FORTRESS LONDON EB

Sam Bright

• Publisher: HarperNorth
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008474256
• eBook ISBN: 9780008474232
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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…

1.

Education, Education, Education

Before giving an appraisal of the education system in the UK, I feel it’s only fair to begin by telling you about mine.

Our class awareness is bound up in the type of education we received – perhaps more than any other developed country. Elite, fee-paying institutions have funnelled students into the upper echelons of business, law and politics for centuries – a rigged system that the Labour Party has variously attempted to knobble, with little success. Perhaps it’s no wonder that schooling is so important to us, individually and collectively. It’s how we have been sorted throughout history.

It’s rare to find someone who isn’t weighed down by their schooling – even if they have graduated from the highest stratifications of the UK’s steeply contoured system. When worlds collide, particularly at university, the former inmates of fee-paying schools are met with animosity from those who were educated by the state – those who are naturally and justifiably resentful about an education system that bestows opportunities based on birthright rather than merit. The privately schooled argue, equally justifiably, that they had no choice in the matter – they were sent by their parents – and therefore the comprehensive kids must simply be jealous and boorish. A cycle of mutual resentment flows down through generations.

In order to trust the words that follow, you want to know how I was educated. I can feel your judgement piercing through these words, even as I write them. That’s fine, I don’t blame you. Judgement of each other’s education is a knee-jerk impulse of this country as much as our road rage or our adoration of David Attenborough. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

My schooling was not particularly unique. I was educated at three state schools and a state sixth-form college. The catchment of the schools comprised a village network on the outskirts of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. The kids I went to school with came from normal families: the majority were not well-off in relative terms, but their existence was comfortable. Their parents worked as nurses, teachers, accountants, physiotherapists and occasionally lawyers. Families owned their own cars and their own houses. The area was semi-rural, safe, and although it wasn’t exactly exciting for young people – there were more bingo halls than nightclubs – none of us felt as though we were missing out on anything. We had fields big enough to host football games and nice houses to which we could retreat, with grass-stained tracksuits and sore shins, when we were inevitably drenched by rain.

The schools themselves were decent, in the truest sense of the word. By and large, the teachers did not drag down the performance of their students, but neither did they elevate them. A number of parents had attended the same school as their kids. In fact, the school lineage was so strong, and the facilities so bog-standard, that our school football team kits – i.e. the actual jerseys – had been worn by some teachers and parents when they had donned the school’s colours some twenty or thirty years prior.

Indeed, an underlying assumption pervaded: that you did not need to outperform your circumstances. There were worse things in life than getting decent grades, working in a comfortable job and settling down in the area, eventually filming your kids in the nativity play you had starred in at the same school years earlier.

There were no private schools in the area; there didn’t seem to be any need for them. The sports field provided our only exposure to class conflict. Our high school cricket team was particularly good, and I featured as a disciplined right-arm medium pace bowler. We progressed through to the final of the county championship at under-15 level – some achievement in a county that is both the nation’s largest and its most cricket obsessed. We didn’t have a cricket pitch at our school, so we agreed to play the final on enemy turf, at Scarborough College.

It was an important game and we were playing against a posh private school with a history of producing top cricketers. So, ditching the school’s polo-shirt uniform, our coach instructed us to wear a white shirt and a blue tie for the occasion. The problem was, the coach did not specify which shade of blue. Players turned up with ties hastily swiped from their dad’s closet, featuring every size and shade from turquoise to navy. The clown in the team, Josh, even appeared at school wearing a garish pink tie featuring a blue stripe, beaming at his ingenuity. After the two-hour drive to Scarborough, the boys rolled out of our beaten-up Volkswagen bus with shirts untucked, half having removed their ties entirely and half choosing instead to undo the noose – hanging the tie in a low listless knot, more like a mayor’s medallion. The social differences between our rabble and the prim Scarborough boys with their pressed blazers and prefect robes could not have been starker. Even so, we won the game comfortably.

I left my leafy high school behind at 16, attending Greenhead College in the centre of Huddersfield. This was my equivalent of leaving for the big city, swapping my local school for a 7:30 a.m. train ride into the centre of town – embarking on a two-year academic training camp with fifteen of my friends and 2,000 kids from other schools who we didn’t know.

We were lucky to attend somewhere like Greenhead. The school has consistently been rated as one of the best sixth-form colleges in the country, and in 2020 it recorded a better Oxbridge acceptance ratio than Eton, one of the world’s most venerated and expensive private institutions, if one looks at the number of applications to acceptances.1

However, while Greenhead received the ninth most Oxbridge offers of any school in 2020, only one other Northern establishment mounted a charge into the top twenty – namely Manchester Grammar school, which costs roughly £13,000 a year to attend. Eleven of the top twenty schools are located in London, eleven are independent institutions and seventeen are based in the broader South East of England stretching from Cambridge to Brighton.

This triggers the two basic questions that frame this chapter: in what ways do regional inequalities manifest through the education system, and why has this happened?

Anecdotally, my school days provide some pointers now that I can reflect on my experiences with a reasonable level of distance and objectivity.

In year nine, every student was handed their predicted GCSE grades – a clever trick that allowed teachers to flay anyone who was straying away from their expected performance. My five or six closest friends were all justifiably predicted A* grades across the board. Perhaps partly saddled by the weight of expectation, none achieved this target, or even came close. As their relative performance gradually waned over the succeeding years, two of the most talented among the group eventually graduated college and attended a former polytechnic university, which are generally considered to be non-academic establishments.

There is of course nothing wrong with going to a polytechnic – it is not a mark of failure and it certainly does not carry the stigma that it once did. However, I’ve often wondered how my school friends, who were among the brightest 15-year-olds in the country, did not fulfil their academic potential. Especially when London’s most expensive private schools seem to specialise in producing A* morons who end up running the country.

The principal reason, for my friends at least, was that high academic achievement was synonymous with leaving their home area. In many ways, they saw aspiration as foolhardy, given that we lived so comfortably. It’s hard to argue with this case: not many areas of the country boast an abundance of natural beauty, good state schools, affordable homes and decent jobs – while maintaining a brutal Yorkshire realism that dissuades snobbery and privilege.

My friends were also correct in the sense that, if the aim were to pursue a different life – perhaps in the upper ranks of a profession or the arts – Huddersfield was never going to be the midwife of these dreams. Whereas Huddersfield and its mills once fuelled the economic engine of the country during the Industrial Revolution, we knew that London was the only game in town for those who wanted to stand at the vanguard of the information age.

For people in small Northern towns like mine, this detachment from the all-powerful capital city incubates a collective ignorance towards the treasures that it holds. People don’t aspire towards it – whatever it may be – because they simply don’t know it exists. The names of corporate institutions, other than those on the high street, were alien to me until I ventured to university. And even then, in my first year, fellow students talked about their father’s promotion at KPMG as though I was supposed to know that it’s an international accountancy firm and not some sort of Class A drug.

Similar observations are made, although not so crass, by the 2018 Children’s Commissioner report on the prospects of children growing up in the North. ‘Overwhelmingly, the young people we spoke to were planning to go into a career of someone known to them personally,’ it notes. ‘This meant the aspirations of the young people we spoke to were reflective of the local labour market – and its limitations. Very few professional or office-based occupations were mentioned in any of our sessions.’2

Of course, the second-generation immigrant son or daughter of a cleaner in Tower Hamlets will also feel estranged from the glistening glass façades of Canary Wharf. But it’s difficult to be ignorant about the economic opportunities provided by the UK’s financial sector when you live within spitting distance of the HSBC Tower, or apathy towards art or politics after your school trip to the Tate Modern or the Houses of Parliament. London is a melting pot, as we’re often told, and that bestows advantages on everyone growing up in the city – even if the benefits amassed by the rich far outweigh those of the poor.

There has been a stark reversal of regional fortunes in the British education system over recent decades. In the early 2000s, London had the worst performing schools in the country – inner London being the only area in which less than 40 per cent of children achieved five or more good GCSEs.3 There was a fear that London’s poorest boroughs were experiencing a brain drain, as more affluent families repatriated to the suburbs or packed their kids on trains out of the city centre.

By 2013, however, the three London regions (inner, outer and everywhere else) had cartwheeled into the three top positions in England, comfortably exceeding 60 per cent of students achieving five or more good GCSEs, including English and Maths.4 We will come to the reasons for this metamorphosis but I first want to chart London’s lead, on an array of school performance indicators.

According to the Social Market Foundation, geography is now more closely attached to school performance than at any moment in recent history. For a child born in 2000, birthplace was a more powerful predictive factor of their success than those born thirty years prior.5

The radical divergence of performance based on geography does not occur from the moment that a child steps into school. Children in the North of England perform worse than their peers in London at key stage one level, though the divide is little more than a few percentage points. This gap widens as the school years progress, spurred by the comparative poor performance of the most disadvantaged students.

Statistics from the Children’s Commissioner show that a child who qualifies for free school meals in London achieves, on average, half a grade higher in every subject at GCSE than a child on free school meals outside the capital, even if they both start secondary school at the same level of attainment.6 Children on free school meals in London are 20 per cent less likely to achieve a C or above in Maths and English at GCSE than the national average for all students, while children on free school meals in Northern city regions are 40 per cent less likely to achieve this standard.

This chasm further widens above the age of 16. London-based students on free school meals are slightly more likely to attend university than the national average for all students, whereas those on free school meals in Northern city regions are 50 per cent less likely than the average. In other words: a pupil from London on free school meals is twice as likely to attend university as a child from an equivalent socio-economic background in the North.

‘Material poverty threatens your chance of a good start wherever you’re born,’ notes Anna Round, a senior research fellow at IPPR North, ‘but that threat seems to be greater in the North than in the capital.’

Some explanation for this rupture can be found in Ofsted ratings. In the most deprived areas of London, 35 per cent of secondary schools are classified as outstanding and close to 90 per cent are either good or outstanding. In the most deprived areas of the North, less than 10 per cent are rated as outstanding and less than 50 per cent are either good or outstanding – an eye-watering drop in standards compared to the capital.

In terms of standards at least, schools in London exist in a different universe to those elsewhere. Some 50 per cent of all secondary schools in London are rated as outstanding by Ofsted, and 95 per cent are classified as either good or outstanding. In the North, those figures are 30 per cent and 75 per cent respectively.

Thus, a fledgling adult in the London school system is much more likely to attend university than those who’ve been deprived of the capital’s academic booster-shot. A staggering 49 per cent of all London students end up in higher education, compared to 36 per cent in Northern and Southern city regions, and 37 per cent in Midlands city regions.7

Raw funding is one factor that has exacerbated these inequalities. In 2016, for example, secondary schools in the North received on average £1,300 less per pupil than schools in London.8 And while schools in London have been able to rely on donations to compensate for funding shortfalls, charitable gifts have been more constrained in other parts of the country. In 2017–18, the average school in London raised £43,000 from donations while in Yorkshire the equivalent figure was just £13,300. Indeed, the average donations raised by schools in London surpassed the second-placed region, the East of England, by 58 per cent, or nearly £20,000 per school.9

Inequalities in the education system are a permanent feature of national life, begrudgingly accepted by most people. But place-based inequalities have added a new dimension to the disparities that mould the British class experience.

From the pageantry of the House of Lords to the twitching moustaches of the military high command, the UK is renowned for its hereditary culture. This lingering world – of lords, ladies, butlers and unearned privilege – is still one of our most lucrative exports, as the producers of The Crown, Downton Abbey and Made in Chelsea will attest. One suspects that the tabloids would struggle to fill their pages without the help of the royal family.

But while the concurrent veneration and exploitation of aristocracy in popular culture has continued apace, politicians have deployed high-minded language about meritocracy and social mobility. In his 2012 Conservative Party conference speech, prime minister and old Etonian David Cameron articulated an idea that is institutionally accepted among major p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Fortress
• 1. Education, Education, Education
• 2. Cradle to Grave
• 3. Capital in the Capital
• 4. Left Behind?
• 5. Red Wall
• 6. The Fourth Estate
• 7. Devolution
• 8. Rust Belts
• 9. Unification
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Book Credits
• About the Publisher