A government in need of a unifying, upbeat story should embrace every urban area in its national renewal mission
Prepare for further avalanches of untruths about London as the borough elections appear on the horizon and the gangster in the White House tries to shore up his ratings. Even though Metropolitan Police statistics have shown violent crime rates falling across the capital, a soil pipe is gushing with false claims that London is awash with killers and robbers and that a “once proud” city is in chronic decline.
Such claims have, of course, been around for some time, notoriously (and sometimes laughably) made by the Conservatives – including, remarkably, London Conservatives – since the 2024 general and mayoral election campaigns, and before. Nigel Farage is now shamelessly in on the act, self-importantly informing a Sky News reporter last summer that she wouldn’t dare wear jewellery in the West End after dark. She assured him it’s something she does all the time, but that hasn’t deterred “good old Nige”.
King’s College researchers counted more than 250,000 social media posts last year, many of them fake, feeding such falsehoods, which Trump spreads at every opportunity. In November, lickspittle TV channel GB News enabled the World’s Biggest Liar to again recycle his old rubbish about supposed no-go zones in the city (Ofcom is having a jolly good dither about whether to investigate).
Meanwhile, London continues to be derided and disdained by some on the British Left. They too see political advantage to be had from knocking a city whose economy bankrolls the rest of the country while also coping with some of its highest poverty rates. To the point scoring of the Mayor of Greater Manchester can be added the drive-by snipes of none other than the MP for Holborn & St Pancras and the Lewisham-born Chancellor, each impelled by Fear of Farage and dread of re-losing the “red wall”.
The Guardian, long a pushover platform for “north-south divide” populism, is currently running stuff about students from the north of England complaining about having to share “their” universities with Londoners. (What they’re actually objecting to is rudeness and snobbery, which are never good things, but neither is recourse by the higher educated to low regional identity politics). I have lost count of the liberal-Left national outlets that quail at the idea of publishing anything about the capital unless it’s slagging it off, as if doing so would oppress Blackpool. “We don’t want to look London-centric,” they explain. The BBC is just as bad.
All of this is a symptom of Britain’s Age of Pretending, specifically the daft idea that bashing and sidelining London will somehow make life better for everyone else. In reality, a thriving capital creates jobs and supports businesses all over this land and generates taxes that fund public investment and services too. That doesn’t mean other cities and regions matter less or shouldn’t be helped to grow stronger. Far from it: the UK’s historic, heavy dependence on London robs other cities and regions of talent, driving a cycle of redistribution rather than nurturing self-sufficiency.
The big question is about how best to get from where we are now to where we would sooner be. The search for convincing answers has been thankless for many decades, even centuries. A good way to start gripping the issue today would be dumping the discourse of regional resentment, Sir Keir Starmer’s tiresome exception to his dislike of grievance politics. It gets no one anywhere. Far better would be a warmer, more public embrace of all Britain’s cities, from the smallest to the largest of all. Each has its own strengths to build on, weaknesses to cure and surrounding areas to embrace. All are linked and interdependent, not rivals in sour silos. They are also places where Labour voters live.
London’s distinctiveness is its sheer size and the league in which it competes, which is more global than domestic, more about New York, Hong Kong and Paris than Bristol, Glasgow or Leeds. A confident, outgoing Britain should be backing its biggest city and all its others as places of creativity, freedom and opportunity, both for those who already live in or near them and others who might like to. A government that rejects suspicious, narrow nationalism for being the dead end it is should tell a story of what it wants to achieve that harnesses every one of its cities to the task of national renewal.
Would that be so hard to do? Could it not include embracing its capital as an asset to be cherished rather than a scapegoat to be picked on or a problem to be solved?
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