editor-at-large of Channel 4, born in Paisley, Scotland. ‘So journalists will often cover the issue of commuting to work by going on the London Underground. If journalists had been forced to experience the horror of trying to travel regularly between Manchester and Leeds on a train or any road, they would soon be writing different stories.’

London is aware of its exceptionalism. It is a global city, a vast agglomeration of different nationalities and cultures. It self-identifies, whether accurately or not, as cosmopolitan and outward-looking. Using David Goodhart’s definition, London is populated by proud ‘citizens of anywhere’.9 Yet, Londoners have a complex relationship with their city, and their roots. They recognise that London is unique, in a domestic context, and are keen to distance themselves from people outside the city, who they see as conservative and small-minded. And they identify primarily as Londoners, rather than as British or English. A YouGov survey in 2018 found that eight out of ten people in England identify strongly as English, falling to some 40 per cent in London,10 while a British Future poll in 2012 reported that 90 per cent of Londoners are proud of their city.11

This relates to the demographic makeup of London. Some 37 per cent of Londoners were born outside the UK, and polling shows that young inhabitants of the Capital are considerably less likely to harbour patriotic instincts.12 The average (median) age in London is 35.6, compared to 40.3 in the UK overall. Almost half of London’s inner-city population is made up of those who are in their early twenties to early forties.13

However, a lack of contact with the rest of the country also explains London’s superstitions. With many Londoners lacking a first-person understanding of places outside the capital, they have glanced at the results of recent elections and have decided – with a helping hand from the media – that peripheral Britain is bigoted and parochial. This attitude has a kernel of truth; there’s no denying that the Brexit vote was motivated in part by anti-immigration sentiments. But London’s sense of exceptionalism is also a product of its own parochialism. The capital is a magnet, pinning its population to the fortress. This reduces the need for Londoners to experience or learn about the rest of the country – leading to slapdash assumptions about the character of other places. Londoners see themselves as open-minded, when in fact their understanding of Britain is often limited.

Jess Phillips, for example, tells me that she is regularly mistaken for Ashton-under-Lyne MP Angela Rayner, even by journalists, such is their level of ignorance towards places outside the capital (quite apart from their misogyny). On one occasion, she recalls, on the night of the 2017 general election, Phillips was invited to appear on BBC Newsnight, under the premise that the programme was filming ‘in her area’ – allegedly shooting in the vicinity of her constituency. ‘They sent me the details of the event and it was in Bolton,’ she says. ‘I don’t live anywhere near Bolton!’

Even though London’s values promote a rootless existence, people from the capital are largely embedded in one place. Regional identities matter to all parts of the country – triggering place-based values and political choices. Parochialism is not reserved to the areas that voted for Brexit. The late Christopher Hitchens described New York as a place of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ and this characterisation likewise applies to London. The city is not simply an empty vessel for the projection of different social and national backgrounds; it’s a place that actively celebrates its diversity and believes in the righteousness of its cultural carousel. Try slagging off the capital in front of a Londoner and you will understand how passionately they feel about their birthplace and its values.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. Rather, an acknowledgement that we’re all the same. Most of us have an affinity with our birthplace and where we live, even in parts of the country that claim to be vagabonds and outcasts. That’s why it’s important to map the contours. The UK is not a homogenous blob; understanding regional circumstances and the inequalities that exist between different places helps us to understand not just political events but also our national identity.

This task is complicated by the North–South divide, a time-honoured concept that lingers in our collective subconscious despite being almost entirely divorced from the lived reality of modern Britain. ‘I get quite cross about the idea of the North–South divide,’ says Labour councillor Kate Ewert, who represents Rame and St Germans in Cornwall. ‘I think people in Cornwall have far more in common with people in the ex-industrial North than anyone who lives in Hampshire or Surrey or Oxford. Although we’re not an organised working-class area, we do have an industrial background.’

The North–South divide also sidelines Scotland, Wales and the Midlands – reducing regional inequalities to a simplistic football match between two easily-demarcated teams. ‘People in the North regard the Midlands as belonging to the South and people in the South think the Midlands belongs to the North,’ says broadcaster Adrian Goldberg, born and bred in Birmingham. ‘People haven’t really paid attention to the Midlands, or at least that’s how we feel.’

So, while there is a romantic attachment to the North–South divide, the sentimentality of the idea exceeds its substance. In reality, on pretty much every metric – productivity, education, house prices, poverty, ethnic and economic makeup – London stands alone, shadowed at a distance by the broader South East. As the 2021 British Social Attitudes Survey notes in relation to the economic values held by English regions, ‘the headline findings point to the main regional difference being between London and the rest of England’, rather than between the North and South.

More recently, a distinction has been made between small towns and cities, as a way of explaining place-based inequalities in modern Britain. This theory has merit. On visiting small towns in poorer parts of the North, Midlands and the South, their common features are immediately obvious, from their pollution-stained town halls to their graffitied shop-fronts. However, London is so removed from other cities in the UK – in particular its population size and economic output – that it cannot be paired with other urban conurbations, aside from perhaps to establish broad trends in voting patterns.

Ultimately, members of all political camps have concentrated on the perceived differences in values between people in different parts of the country, while ignoring the real-life inequalities that actually matter.

According to the Resolution Foundation, the richest 1 per cent of the population holds a quarter of all household wealth.14 This wealth has accumulated not through spectacular innovation or ingenuity, but through the inflation of assets. Between 76 per cent and 93 per cent of wealth gains since the 2008 financial crisis have been delivered through the rising value of assets such as housing. Britain’s wealth is increasingly hoarded by a property-owning aristocracy whose investments have bloated while austerity has been inflicted on public-sector workers and the low-paid.

This has buttressed enduring forms of social prejudice. As George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941: ‘England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.’15 The leadership of the country since 2010 proves the longevity of Orwell’s observation.

‘The only way that a Culture War can grow and fester is if people feel hard done by and start blaming others, instead of blaming those in power,’ says Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent Central. ‘If everyone felt they were being treated fairly, the Conservative Party wouldn’t be able to create a Culture War and divide people for their own twisted advantage.’ Ergo, the material deprivation of some people allows expedient actors to channel this public rage into the resentment of other groups based on who they are and what they seem to believe – creating the perception that Britain is divided by values, rather than social circumstances.

Ironically, these expedient actors exploit the grievances of the poor while downplaying their own privilege – failing to mention their education at expensive private schools in London and/or the South East. Yet their attitudes pervade the corridors of power, says Jess Phillips. ‘The way the Midlands and the North gets talked about’ in Parliament ‘is commonly irritating and underwritten by basic snobbery,’ she says. Ruled by a landed aristocracy, British society mirrors the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (up until the 1970s), though stripped of industrial prestige and deprived of the steep, mass inflation of living standards.

Thus, the Culture War concocted by the Conservative Party and amplified by Labour is not a fair representation of our values as a nation. While there are profound differences between political parties – greater differences than at any time in the twenty-first century – voters are more clustered than we imagine.

A vast political divide exists between Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, for example. On immigration, nationalisation, healthcare, multiculturalism, taxation, they hold radically different opinions. But this Culture War cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the country; to people who will never hold ideological passions equivalent to those of Farage or Corbyn. Most people are indifferent to politics, and, for a variety of reasons, little coverage is devoted to the ways that we agree with one another. Those who benefit from the Culture War (both politically and financially) cherry-pick examples that exaggerate supposed conflicts between different ideologies and different regions. What bleeds, leads.

For all the profound material differences between London and the rest of the country, shaping life chances from cradle to grave, there is still an enduring moral consensus between our different nations and regions. We are more economically divided, and less ideologically opposed, than we currently care to admit.

At this point, it’s worth setting some ground rules. National and regional identity are volatile subjects, and we’re each guided by our own experiences. I was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and this identity (plus my general affinity with the North of England) informs the way I see regional inequalities. I have an instinctive, emotional attachment to Yorkshire that is entirely irrational yet makes perfect sense when I stand beneath the grand, ornate façade of York Minster or the barren beauty of the Dales. It’s a feeling of home, of sanctuary and belonging, that is sentimental rather than scientific.

People from other parts of the country have a similar emotional attachment to their home, informed by different histories, cultures and idiosyncrasies. I’ve gained some appreciation of these differences during my life: I have been taught elementary Welsh by colleagues in Cardiff, lectured about Rugby League by relatives in Widnes and taken on tours of London’s urban mosaic by my fellow inmates of the capital. I have also consciously supplemented this book with a number of interviews, calling on the experiences of those who know their local areas far better than I ever could.16

However, I will inevitably have made generalisations that more accurately describe some areas than others. I wish that I could absorb and articulate the full complexity of Britain’s human geography, but such a task would probably be impossible – and would almost certainly prevent me from forming any sort of useful, overarching conclusions that may help to repair the landscape. Often, I will refer to the wider South East rather than specifically to London. The South East is of course different in many ways to the capital, not least in terms of political values, but its economic fortunes have invariably been tied to London – the capital’s ‘economic strength [spilling] over to benefit towns and cities across the wider South East,’ as the Resolution Foundation notes.

Also, you will notice that I have variously used ‘the UK’, ‘Britain’ and ‘the country’. This book substantially refers to Britain: England, Scotland and Wales, given that Northern Ireland has a unique constitutional and historical relationship with both the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the UK. However, I will still refer to ‘the UK’ either when I am referencing a study that has set its parameters across the whole of the UK, or when I am discussing a particular issue that has direct, unobstructed relevance to Northern Ireland. Scotland and Wales of course also differ from England’s regions by virtue of their devolved parliaments, and I hope these nuances are properly acknowledged in what follows.

Finally, although I am hacking at the roots of regional injustice in Britain, this is not an attack on the people of London. In a single night in the capital, you can tour the cuisines and cocktails of the world and mingle with scores of interesting, tolerant, progressive people – even if the city has an overabundance of ex-private school boys who now work as ‘creatives’ and dress like side-characters in a Wes Anderson movie.

I believe that regional inequalities are sustained by two behaviours that are prevalent in the capital: a failure to acknowledge the destructive effects of London’s supremacy; and an instinctive (almost involuntary) assumption that places outside the capital are populated by xenophobes.

However,