Land underpins everything. On the geopolitical stage, you see it most crassly in Putin’s landgrabs in Ukraine, or Trump’s greedy desire to annex Greenland. But the importance of land goes far deeper than the territorial ambitions of states. It is the foundation of every nation’s economy: the fields that produce our food, the places where we build our homes. And underlying all this is land’s irreplaceable role in providing ecosystem services, from purifying water and preventing flooding to soaking up carbon in forests and peat bogs.

Britain, as an island nation, understands more keenly than other countries that land is ultimately finite. “Land differs from all other forms of property,” wrote one of Westminster’s rising political stars in 1909, arguing that it is “a necessity of human existence”, “the original source of all wealth”, and “strictly limited in extent”. The name of this thrusting young radical? Winston Churchill.

Part of a reforming Liberal government at the time, Churchill recognized that land’s finite nature made ownership of it a zero-sum game — to quote the future Prime Minister “by far the greatest of monopolies”. Certainly, this truth lies at the heart of the housing crisis of our own time. If little land is coming onto the market, one cannot simply make more of it to increase the supply. Land prices occasionally fluctuate, but they always go up in the long run: the total value of land in the UK increased from around £1 trillion in 1995 to over £5 trillion in 2016. You could rip up the entirety of the Green Belt tomorrow, only to see land values in those areas skyrocket, replacing the supposed block of the planning system with the block of landowners keen to make a tidy profit.

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England’s market in land, after all, is highly illiquid: huge swathes of the country have been owned and inherited by the same aristocratic families for centuries. After the Norman Conquest, William the Bastard declared all land in England ultimately belonged to the Crown, before parcelling it out to his 200 barons as patronage. That concentration of landed power in the hands of a few set the pattern in England for a thousand years. In Belgravia, owned by Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, a statue of one of his ancestors bears the proud inscription: “The Grosvenor family came to England with William the Conqueror and have held land in Cheshire since that time.”

At the same time, land has taken on fresh relevance in the 21st century with the acceleration of the climate and ecological crises — because who owns land also enjoys huge sway over how it’s used. Land ownership comprises a “bundle of rights”, including not just the right to enjoy its fruits and charge rent, but also to exclude others (hence laws of trespass) and even the right to destroy or abuse land, the so-called jus abutendi. As the 18th-century legal scholar William Blackstone remarked: “if a man be the absolute tenant in fee simple [ie. a freehold owner]… he may commit whatever waste his own indiscretion may prompt him to, without being impeachable or accountable for it to anyone.”

Many of England’s biggest landowners have hidden their environmentally dubious records behind the oft-repeated lie that they are the trusted “custodians of the countryside”, who can be left to their own devices to look after rural England. Translation: no need for pesky environmental regulations, state oversight or public accountability. Though there are clearly some brilliant nature-friendly farmers and landowners, trying their best to restore nature to these de-wilded isles, the broader picture remains grim. The reality is that a tiny number of landowners have had an outsize role in ecological destruction, from the draining of the Fens and the destruction of England’s upland peat bogs, to the dire state of even our most protected nature reserves.

Those in possession of land have woven a powerful forcefield around questioning the status quo. A shroud of intense secrecy still surrounds even knowing who owns land in this country. The official Land Registry, despite being founded in 1863, still hasn’t completed its task of registering every landowner, and the vast dataset it possesses lies locked behind prohibitively expensive search fees. Influential lobbyists continue to press the case for landed privilege: the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), set up in 1907 to oppose land taxes, still protests the Government’s attempts to close the tax loophole of Agricultural Property Relief. We might sympathize with elderly farmers struggling with inheritance planning — less so with the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, who bought his Cotswolds farm with the express intent of avoiding tax.

Challenging any of this — the inequality of land ownership, and the way landed power mistreats this vital common good — is often referred to as “land reform”. In the modern world, this means both changing who owns land, but also changing the terms on which land is owned. Why should landowners’ bundle of rights include the right to destroy nature, for example, or the right to exclude others from even accessing the countryside? The cause of land reform once united politicians of all stripes, from Churchill to David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee. Serious land reform in England has been off the political agenda for decades. Yet now, finally, it is stirring once more.

The first straws in the wind came in the dying days of the Tory government. “There is… unquestionable public interest in who really owns land and property,” asserted Michael Gove, then Levelling Up Secretary, in the foreword to a government consultation on increasing transparency about land ownership. This strand of thinking has been taken up with gusto by Labour, with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook recently announcing that the Government intends to open up the Land Registry, “prioritize free access to data”, and “enabling others to map” who owns land. If enacted, these changes could finally spell an end to the secrecy that has cloaked and protected landed power in England since the Domesday Book.

But Labour also appears willing to go much further. In its new Planning Bill, the Government has taken aim at the hoarding of land by landowners, addressing the sky-high land prices that thwart the building of affordable homes. Ministers propose to give local authorities powers to acquire land — compulsorily, if necessary — at close to existing use value: that is, shorn of the “hope value” that can inflate the price of a field from, say, £22,500 per hectare to £6.2 million per hectare. During a recent parliamentary debate on the Bill, Labour MP Chris Curtis mocked Tory opponents of this provision by approvingly quoting Churchill’s writings on land reform.

Starmer’s government also seems to be taking some inspiration from the successful land reforms that Labour-led administrations have enacted in Scotland. In 2003, First Minister Jack McConnell championed a Land Reform Act that created a Community Right to Buy: giving communities powers to register an interest in land; a right of first refusal when it comes up for sale; and a pause in the ordinary sales process to give them time to secure funds. Half a million acres of Scotland now belong to communities, from small-scale communal woodlands to a vast 10,000-acre former grouse moor, acquired in recent years by the townsfolk of Langholm. Now, Angela Rayner says she will create a Community Right to Buy in England, via the forthcoming English Devolution Bill.

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Community ownership does not, however, simply mean transferring legal title over land from one person to another. It also opens up profound questions about landowner accountability, asserting that the public have a legitimate interest in how land is used for the common good. The Government now argues this too. In particular, it has recently issued a challenge to England’s biggest landowners to do more to restore nature. In March this year, Environment Secretary Steve Reed convened the first meeting of a new “National Estate for Nature” group, comprising huge landowners like the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and the water company United Utilities. “Landowners must go further and faster to restore our natural world,” Reed told them, arguing that since they collectively own 10% of England, they “have a responsibility to future generations to leave the environment in a better state.” If major landowners want to claim to be stewards of the earth, they can. But now, the public needs to see proof of delivery.

The idea that land should serve the national interest, not just that of private property owners, also animates Labour’s proposed Land Use Framework, which seeks to more rationally plan how we use the finite resource of land. It equally lies behind the Government’s planned ban on moorland burning: an ecologically destructive practice carried out by the wealthy owners of grouse moors to prop up their archaic Victorian bloodsport. Setting fire to heather helps maximize the numbers of grouse for shooting. But, more importantly, it also damages England’s most important natural carbon store — our upland peat bogs — and forces the residents of Sheffield and Manchester to breathe in acrid smoke and suffer worse flooding. The dukes and oligarchs who possess England’s 150 grouse moors view them, in the words of The Spectator, as the “ultimate trophy asset”. But the Government is now signaling that this land should instead be treated as a national asset: and looked after accordingly.

There is still much to be done, of course, to push forward more ambitious land reform in England. When in opposition, Labour initially committed to introducing a Scottish-style right to roam in England, but later U-turned following intense lobbying by the CLA and National Farmers’ Union. It should look at the polling, and think again. Almost 70% of the public want a right of responsible access to the English countryside — a sentiment shared by people living in rural areas and cities alike. There are also worrying signs that the Government is watering down some of its commitments around Community Right to Buy, a move which would deny communities the chance to dream big and own not just pubs and village halls but also rivers, woods and peat bogs.

If, however, this is not the end, it is at least the end of the beginning. As the Labour government looks towards its second year in office, it should seize the land reform agenda with both hands, and lay claim to a tradition that united both Churchill and Orwell, and a great swathe of public opinion in between.

***

Guy Shrubsole is the author of The Lie of the Land, published by William Collins in paperback on 8th May.

Unfortunately, our present government is less discerning. The whole of Kent has been placed under Tier 3 Covid restrictions — meaning that the end of lockdown barely makes a difference. That’s also true of other parts of the country, but Kent has particular reason to feel aggrieved. Having gone into lockdown as a Tier 1 area, it’s emerged at the other end of the scale.

For some people, this is proof positive that lockdowns don’t work. The real problem, though, is the precise opposite — the surge of infections seen in one corner of the county has not spread to anything like the same extent. Indeed, in some areas there are so few cases that the figures have to be disguised to stop particular individuals from being identified. 

In case you don’t know Kent very well, it’s pretty big — 50 miles plus from one side to the other. It borders London at one end, but is closer to Calais at the other. It’s also home to 1.8 million people. That’s more than four EU member states (or six, if you were to return the London boroughs of Bromley and Bexley to their Kentish homeland).

Kent also contains a whole country’s worth of sociological differences. Picture perfect villages contrast with struggling coastal towns; and built-up suburbs with sparsely populated marshland. And just compare bourgeois Tunbridge Wells, which voted to remain, with Brexity Thanet, which, at one point, had a UKIP-controlled district council. Nigel Farage, born in Farnborough, is a quintessential Kentishman; but then so was Ted Heath, born in Broadstairs. The county is both closely connected to the Continent (literally, thanks to the Channel Tunnel), but also sticks two fingers up to it.

Fierce and gentle, rebellious and conservative, poor and prosperous, the dualities of the county find an echo in the distinction between Kentish Men and Men of Kent. Today, those labels refer to the western and eastern parts of the county; but there was once a class connotation too — the Men of Kent being grander than the mere Kentish Men.

In short, Kent contains multitudes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the Government from treating the county as an undifferentiated blob. Which is weird, because elsewhere the map of tiers has been drawn in finer detail. For instance, Slough is in Tier 3, but not the rest of Berkshire which is in Tier 2.

So why the geographical blunderbuss in one county and not the other? 

Perhaps it’s because Berkshire doesn’t exist — at least not for administrative purposes. Berkshire County Council was abolished in 1998 and turned into a series of unitary authorities. However, Kent — like most of England — was left largely as it is. With the exception of Medway, Kent County Council remains the highest tier of local government. 

An absurd possibility therefore presents itself — which is that the Covid tiers were assigned by some bureaucrat reading down a list of highest-level local authorities and making no allowance for their greatly varying sizes. But can that really be the explanation? They surely can’t have locked-down nearly two million people just because of a historical quirk of political geography, can they?

It’s hard to tell, because the Government won’t properly explain the rationale for the new tiers. As a result temperatures are rising; mild-mannered MPs like Damian Green, Greg Clark and Tom Tugendhat are on the warpath. And who can blame them? If the ministers can’t justify an apparently nonsensical decision then they deserve all the Kentish pitchforks heading their way.

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At this point, I ought to state that I’m not reflexively anti-lockdown. If there’s a firm scientific basis for any anti-Covid measure, then so be it. I also think we ought to be tolerant of the mistakes that are bound to be made in such extraordinary circumstances. Our leaders are only human after all. However, when a mistake had been identified, it ought to be corrected. Kent MPs have already alerted the government to its geographical illiteracy, pleading with ministers to set tiers by district and borough, not by county. It’s an eminently sensible idea — so why has it been ignored?

As a Kentish Man, I’ve been entertaining doubts — not just about Covid policy or government competence, but also about something of longer-lasting significance: the entire county system. Indeed, I’m coming to the conclusion that this literally medieval arrangement is doing serious harm to the governance of England in the 21st century.

This is a painful realisation. For a cultural conservative like me, county-scepticism isn’t just unorthodox, it’s downright heretical. Our ancient counties aren’t called ancient for nothing — they go back to the early Middle Ages, and some of them to Dark Ages. Kent, for instance, was one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. So why on earth would I want to get rid of that much history? What could be more redolent of a bloodless, bureaucratic mindset than erasing age-old traditions to make way for something more “rational”? I mean, that’s the sort of thing the French would do. Indeed, they have done it — many times. Parisian technocrats are forever tinkering with the internal borders of France.

Ironically, it was the French who gave us the term counties — or comtés — in the first place, replacing the older shires. Originally, a county was a jurisdiction governed by a count — a title derived from a Latin word meaning ‘companion’ (to a king). In England, we replaced the word “count” with “earl” for reasons of delicacy, but “counties” remained.

Over the centuries they took on various administrative functions — and in the Victorian era they became the main engine of local democracy. Except that it’s long been obvious that the county map doesn’t correspond to the geography of the modern world. Urbanisation has disrupted older patterns of settlement; in some cases, county borders that once ran through the back-of-beyond, were enveloped by growing towns and cities. Royal Tunbridge Wells is the classic example: 400 years ago it didn’t exist, but then a spring was a discovered and the famous spa grew up around it, in time becoming bigger than its parent town, Tonbridge. Inconveniently, though, the Kent-Sussex border chopped the new town in half.

Borders can be moved, of course — which is what eventually happened in Tunbridge Wells. However, such tweaks only kick the can down the road. Indeed, road and rail links have changed the old rules of geography, shrinking distances and creating hubs that extend far beyond irrelevant old boundaries. For instance, the Dartford Tunnel means that the two shores of the Thames Estuary have drawn closer together.

Thanks to a shared environment and their mutual proximity to London, they have things in common that don’t apply the rest of their respective counties (Kent and Essex). The same can be said of the Kent-Sussex border. Now that the Weald is no longer an impenetrable wilderness, but a throughly civilised Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, there’s no real distinction between the communities on either side of the invisible line.

In the post-war period, reorganisations of local government tried to catch up with the new realities. Of course, they failed because they were micromanaged from the top-down. Traditional counties like Middlesex and Rutland were abolished and artificial creations like Avon and Humberside imposed on unwilling residents. In any case, the real power stayed in Whitehall.

Subsequent reforms were also bungled. Margaret Thatcher left Greater London and Greater Manchester without effective city-wide government. Tony Blair’s attempt at English regional government was an embarrassing flop. David Cameron and George Osborne made some progress with the City Deals and Metropolitan Mayors, but then they drove their reforms up a dead end. That’s because they tried to impose the same model they used in the cities on other parts of the country and it just didn’t fit. While a city is an organic whole, a non-metropolitan area containing a similar number of people is just too big and incoherent.

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Power must be localised, but only to communities that actually exist — and those are defined by observable everyday experience. Where do people send their kids to school? Where do they go for the big weekly shop? Where to go to church or walk the dog? This is real human geography — the places that people call home and therefore actually care about. Things like travel-to-work-areas may sound coldly functional, but they reflect the rhythms of life. They also define housing markets and hence planning policy — the most important role of a meaningful local democracy. 

In England, devolution is stuck, because our messed-up map of local government has got in the way. In particular, county councils suck decision-making power away from where it ought to be exercised. They are too big to be local, but too small to take on major infrastructure projects currently controlled by Whitehall. And, as we’ve seen with the Kent Covid fiasco, the county system encourages central government to impose one-size-fits-all decisions on places that have little to do with one another.  

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What about identity, though? Don’t counties add to the richness of our national life? Well, yes, up to a point, they do. But not a very significant point — not compared to the other things we identify with. Cross from one home to another, one town to another, one nation to another — and the differences are all-important. Cross a county line, however, and nothing much changes. If it weren’t for the road signs, you probably wouldn’t notice. Even postcodes carry more emotional resonance, in London at least.

I’m not saying that county-based variations in dialect and custom don’t matter. They’ve been much eroded, but let’s hold on to what we can. I love the pageantry of counties too. When I see the flag of Kent — a rearing white horse on a red background — I feel a flutter of pride. Some county flags may be of rather more recent vintage, but ancient traditions are of great value, even if they were invented last Tuesday. 

There’s no reason why we can’t keep the ceremonial counties, with their lords-lieutenant and high sheriffs. In fact, we ought to restore the old boundaries — bringing back long-lost counties like Westmorland. Free of any administrative significance, it would be easily done. 

As with the monarchy, a clear distinction between the efficient and dignified parts of the constitution would allow us to enjoy the symbolism and ritual of the past, without constraining the present. Counties should be like our surviving castles and manor houses — lovely to look at and of zero relevance to contemporary decision-making.

We can keep our heritage, but we don’t have to be governed by it. Especially when it means the difference between being allowed out of our homes or not.

Well, Chinese people, obviously. As for us in the West, though, I have my doubts. China has scores of major cities with millions of people that most westerners have never heard of. Wuhan, for instance, is home to around ten million people, larger than London or Paris, and were it in Europe or North America, it would have already been a household name like Berlin, Los Angeles or Toronto.

However, when it comes to Chinese cities of equal or even greater size we’re incredibly ignorant. Yes, most people have heard of Beijing and Shanghai; some of us will be familiar with Guangzhou and Xi’an. But test yourselves on these: Tianjin, Qingdao, Xiamen, Chongqing, Chengdu. Ring any bells? Could you place them on a map? Say anything about them?

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You might think that’s unfair — that beyond the most prominent Chinese cities, the rest is specialist knowledge — yet these are places that could change the world (and in the case of Wuhan, unfortunately, already have). Indeed, they are changing the world. So what stops us from getting our heads round the very basics of Chinese geography?

To be fair, it is a daunting task. By one count, there are 65 Chinese cities with more than a million people. Language provides another barrier. Not being attuned to the tonal qualities of spoken Chinese, let alone the symbolic significance of the written characters, we only hear and see Chinese place names in one dimension. It doesn’t help that there are several ways of transliterating Chinese names and words into our alphabet, and some of the earlier attempts weren’t very accurate — giving us Peking and Canton, for instance, instead of Beijing and Guangzhou. Then there are sounds (like those written as ‘q’ and ‘x’) that have no equivalent in English (‘ch’ and ‘sh’ are inadequate approximations).

This article is an attempt to provide a rough guide to ten Chinese cities you ought to know about.

*

First, though, a quick primer.

China is almost the same size as the United States of America. In fact, there’s a debate as to which one is bigger — it depends on precise territorial definitions. In any case, China is big.

It also occupies much the same latitudes as the contiguous United States, although the southernmost parts of China are at Mexican latitudes and the northernmost at Canadian latitudes. So China ranges from the bitterly cold to the steaming hot.

But while America stretches from “sea to shining sea”, China stretches from the Pacific Ocean to Central Asia. In fact, the most inland place on the planet is in the far north-west of China.

There’s something called the Heihe-Tengchong line that bisects China from the Russian border in the far north-east to the Burmese border in the south. Remarkably, just 4% of the country’s population lives west of the line. So, when you look at China on a map, remember that almost everything is going on in the eastern half of the country.

Here’s another really important line: the line of latitude that lies thirty degrees north of the equator. It’s on or near this parallel that all four of the world’s oldest civilisations — ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilisation and ancient China — got their start. Later civilisations arose further north or further south, but the earliest ones were all at this crucial latitude.

River valleys were another essential ingredient. Whereas in ancient Egypt it was the Nile, in ancient China it was the Yangzi (or Yangtse), the third longest river in the world. Unlike the Nile, however, it runs east-west along the 30th parallel, allowing civilisation to spread and stay connected over a wide area sharing the same sort of climate. Furthermore, not too far to the north is another great river — the Huang He (a.k.a. the Yellow River). Even better, the land through which both rivers flow is fertile not arid. Tributary rivers (and, later, canals) helped to link up the Lower Yangzi Plain and the North China Plain into a vast and cohesive Chinese heartland.

It was there that Chinese civilisation developed over the millennia and from there that it spread out in all directions.

1. Wuhan — the crossroads of China

Which bring me back to Wuhan. The city is known as the cross-roads of China for a very good reason.

It sits on the Yangzi about a thousand kilometres inland; a thousand kilometres to the north is Beijing; a thousand to the east (i.e. downstream) is Shanghai; a thousand to the south is the Pearl River delta, which includes Guangzhou and Hong Kong; and a thousand to the west (i.e. upstream) are the mighty Sichuanese cities of Chongqing and Chengdu.

Wuhan is also where the Han river flows into the Yangzi — the Han being the birthplace of the Han dynasty, which in turn gave its name to the Han people i.e. China’s majority ethnic group.

Wuhan, therefore, is the most central city in the most populous country on the planet. There couldn’t have been a worse place for the coronavirus to take hold. Whether the city is where it all started remains to be seen.

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2. Kaifeng — an ancient connection to the West

From Wuhan, it’s about 500 kilometres north to Kaifeng, one of the eight ancient capitals of China. It sits on the southern bank of the Huang He — or rather a safe distance further back from the notoriously flood-prone river. Almost a million people live there, so it’s not an especially big city by Chinese standards. It is remarkable, however, for its Jewish community, whose history stretches back a thousand years or more.

The city’s synagogue has long since disappeared and centuries of intermarriage have meant that those claiming Jewish ancestry are as Chinese as their neighbours. And yet Jewish traditions persist, though to what extent is unclear. Episodes of persecution — most recently, Xi Jinping’s crackdown on unregulated religion — means that the community is once again hidden from history.

3. Lanzhou — the gateway city

The ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews presumably travelled to China along the Silk Roads (note the plural). Heading west out of Kaifeng (i.e. upstream along the Huang He), we pass the much bigger cities of Zhengzhou (6 million people) and Luoyang (2 million). We leave the North China Plain and move on to higher ground. The Huang He itself takes a dramatic turn to the north, but a key tributary keeps going west. It’s there, along the Wei river, that we come to Xi’an, home to 7 million people and the Terracotta Army.

At this point we’re 500km west of Kaifeng, but we’re going to keep going all the way up the Wei and then a bit further until we rejoin the Yellow River. It’s here, about 600km from Xi’an, that we find Lanzhou. This city of 3 million people was the Northern Silk Road gateway to and from the Chinese heartland. It is the anchor point of the Hexi corridor — a string of oasis towns squeezed between the Tibetan plateau and the Gobi desert.

This was the fragile artery through which Chinese goods eventually found their way to the Roman Empire. Today, Lanzhou is a vital node in the Belt and Road Initiative — the massive infrastructure programme designed to extend China’s commercial power across Eurasia.

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4. Tianjin (and Beijing) — at the head of the nation

Instead of continuing westwards into Xinjiang province (home to the persecuted Uighurs), we’ll retrace our steps all the way back to Kaifeng.

Downstream of Kaifeng, the Huang He turns north-east, eventually reaching the Bohai Sea (the innermost part of the Yellow Sea). A little way up the coast we come to the port of Tianjin, one of the biggest cities in the world — with a population of about 15 million. It also has the highest per capita income of any Chinese city. So why isn’t it a household name in the West — up there with Shanghai and Hong Kong?

Well, one only has to look 100 km to the north-west, and Beijing, an even bigger city (a massive 21 million people) and China’s capital, overshadowing its coastal neighbour.

But why did Beijing come to rule the rest of China? Why not somewhere more central, i.e. one of the cities along the coast or the two great rivers? The answer is precisely because Beijing isn’t in the middle of the Middle Kingdom, but at the northern extremity of the North China Plain — on the frontline against nomadic invaders.

Protected by mountains, and later the Great Wall, there’s no doubting Beijing’s strategic significance. In commanding the defence of the heartland (or as serving as a capital for successful invaders), the rulers of Beijing have grown used to a position of absolute authority.

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5. Harbin — the ice city

Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is a Chinese province, ‘outer’ Mongolia an independent country) lies north-west of Beijing. To the north-east is another vast land — Manchuria, where China butts up against Russia and Korea.

The Japanese have also vied for control of this territory. In 1931, they invaded — setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The man they chose as its puppet ruler was Puyi — the deposed last emperor of the China and, as the member of the Qing dynasty, an ethnic Manchu.

Today, the Manchus are a small minority, and Manchuria itself — the focus of industrialisation in the Mao era — has become China’s rust belt, left behind by the frenetic growth of the coastal cities further south.

The biggest city in the region, with five million people, is Harbin. Situated a 1,000 kilometres north-east of Beijing it makes the most of its freezing winters with its spectacular ice sculpture festival.

But even being that far north, Harbin is still 500 kilometres south of the Russian border and the northern end of the Heihe-Tongcheng line (see above).

Did I mention China was big?

6. Qingdao — Germany’s long lost Hong Kong

Returning to Beijing, we should say something about China’s Grand Canal, the world’s longest. It connects the capital to Tianjin (although it  continues all the way down to Hangzhou, a city of 9 million people), and from Tianjin we head down the coast, past the mouth of the Yellow River and to the Shandong peninsula, which sticks out towards Korea. 

At the tip of the peninsula was a forgotten fragment of the British Empire — Weihaiwei. It was leased by Imperial China in 1898 to the British, and finally returned in 1930. The territory even had its own flag — featuring a Union Jack and some mandarin ducks.

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On the south side of the peninsula is the major port city of Qingdao (population 6 million — larger than Berlin or Madrid). Again, not a household name in the West — though you may be familiar with the older spelling of Tsingtao, the name of the beer founded by Germans here in 1903.

It’s a reminder that, for a while, Qingdao was the German Hong Kong — yet another “leased territory” extorted from China by predatory foreigners. At the start of the First World War the city was seized from the Germans by the Japanese with British help. It was returned to China in 1922, but in 1938 the Japanese took it back again.

There is a reason why the Chinese resent outside interference.

7. Wenzhou — China’s Jerusalem

Let’s carry on hundreds of kilometres down the coast. We’ll go past the mouth of the Yangzi, and also wave without stopping to Shanghai and its neighbouring cities (total metropolitan population, 34 million). 

South of the great river, we’re into a different China. The climate is warmer, of course, and wetter; the terrain is hilly, sometimes mountainous; and the main crop is rice not wheat.

There’s a theory that rice farming, because it is so challenging, has shaped a different cultural mindset — interdependent and holistic (as opposed to the North’s rugged individualism). That said, the South also has a strong mercantile tradition. Not having the broad open plains of the North, the coastal cities have tended to look outwards to the wider world.

They’ve also been where the wider world has come to China. For instance, Wenzhou, a city of three million people, almost 500 kilometres south of Shanghai, is known as “China’s Jerusalem” because it is a long-established centre of Chinese Christianity.

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It is also a focal point for Xi Jinping’s crackdown on religion. Though the persecution is not as bad as that suffered by the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, hundreds of churches have been demolished or vandalised. The Communist authorities are especially keen on tearing down crosses.

8. Xiamen — launchpad of the Chinese diaspora

Further down the coast, across the sea from Taiwan, we come to the port city of Xiamen (better known to us as Amoy).

It’s long been a departure point for China’s emigrants. Over the centuries, the Chinese diaspora has drawn heavily from the southern provinces, including Fujian (of which Xiamen is biggest city). It’s why the Hokkien language and culture of Xiamen is spoken in Chinese communities across the world — and especially Taiwan and Singapore.

A quirk of Xiamen’s geography is that Taiwan is almost 300 km away across the Taiwan Strait but also just 2 km away. That’s because the Taiwanese government still controls the nearby Kinmen islands — a strange remnant of a frozen conflict.

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9. The Pearl River delta — capital of the world?

Heading even further down the coast we come to another special territory — Hong Kong. But as special as it is, it’s also part of a bigger urban conglomeration: the cities of the Pearl River delta, among them Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Jiangnan and Macau, slowly growing together into a mega-city of some 60 million people.

United by proximity, they are however divided by politics — Hong Kong and Macau being Special Administrative Regions — and also language. Southern China is a place of great linguistic diversity. Cantonese, Hokkien and other languages of the region are more than mere dialects. In their spoken form, they are mutually unintelligible with Mandarin Chinese.

10. Chongqing and Chengdu — deep China

If we travel 1,000 kilometres north of the Pearl River delta we end up back where we began — in Wuhan, on the banks of the Yangzi. From there we’ll make one final journal — upstream. As we head west, the terrain gets mountainous, but we’re not at the Tibetan plateau yet. Long before that, we pass through the Three Gorges and into the Sichuan basin, a large and fertile lowland region surrounded by mountains on all sides.

It is the breadbasket of China — but also home to two huge industrial cities: Chongqing in the east and Chengdu in the west.

Chongqing is sometimes listed as the world’s biggest city. That’s a bit of a misconception, because its official boundaries encompass an area the size of Austria, including all the smaller cities and towns therein. Even so, the actual urban area of Chongqing is a vast growing metropolis, home to 18 million people.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

Some 400 kilometres onwards, at the far end of the Sichuan basin, we reach Chengdu (population: 12 million). This is la Chine profonde, the national redoubt. In the Second World War, it is where the Chinese government fell back before the advancing Japanese. It was also the last mainland city to fall to the Communists.

And not far from Chengdu, just before the Earth rises up to form the Tibetan plateau, we find one final refuge — the last habitat of the giant panda, and the most fitting place to end this journey.

Different cultures, colours, creeds, classes, languages and identities of every kind: all are included. Except for one group of people who find themselves increasingly excluded from the urban milieu: children.

Further reading

Can you afford parenthood?

By Peter Franklin

It’s a phenomenon explored by Derek Thompson in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

“In high-density cities… no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.”

Consider the statistics for New York:

“Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan.”

Or Washington DC:

“…the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined.”

Or the tech capital of the world:

“San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”

The great global cities are portrayed as places of youth and vibrancy. They certainly attract ambitious, highly educated twenty-somethings – which is why big companies base themselves there: so that they can take their pick of the brightest young minds. This is especially true of the tech sector.

In 2007, it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told a conference that “young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg himself was only 24 at the time and well on the way to global domination – and thus could be excused for thinking such a thing (which, in any case, is correct in some respects).

He’s also reported as saying that “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not have a car. We may not have a family.” In a long-hours working culture, that’s something that adds to their employability – and another reason why top employers love big cities.

The heaving metropolis doesn’t just concentrate bright young things in one place, it also ensures that they can be worked without distraction. The sky-high property prices that put city-centre family homes beyond the reach of most young workers are a feature not a bug. They stop reproduction from getting in the way of productivity.

Further reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Family life isn’t solely about having children of our own, of course. It’s also about continued participation in the families we were born into – and, beyond that, a wider circle of friends and neighbours. To take one’s place in a community, to learn from others so that responsibilities can be handed from one generation to the next, is (or was) part of becoming an adult – as much as getting a job or getting married.

The concentration of young talent in big cities severs these connections too; distance weakens established old family ties just as property prices discourage new ones.

But does this matter? There’s plenty of time in one’s thirties and forties to quit the city and do the whole family and community thing somewhere less frenetic. So why shouldn’t twenty-somethings – excuse me while I vomit – ‘work hard and play hard’?

It’s a neat idea, but collapsing birthrates around the world suggest that many people never make up for lost time. I wonder where the big employers hope to find the next generation of eager recruits if they’re not even being born? Immigration is only a stop-gap because western demographic trends are spreading to developing countries.

There are political consequences too. Derek Thompson describes America’s great divide:

“With its rich blue cities and red rural plains, the U.S. has an economy biased toward high-density areas but an electoral system biased toward low-density areas. The discrepancy has the trappings of a constitutional crisis.  The richest cities have become magnets for redundant masses of young rich liberals, making them electorally impotent.”

Any group of voters (e.g. college educated urban liberals) who concentrate themselves in a few locations are not only likely to lose elections – but also to be shocked when they do. After all, almost everyone they know thinks and votes the way they do – so, how does the ‘other side’ keep winning? It must be some kind of trick!

The sense of bewilderment is accentuated by one of resentment. If the cities are generating most of the money and thus ‘subsidising’ other parts of the country, then suburban and provincial voting preferences are perceived as ingratitude if not outright stupidity.

Of course, if you’re relying on other parts of the country to supply most of the people – it shouldn’t be so surprising if they perceive you as dependent on them.

Thompson sums it all up as a “division of labour”:

“America’s rich cities specialize in the young, rich, and childless; America’s suburbs specialize in parents.”

But while a division of labour may work in a factory – different workers specialising in only one part of the job – it can’t work in a country. Each component community, whether urban, suburban or rural, has to do the whole job of being a community, finding a place for people at every stage of life.

A truly flourishing community is an extended family, joining together the generations. The childless city, however, is something quite different: an extended workplace. For all its diversity, it is fundamentally incomplete.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

That requires a map, but what kind? The infamous Mercator Projection presents a highly distorted view of our planet. Land in the northerly latitudes is massively stretched out – Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Europe and Russia all appear much bigger than they actually are. To get an idea of how distorted a map is, compare the size of Greenland with that of Saudi Arabia. In reality, the two territories are almost identical in area. On a Mercator Projection, however, the cold place appears to be several times bigger than the hot place.

Further Reading

Why doesn't geography get the respect it deserves?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, there’s no way of displaying the surface of a sphere onto a rectangle without distortion. Using a globe instead of map avoids that problem. Suddenly you notice things that most world maps obscure. Africa, for instance is really, really big – twice the size of the Russian Federation (which itself is absurdly large – stretching from the borders of the EU almost all the way to Alaska.)

But even an accurate representation of size and distance is misleading. Population, much more than territory, is what makes somewhere ‘big’. Elie Wiesel once said that “we must see in every person a universe”. In that respect even the smallest human settlement is immeasurably bigger than a vast and empty desert.

It’s worth looking at a map that resizes each country according to its population. Suddenly one sees a new view of the world – dominated, of course, by China and India, while thinly populated Russia and Canada shrink away.

But even this exercise is misleading because it doesn’t account for variations of population density within countries. If it did then London would be as big as Scotland and Wales combined. Furthermore, it’s not just the number of people who count, but the number of interactions between them. That’s why cities tend to be more productive per person than smaller settlements, because proximity facilitates interaction.

Of course, there’s more than one way of overcoming the tyranny of distance. Along the all-important dimension of human experience, transport links shorten and thicken the connections between the people and places at either end.

That’s why one of the most important, but under-reported, stories in the world today is China’s Belt and Road Initiative – a programme of infrastructure investments that spans the entire Eurasian continent plus Africa. Without moving a single border these links are redrawing the real map of the world – not so much by extending China’s reach, but by shrinking the effective distance between it and its ostensibly far-flung partners in global trade and geopolitics.

Further Reading

The jaw-dropping scale of China’s global ambition

By Peter Franklin

The really scary thing is that the Western powers act as if it isn’t happening. It’s an argument made in the New York Times, by Robert D Kaplan.

Europe (the UK included) is now so self-obsessed that we barely noticed that America almost went to war with Iran last month. The US, unlike Europe, has the means to project power around the world, but it uses it foolishly. In the last decade the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq greatly strengthened Iran; and now in this decade confrontation with Iran is strengthening China.

In siding with the Saudis against the Iranians, the Americans think they’re intervening in a regional conflict. What they’ve missed, however, is China’s global strategy.

Using our western categories of ‘Middle East’ and ‘Far East’, we easily think of China as a Pacific power for removed from events around the Persian Gulf. But look at the map: only one country separates China from Iran – Pakistan, a Chinese ally:

“In the southwestern corner of Pakistan, close to the Iranian border, China has completed a state-of-the-art container port at Gwadar, which Beijing hopes will eventually link up with roads, railways and pipelines to western China. And from Gwadar, the Chinese can monitor shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

“In other words, China is already in the Middle East.”

Belt and Road infrastructure across the Central Asian states provides further links between China and Iran. The latter, as the bridge between China’s immediate sphere of influence and the Middle East is therefore of great strategic significance:

“Iran is at the very center of 21st-century geopolitics. It dominates Central Asian trade routes and sits at the hydrocarbon nexus of the Indian Ocean, with a coastline of over 1,500 miles stretching from Iraq to Pakistan. Iran is the key to China’s plans, just as China’s plans are key to Eurasia’s destiny.”

Kaplan says that, together, China and Iran make an “unbeatable combination in Eurasia”.

Iran, however, is not completely in the Chinese camp. For instance it cooperates closely with India – an important counterweight to Chinese power in Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Kaplan warns the US government against its “myopic war-by-choice strategy with Iran” and its obsession with “the Persian Gulf as a small, distinct region”. He argues that the Chinese “see the larger, more fluid geographical picture” and notes America’s lack of a “big idea” to provide any positive competition.

Further Reading

Europe no longer exists – our future is Eurasian

By Peter Franklin

As to what that big idea might be, I don’t see the US launching its own Belt and Road Initiative. It has enough trouble updating its own infrastructure, let alone anyone else’s.

A more promising avenue would be real ambition on the development of low carbon, decentralised energy and other green technologies. To reduce competition for unevenly distributed resources like fossil fuels and water would go a long way to defusing the ‘great games’ of the 21st century.

Among the vast, awful canon of positive-thinking, self-help slogans and truisms, there is a quote attributed to Ella Fitzgerald: “It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.”

That sounds nice, but it’s not really true, especially in Britain. Where you come from has a huge influence over where you end up, physically and economically. Grow up poor in the wrong place and you’re not just more likely to live poor and die poor – you’ll die sooner too. People in the poorest places die a decade or more before people in rich places.

The unusually big and largely unjustifiable differences between places in the UK should be a much bigger part of the debate about inequality. Geography matters as least as much as economics, and matters an awful lot more than a lot of people in politics have acknowledged during the last couple of decades.

Indeed, I suspect that if more people in the Westminster village (I am one of them) had paid a bit more attention to economic geography and the people who study it, we’d have been a bit less surprised by the events of the last few years.

Let’s start at the beginning, with education. Where you grow up matters a lot to whether you acquire the basic skills needed to do anything but the worst-paid, least stable work.

A couple of years ago, the Social Market Foundation pointed out that there are significant differences between 16-year-olds across England. In 2016, over 60% of pupils in London achieved five good GCSEs including English and Maths. In the West and East Midlands, the figure was just 55%.

Those differences carry out through the education system. In 2017, almost 42% of 18-year-olds in London accepted a university place. In the south-west, the figure was less than 29% and Scotland managed only 26%.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

This pattern produces some extreme, eye-catching examples. I’m generally not a fan of using Oxbridge entry as a proxy for social mobility but sometimes the numbers speak volumes. In 2016, the number of children from the lowest-income homes from the north-east of England, Yorkshire and the Humber who got into Oxford or Cambridge was one. Yes, one.

So what sort of economy awaits the kids who leave school in the poorer parts of the UK? A dismal one.

Here, the best measure to look at is labour productivity, a count of how much valuable stuff, physical or otherwise, is produced by an hour of a person’s work. This, properly known as Gross Value Added, is arguably the most important data in British economics or politics, since it’s what helps to determine how much workers are paid. If it doesn’t rise, nor do wages. And we know how the politics of that play out.

At the level of big regions, the disparities in GVA per hour are stunning. Workers in London are 33% more productive than the UK average.

Measured in terms of everyday lives, these differences are striking. Average household incomes today in the Midlands, the north and Wales are roughly equivalent to household income in the South East during the 1990s. Large parts of the country are economically decades behind the richest places.

This leads to a vicious circle of under-capacity. Because much of England is short of high-skilled, high-paid jobs, people from those places with the skills to do such jobs have to move away to get them. And without them, underperforming places struggle to develop the businesses and productivity rates that would generate those jobs locally.

Maria Abreu, a Cambridge economist and part of the ESRC’s excellent Productivity Insights Network came to the SMF last year and produced a truly eye-opening figure. Six months after graduating, a quarter of all English graduates in work are working in London. A quarter.

Here, a note on London is needed. Quite a lot of political conversation about regional inequality plays into the “rich London, poor provinces” narrative. And at a superficial level, that’s fair enough: Londoners, in aggregate, earn more than people elsewhere, in aggregate.

Suggested reading

The rebirth of Liverpool

By Sam Jordison

But they also spend more, especially on housing. And more importantly, they, like everyone else, don’t live in aggregate but as individuals. And a lot of individuals in London are poor: Trust for London calculates the capital’s poverty rate at 27%.

Yes, London as a whole is hugely wealthy, but Londoners are still more likely to be unemployed than people in north-west England, Yorkshire or Scotland. Even when they’ve got jobs, the typical London worker is actually worse off than the typical Brit. Once the capital’s enormous housing costs are met, London’s above-average salaries deliver below-average disposable incomes.

At the bottom of the scale, things are truly tough. Peabody, a big housing association, last year found that four in ten Peabody residents were cutting back when they buy food. More than one in ten were skipping meals to save money.

Here, a question should be asked: how unusual is this? Don’t all developed economies have big rich cities and poorer peripheries?

This is a relatively fraught area of analysis, but I’m reluctant to dispute the verdict of Professor Philip McCann. He’s a University of Sheffield professor, joint head of that Productivity Insights Network and one of the world’s most eminent scholars of economic geography.

He’s also high on my list of academics who people in politics and media really should listen to more. Paula Surridge, who studies public opinion at Bristol University is another. And he says that yes, interregional inequality in the UK is very high by international standards.

He also challenges the recent popular political story about “towns” and their plight:

“There are few, if any, major gaps in prosperity between urban and rural areas, or between cities and towns. Contrary to some of today’s popular narratives, the UK gaps between cities and towns and urban and rural areas are actually small by international standards.”

He adds: “In other words, the real geographical inequalities and imbalances within the UK are between regions; they are not between cities and towns or between urban areas and rural areas, and by international standards UK interregional inequality is very high.”

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

What do we do about all this? There are a dozen policy areas that deserve more thought and attention. An even more active industrial strategy, regional devolution and much, much better transport connections should all be high on the political agenda for Brexit Britain, but most are largely ignored by a Westminster class that writes such things off as “too complicated” to just “boring”.

In a more sensible political realm, terms like “agglomeration effect” would be seen as commonplace, not abstract jargon, and people like Tom Forth would be setting the policy agenda.

After all, who wants to talk about bus timetables and bypasses when you could debate sovereignty or free trade, or announce big, sexy projects like HS2? It’s an open secret that some people involved in national politics got involved in national politics to get away from local politics, which involves a lot of talking about bus timetables and bypasses. And quite a lot of the people at the very top of national politics began their political careers in Parliament, never bothering with local government.

Among the less obvious responses to regional inequality, I’d point to education and the need to get the best teachers (and more educational resources) into the poorest places, to ensure that kids there at least start life with basic skills. That should start with coastal towns.

Hopefully, most people now understand that Britain’s coastal towns are among our most deprived, unfortunate places. But even if you know the story, a glance at the figures can still shock.

Five of the ten local authorities in Great Britain with the lowest average employee pay are in coastal communities. Ten of the 20 local authorities in England & Wales with the highest proportion of individuals in poor health are coastal communities.

These are places desperately in need of new industry, better transport links and infrastructure, but those things take time. More immediately, they need more and better public service professionals to deliver more and better education and healthcare. If that means the State paying better teachers much more to settle in poor places, helping them buy property there or wiping out student debt for people who take jobs there, so be it.

Suggested reading

Can Britain ever be united again?

By Polly Mackenzie

Meanwhile, Dr Abreu’s work also strongly argues for much more focus on basic skills among the existing adult population. The blunt truth is that Britain, home of many of the world’s best universities, is also home of far too many people who struggle with basic numeracy and literacy.

That’s troubling enough, but worse is that they tend to be working in jobs that are at greatest risk of being lost to automation.

This ONS map shows why the UK urgently needs a much bigger, better offer on adult education and lifelong learning, targeted on lowest-skill workers in low-income areas. Because without significant change, technological progress will only widen the UK’s inequality of economic geography.

In short, Britain has a real and unusual problem with regional inequality. A problem that could get worse.

To read the rest of the Riven Britain series, click here.

“I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and political cohesion. I accept that I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, that I can no longer sit for this party.”

To advocates of a ‘hard’ Brexit or indeed no Brexit, any compromise on the issue (including the Prime Ministers deal) would leave Britain ‘half-in and half-out’ of the European Union. Technically, they’re wrong – a country is either a member of the European Union or it isn’t; but leaving that aside, would being half-in, half-out be such a terrible thing?

History is full of compromises, some of them permanent, some which collapse, and others which can be seen, in retrospect, as a staging post to something else. Here are 10 of the most interesting examples.

Further reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

1. The Crown Dependencies

There are three ‘Crown Dependencies’ – the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (which together form the Channel Islands) and the Isle of Man.

Though the three territories are included within the British isles and their inhabitants are British citizens, they are not part of Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland and Wales) nor are they part of the United Kingdom (i.e. Great Britain and Northern Ireland). The UK is responsible for their defence and foreign policy, but otherwise they are direct dependencies of the Crown, with their own legislatures and legal systems – in fact the Bailiwick of Guernsey has three legislatures (one for Guernsey itself, one for Alderney and one for Sark). So, I hope that’s all perfectly clear.

The Crown Dependencies inhabit a half-way house between sovereignty and non-sovereignty. It obviously suits them well. They also inhabit another half-way house – Jersey, Guernsey and Man are not part of the EU but are part of the Customs Union. Looks like the UK might be joining them.

Further reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

2. The Irish Free State

Next up is the most commonly cited ‘precedent’ for a compromise Brexit. It’s not an especially happy one, at least not in its early stages.

After years of struggle, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 granted independence to Ireland. Or did it? The Treaty was full of compromises – not least the fact that Northern Ireland was granted the power to opt out and remain in union with Great Britain, which of course it did. Furthermore, the Free State was still part of the British Commonwealth. George V remained king in Ireland and Irish legislators were required to swear fidelity to him as part of the deeply divisive Oath of Allegiance.

Even Irish supporters of the Treaty called it “the freedom to achieve freedom”. For opponents of the Treaty this was not enough and Civil War broke out in 1922. The pro-treaty side (which became Fine Gael) won the war, but the largest part of the anti-treaty side won the peace – emerging as Fianna Fail (Ireland’s dominant party from 1932 to 2011).

Ironically, it was the party’s founder Eamon de Valera who used “the freedom to achieve freedom” – leading Ireland to full independence in 1937.

Further reading

Brexit will accelerate the inevitable in Ireland

By Giles Fraser

3. The Dominions

Independence came to America in 1776; but what if the American revolution had never happened? What if the American subjects of King George Ill had been granted representation in return for their taxation? Would we have the Honourable Members for Boston Central and Manhattan Upper Westside sitting in the House of Commons? Unlikely. Rather self-governance would have evolved as it did in America’s northern neighbour. In 1867, Canada was granted Dominion status – though quite what that meant took decades to work out.

By 1907 Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Newfoundland – were all recognised as Dominions i.e. self-governing states within the British Empire. The date for full Canadian independence is usually given as 1931, but some powers were not transferred from Westminster until 1982! It was a similar story with slightly different dates in Australia and New Zealand too. The outlier was Newfoundland, which had its own Dominion status separate to that of Canada. In the 1930s, however, its government ran out of money – and self-governance collapsed. The British stepped in for a while until 1949, when Newfoundland became the tenth Canadian province.

So, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, independence was evolutionary not revolutionary. I’ll leave you to decide whether America would have been better off following the same path.

Further reading

How Cambridge flunked the Peterson test

By Douglas Murray

4. Françafrique

Ok, enough about les Anglos for now. Let’s look at the decolonisation of another European empire – the French one in Africa. Whereas the British disengaged from sub-Saharan Africa with barely a backward glance, the French had trouble letting go.

Despite the formal independence of the successor nations, Paris remained deeply involved in their internal affairs – for instance, there were 19 military interventions between 1962 and 1995. The term Françafrique was originally a positive one, but became a byword for an uncomfortably close and murky web of political and business relationships. A notable episode was the so-called ‘Diamonds Affair’ when the French President, Valery Giscard d’ Estaing was accused of having received a gift of diamonds from the Bokassa I, the self-styled Emperor of Central Africa (in reality, a brutal and deranged dictator). Giscard vigorously insisted he’d done nothing wrong, but the allegations contributed to his electoral defeat in 1981. It didn’t help that little diamond stickers kept appearing over his eyes on election posters across the country.

It’s not that France is alone in having behaved badly in the developing world. But in the post-war period, there’s been nothing else quite like Françafrique, which encompassed over 20 African countries. What was the point of this postcolonial empire? Francois Mitterrand, who defeated Giscard in 1981 had this to say in 1957: “without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”.

Complete rubbish, of course – and, now that we are in the 21st century, it’s obvious Françafrique is not the force it used to be, for either France or its former colonies. That’s for the best, but let’s hope that the unhealthy neo-colonial relationship isn’t replaced by an even worse one with China.

Further reading

How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

5. Finland

Finland knows all about half-way houses. In 1917, it escaped the Russian Empire only to be repeatedly invaded by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The Russians kept attacking because the heroic Finns kept fighting back. By the end of the War, Stalin had imposed his rule over half of Europe and some nations were absorbed into the USSR. Finland was unique among Russia’s neighbours in remaining free. There was a price, however: territorial losses, reparations and a position of enforced neutrality.

Though postwar Finland wasn’t on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn’t really on the western side either. Political scientists coined the word ‘Finlandisation‘ to describe the process by which a large country strongly influences a smaller neighbour while leaving it formally independent. That’s somewhat unfair on Finland, which did what it had to do to maximise its room for manoeuvre. In time, Finland learned how to benefit from its obligatory cooperation with the Soviets – developing close economic ties while remaining sufficiently capitalist to profit from them.

Before the war, the Estonians were richer than their Finnish cousins across the Baltic Sea. But Estonia was one of the nations annexed by the USSR. By the end of the Cold War, when the Estonians regained their independence, it was clear that they’d fallen a long way behind their once poor relations.

Whatever the sacrifices and compromises, the freedom to be yourself is usually worth it.

Further reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

6. Taiwan

In one way, Taiwan’s situation resembles post-war Finland: it’s a small capitalist democracy next to a giant communist neighbour. Of course, the parallels are not exact. Most importantly, Taiwan is fundamentally Chinese. Indeed, the official name of the Taiwanese state is the Republic of China (RoC)

Up until 1971, it was the RoC government in Taipei (the Taiwanese capital) that controlled China’s seat in the United Nations, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing. While both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China – mainland and islands – the rest of the world had to recognise the reality that it was the communist PRC that controlled almost all the land and people.

The Republic of China therefore languishes in diplomatic isolation, unrecognised by most countries despite the obvious existence of the Taiwanese state. It’s a deeply strange situation and yet this non-nation nation has prospered. It transitioned to democracy in the 1980s and has a per capita GDP of about $25,000 – that of the PRC is around the $10,000 mark, despite the years of rapid growth.

Though the PRC continues to regard Taiwan as a rebel province, and responds to the pro-independence movement with threats of invasion, it has also moved to deepen trading relationships and other forms of cooperation. Even more than Hong Kong, Taiwan provides a living model of what a democratic, free market China would look like. It would take the most blinkered Beijing ideologue not to see the interest in that.

It would be nice if the EU saw the benefit of an island neighbour free to do things differently.

Further reading

To save democracy, we must disrupt it

By Carl Miller

7. Singapore

The British view of Singapore’s history is full of gaps. We recall the colonial past; commemorate the wartime occupation; and admire the hyper-modernity of the present. However, that leaves out a lot – not least the tumult of the post-war years.

Today, Singapore may be the very image of an orderly society, but in the 1950s and early 60s, Singapore was teetering between multiple opposing forces: between the British Empire and the independence movement; communism and capitalism; and, most significantly, between union and disunion with Malaya/Malaysia.

Look at Singapore on a map. See how small and vulnerable it looks – a tiny island, barely separate from the Malay Peninsula. It’s easy to understand why Singapore’s leaders chose semi-autonomy within the Malaysian federation as a path to independence (achieved in 1963). However, the ethnic, religious and political divides between Singapore and rest of Malaysia proved unbridgeable. Feeling threatened by Singapore’s economic power, Malaysia’s leaders moved to expel the island from the federation. And thus in 1965, Singapore found itself independent and alone – a city state without a hinterland.

One half-way house having collapsed, Singapore built another one – a system of government somewhere between a liberal democracy and a benign(ish) autocracy. That’s true of both the political and economic system, because contrary to what you might have heard, Singapore is not a capitalist free-for-all. A small state and low taxes is balanced against strict government control of the land supply and massive state-led investment programmes.

There’s no such thing as a ‘Singapore model’ for other countries to follow. The city state’s singular history and geography means that it is a model for nowhere else but itself. However, what Singapore’s story does show is that a hard-working nation, with a strong sense of identity and a competent government can overcome isolation, division and hostility to succeed in a competitive world.

Further reading

Singapore shows there’s more than one way of doing capitalism

By Peter Franklin

8. The mixed economy

The Crown Territories, Ireland, the Dominions, Françafrique, Finland, Taiwan and Singapore: seven case studies in the complex relationship between sovereignty and reality. There are many others, but I’m going to conclude with three non-territorial examples of a historic compromise. First of all, in economics.

The 20th century was a fierce and often violent contest of ideas, not least between the free market and the centrally-planned, state-led economy. But in nation after nation, the eventual outcome was a half-way house between capitalism and socialism.

The social democracies of Scandinavia were once said to have pioneered the ‘mixed economy’, but the truth is that all industrial democracies are mixed economies. The precise division of the cake between the state and the market varies between nations and historical eras, but there is no example of either the public or private sector being reduced to insignificance.

The same is increasingly true of the developed and developing non-democracies. The only places left on the planet with an economically all-powerful state are pitiously poor – something they have in common with the only places on the planet where the state is powerless.

Ideological purity has its limits.

Further reading

Has a Davos backlash begun?

By Nomi Prins

9. The Church of England

If the 20th Century was a contest between economic ideas, the 16th and 17th century was all about religion – in particular the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism.

In different parts of Europe there were different outcomes – and one of the most interesting was in England. Rather than choose between the rival forms of Christianity, the English created a mash-up of the two and called it the Church of England.

That, of course, is a huge over-simplification and overlooks the persecution of Catholics and dissenting Protestants – not to mention the long years of conflict, war and atrocity in England, Scotland and Ireland. And yet the middle way of Anglicanism came to provide a model of co-existence: a roof under which High Church and Low Church, conservatives and liberals, worked out a way to live with one another.

That this became true of the most important spiritual institution in what would become the world’s most powerful nation, is surely not without wider significance.

Further reading

We've got Pascal all wrong

By Graham Tomlin

10. Theoretical physics

From religion, to science – and, specifically, the foundational theories of modern physics.

On the one hand we have General Relativity, which describes the fundamental forces of reality at the scale of planets, stars, galaxies and ultimately the whole universe. On the other, there is Quantum field theory, which does the same, but at the opposite end of the scale – atoms, subatomic particles and the general weirdness of the very small. Both theories are theories in the proper scientific sense, i.e. they’re not just hypothetical, they have real predictive power confirmed by experimental observation.

However, despite the evidence that backs both of them up, there’s a fundamental problem: they contradict one another. The mathematics by which we can explain the very big and the very small cannot be combined into a single theoretical framework. We’ve proved them both and yet they disprove one another. Awkward.

Many of the most brilliant minds of the age have devoted their careers to finding a Theory of Everything that can reconcile Relativity with the quantum stuff. So far, they’ve failed. One might reasonably wonder whether they’ll ever succeed; or whether they even need to. As long as they stay in their lane, the apparently irreconcilable theories both work – surely, the ultimate in agreeing to disagree.

Perhaps we just need to accept that there’s a fundamental contradiction woven into the fabric of creation. If nothing else, it puts our disagreements over Brexit into perspective.

Further reading

Have our scientists run out of steam?

By Peter Franklin

The book’s full title – Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How We Heal – speaks to its grand ambition. Sasse argues that the whirling cesspool of American politics need not be so ugly and futile, that we can recover our sense of decency and our national pride. It’s an appealing message, but only Sasse’s biggest fans will be satisfied by this book. Its diagnosis of our ills is superficial and one-sided; its proposed solutions are feeble. Were it a book from nearly anyone else, its lightness would be laughable.

But Sasse is not anyone else; he may seek to stand for President in 2020 and, now 46, will still be young enough to run four years later. Let’s wade into the book’s shallow pools, therefore, to see why he falls so short. We will also find nuggets of wisdom there that may, in time, grow into a mature understanding of America’s maladies and help him fulfill his substantial promise.

Further reading

What does America want?

By Henry Olsen

Them is really two books. The first of these (I’ll consider the second in my next article), addresses the purported decline in America’s sense of community, which Sasse blames for both a decline in life expectancy and individual happiness. He says this isolation, this loss of community, simply transfers our natural needs for meaning and belonging to a national, political stage, where we are easily manipulated by an unscrupulous but highly profitable ‘politainment’ industry.

Community is at the heart of Them. As Sasse tells it, America was once filled with towns like the one he grew up in, Fremont, Nebraska. Children grew up under the watchful eyes of a league of parents. The Friday night football games at the local high school were where “everyone showed up”, where “there were no rich and poor – there were only Fremont Tigers”. In these “tight-knit places so many of us had called home”, “the town was in it together”.

Today those places, according to Sasse, either don’t exist or are quickly fading away. Parents are not “keeping an eye out on the roving bands of kids, making sure they aren’t up to no good. No longer is the town packing the stands for the game.” The result is loneliness, and loneliness is tearing America apart.

People used to have one primary community for all of their lives. Sasse’s own family lived in Fremont for four generations; his maternal grandfather had carved the altarpiece that is still used by the local cemetery. These days, though, economic opportunity draws people into the vortex of the city and the suburb.

Further reading

America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Henry Olsen

Sasse cites a dizzying blizzard of social science to support his claims, along with references to the work of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam (men who also grew up in small, Midwestern towns and also noted a decline in community cohesiveness). He fails to note, though, that Putnam’s most important work dates from the 1990s, chronicling decline in the period Sasse (who graduated high school in 1990) recalled so fondly.

Ambitious people like Sasse, though, become nomads. Sasse paid taxes in a dozen states in the first decade of his marriage. The result of this rootlessness: no one knows each other and everyone retreats into their own, social media-fuelled echo chamber, replacing real attachments with virtual ones.

Sasse argues that the very survival of our republic and our happiness as individuals is at stake. With such a challenge, what could the remedy possibly be? Not what you’d think. Sasse is one politician who seems to genuinely hate politics. His opening chapter is entitled “More Politics Won’t Fix This”.

And so we come to his wholly unsatisfactory recommendation. He says challenges which are global in nature can only be addressed by tiny individual steps. The ones he proposes – limiting internet screen time; spending time in your community; making regular time to meet old friends – are not going to make Fremont great again.

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

They might, at a push, reinvigorate community on the margins, but they’d take an awful lot longer to change mass behaviour. It’s like Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War saying that slavery is an evil that is ripping America apart, and then saying that rather than ban slavery in the territories it’s important to follow St Paul and be nicer to the slaves. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt.

Sasse’s diagnosis is also seriously flawed. Even if we accept his glowing description of 1980s Fremont, the fact is that most Americans stopped living in these places decades ago. The explosive growth of the automobile dependent suburb, subsidised by the federal government through its housing and transportation policies, meant that by 1970, 70% of America’s population lived in a metropolitan area. By 1990, the year Sasse graduated from high school, that share had risen to 77%. In short, Fremont’s Dodge County, which remains a non-metro area, has long been a throwback to America’s distant past.

Life in a metropolitan area is defined by the separation of work, life, and play. You work in one place, drive or take public transit to another to shop, go to yet another place to worship, and none of these places needs be within a mile of your home. You share these different experiences with different people in each place, and these people also share their lives with different people in each place. You may not know any of your neighbours, but that does not mean you do not know plenty of people or that you do not form friendships that matter with them. It’s just that the human interactions you do have are by choice rather than by accident and are unbounded by geography.

Further reading

The ugly truth behind Amazon's beauty contest

By Ian Birrell

A serious attempt to return to the geographically-bounded communities that Sasse remembers would mean tackling this separation head on, forcibly rebundling them – a gargantuan undertaking, and one unlikely to succeed. Maybe America could do something like Britain does: create mandatory green space between discrete towns, to nudge people into identifying with a small area and thus subtly encouraging the informal interactions upon which genuine community depends. Doing this now, however, would leave America’s vast suburbs largely in place, committing tens of millions of people to the allegedly inferior life there.

American politicians who propose limiting the growth of cities are almost always found on the Left – and are criticised by those on the Right for sacrificing consumer preference and cheaper housing on the altar of social planning. If the community deficit is as serious as Sasse proposes, perhaps it’s a sacrifice worth paying. But given Sasse cannot bring himself to consider limiting of the size of cities, perhaps this isn’t quite the problem he makes it out to be.

That’s because his real aim is not in recreating community; he aims to heal America’s political divide. Sasse implicitly acknowledges that in his youth Americans did not hate each other because of politics. Yet most Americans did not live in tight-knit communities during this time. Something else must have happened to bring about the intense vitriol and anger that makes Sasse and millions like him despair.

Further reading

And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

We can begin to see what that might be by looking at what’s missing from Sasse’s own description of Fremont. Fremont High and its Friday night games looms large in his retelling, the place where “everyone” went. But it turns out Fremont High was not the only high school in town. Archbishop Bergan served many of the town’s Catholics and fielded their own sports teams. Indeed, despite their tiny size their basketball team won the Nebraska state championship during Sasse’s freshman year, something that a self-described “gym rat” who spent “enough hours there that it came to feel like an extension” of his home was surely aware of. Everyone, it turns out, does not mean everyone.

People like Sasse who extol tight-knit communities almost always miss those on the margins who don’t quite fit in. Possibly because these people generally avoid outing themselves. They’ll show up at mandatory events like pep rallies and cheer the obligatory cheers, and then go back to their quiet closeted lives where they can carve out a space of dignity far from the maddening crowd.

If they are lucky, like the kids at Archbishop Bergan, they can carve out their own space to establish their own community. If they are not, like countless outsiders, punks, theatre kids, and anyone else who has ever found themselves on the margins of high school, they cling to the shadows and ensure they remain unseen.

Further reading

Trumpism: America's new religion

By Peter Franklin

America was once a nation of communities dominated by people of faith like Sasse. Coincidentally, Sasse’s life spans the period when this group passed from a majority to a distinct minority. This, not the supposed decline in community, might have something to do with the change in the tone of American politics since Sasse’s youth.

There’s an old medieval German expression that’s relevant here: “Stadtluft macht frei” – city air makes one free. Under German feudal law, a serf who could escape to a city and remain there undetected for a year and a day was freed of his obligations and became a freeman. Cities and their modern suburban equivalents have always been havens for those who don’t care to fit into tight communities, for the people who want to be free.

Visit Americas cities and suburbs and you will find all those people who want to be free from old-time community – career women, ethnic minorities, non-Christians of all stripes, LGBT people. Analyse America’s political divide and you will find the cities and suburbs on one side and the rural and small towns on the other.

Further reading

How long can Trump hang on to the evangelicals?

By Francis Fitzgerald

Scratch the surface of any angry debate, such as the one surrounding Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and you will find partisans on both sides of this divide, each convinced that the other means to force them into the shadows.

This divide between those who reject traditional American community and those who revere it is at the heart of the bitterness that typifies today’s politics. Sasse, as we will see in the second part of this review, is not wholly unaware of this. Feckless paeans to a fading communitarian past will not heal our divide, but in parts Sasse is on to something which, properly developed, might.

But all of that is as nothing compared to Amazon’s latest achievement, which is bringing unity to America’s fractured political landscape. Leftwingers like Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rightwingers like Tucker Carlson of Fox News now speak as one… against Amazon.

Indeed, an extraordinary range of American publications from the socialist Jacobin magazine to the centrist Atlantic through to the conservative National Review have published pieces lambasting the company. The focus of this widespread rage is something that might seem relatively innocuous – a decision over where to site the company’s second headquarters (the first is in Seattle). Compared to all the other controversies that Amazon is embroiled in, the acquisition of some extra office space might seem an odd thing to get so exercised about.

Suggested reading

Cheap consumer goods come with a high human price tag

By James Bloodworth

However, there was an awful lot at stake: 50,000 new jobs and a $5 billion investment in new construction: a huge prize for a big city; the promise of complete transformation for a smaller one.

Which is why a grand total of 238 cities (including some in Canada and Mexico) entered the competition to be chosen. This was narrowed down to a shortlist of 20 cities in January, with the final result announced earlier this month (of which, more later). The whole process was distinctly reminiscent of the competition between cities to host the Olympic Games.

Unfortunately, for Amazon, its quest to find a second home has become a symbol of corporate welfare. That’s because the company wasn’t just looking for the best possible location, it was also angling for incentives.

It is estimated that the various levels of American local government (including state governments) spend between $45 and $90 billion every year enticing businesses to invest in their states and communities (or to not move existing investments elsewhere). The sweeteners take many forms from tax breaks to targeted infrastructure investments (though what counts as a special favour and what is something that the state or city would have done anyway is not always clear). The justification is that the locality will receive much more in return once the corporate welfare recipient moves in and starts creating jobs, tax revenues and reasons for other businesses to move in. From a nationwide perspective this amounts to a system of subsidies for businesses big enough to demand them, but from the narrow perspective of the locality, it can look like a good deal.

Therefore, Amazon wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary… for corporate America. But if they thought that the spectacle of a trillion dollar company touring the country soliciting favours from investment-hungry cities would look good, they were mistaken.

Suggested reading

The traitors and thieves of Silicon Valley

By Jonathan Tepper

The secrecy surrounding the bidding process didn’t help. One could argue that this is just how business is done – with Amazon expecting no more confidentiality from its prospective public sector partners than it would from the private sector. However, government, whether national or local, is not just another client/supplier, it is a democratic institution. While it isn’t necessary to give a running commentary on every twist and turn in a negotiation, the people of a community can’t be frozen out altogether – not when the deal is as consequential as that on offer from Amazon. Citizens need to be treated with at least as much respect as shareholders – in fact, rather more, because they not only ‘own’ but also legimitise the government side of the deal.

*

All of these concerns and others were bubbling away during the 14-month competition, but it was the final result that blew the lid on public anger.

It wasn’t that most of the cities making the bid were doomed to be disappointed. After all, with one new HQ there could only be one winner – something the 238 bidding cities will have been aware of going into the process. As it turned out, there were two winners, because Amazon decided to split its second HQ between two locations. But rather than lessening the disappointment the joint award accentuated it. That’s because neither winner was a city that really needed the break; both winners were located along the BosWash corridor – the mighty connurbation that runs from Boston to Washington. Hopes that Amazon might establish an HQ somewhere in heartland America – helping to bridge the divide between the coastal cities and flyover country were dashed.[2. There will, however, be a $230 million “Operations Centre of Excellence” in Nashville, Tennessee]

Suggested reading

What does America want?

By Henry Olsen

One of the winners was New York – always a strong contender given its global profile. But the other winner was, if anything, of greater geographical significance. Arlington County, Virginia cannot be described as heartland America. It’s not even heartland Virginia – but rather in the western suburbs of Washington. It is therefore well within the infamous ‘Beltway‘ – seen by much of America as the home of an out-of-touch political elite (though it’s also home to a great deal of poverty). The specific location is a business district of superblocks called Crystal City. Despite the name, it is not the most sparkling of places – but it is right next door to Reagan National airport. It’s also got metro stations, is just across the bridge from the Capitol and handy for the Pentagon (where Amazon has business). Jeff Bezos also happens to own the Washington Post.

So despite a high profile competition in which cities across and beyond the nation were considered, the winners were America’s biggest city and its capital city. A big-ticket investment decision that might have helped disperse the concentration of economic power in America, has confirmed it instead.

In the light of the outcome, Amazon is open to accusations of having staged the competition as a publicity stunt. Though to be fair, if it had opted for New York and Washington without the competition, it would have been accused of not giving the rest of America a chance.

Other critics see the competition as a clever way of obtaining commercially useful information about the expansion plans of candidate cities – handy when you’re in the business of building a nationwide distribution network (not to mention a chain of automated retail outlets). That said, obtaining such information is what major developers are pretty good at anyway.

Suggested reading

Who will take on the undeserving rich?

By Deborah Hargreaves

The fiercest aspect of the backlash centres on the corporate welfare aspect of the final decision. Despite picking the most ‘Amazon-ready’ locations, the company has nevertheless secured a reported $2.2 billion of additional inducements. Even the most reliable defenders of corporate America have had enough. In an editorial entitled ‘Amazon’s Golden Fleecing’, the Wall Street Journal had this to say:

“We rarely agree with socialist Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s right to call billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon “extremely concerning.” These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst.”

Fox News host, Tucker Carlson also weighed in: “the richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?”

And yet, some of the rival locations were offering a lot more than that. Amazon literally turned down billions of dollars so that it could locate in New York and Washington. What clearer proof could there be of the pulling power of a fortunate few locations over everywhere else.

The fact that this involves Amazon only makes it worse. This is a company with a physical footprint of facilities and employees across America. With its expertise in cloud computing services, logistics and distribution, there can be few organisations better positioned to overcome the tyranny of distance. If anyone could have made a non-obvious location work, it was Amazon.

*

The ‘Amazon moat‘ is not a water feature planned for either of its new headquarters, but a reference to the company’s well-defended position in the marketplace. Its operational infrastructure from websites to warehouses is so extensive and interconnected as to make it all-but-impossible for a serious competitor to emerge. Without the Amazon’s economics of scale (and accumulated expertise), it’s very hard for rivals to compete on price across such a range of goods and services – and if they can’t do that they can’t grow big enough or last long enough to match Amazon’s heft.

Suggested reading

What does the 'charging elephant' - also known as Amazon - want? Only everything (and beware of getting in its way)

By Peter Franklin

‘Superstar cities’ like New York and Washington also have their metaphorical moats: the connections, attractions, size and diversity that smaller and/or poorer places cannot compete with. Unlike a company, a city is limited in the scope of its geographical expansion. A city cannot grow ever onwards across the world. What it can do, however, is bring the world to the city. Companies are nothing without people and are, therefore, drawn inexorably to the places that have the people it needs, which in turn attracts more people and, of course, their money.

So is that it, then? Are nations like America doomed to a circular process of growing geographical inequality? A favoured few mega-cities monopolising a favoured few mega-corporations?

A country can’t afford to give up on its smaller cities (or to ignore the interests of its smaller businesses). However, changing the dynamics of economic concentration will require concerted action on the part of central and local government. Here are five things they should be getting on with now:

A crackdown on corporate welfare. It should be against the law to offer inducements to one business that aren’t available to all businesses – especially when it comes to their treatment in the tax system.

A transparent city planning system. All information about governmental land-use and infrastructure investment decisions should be open source – with no privileged access for powerful interests. Maximising the involvement of local citizens in key planning decisions requires radical openness anyway.

Giving communities more control over their land. One of the reasons why Crystal City was so attractive to Amazon is that much of the relevant land was owned by one developer – greatly simplifying matters for a major investment. Instead of offering tax breaks and the like, local government would be much better engaged in entrepreneurially obtaining and preparing land for development.

Rethinking the way the state allocates capital spending – which should be counter-geographical as well as counter-cyclical. Investing to maximise returns on the basis of conventional assumptions means that the same places will get most of the public investment as well as the private investment. It would also help not to include rent in GDP calculations, which counts the inflation of land values in overheated property markets as ‘growth’.

Suggested reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

Introducing a land value tax. The concentration of development in a few favoured locations sends rental values soaring. Not only should this bonanza for landlords not be counted as growth, it should also be properly taxed. In the long-term, this would help shift investment out of economically unproductive, socially useless speculation. In the shorter-term, it would raise revenues that could be invested locally in social housing and community land trusts – and nationally in boosting the potential of smaller cities.

Finally a word of warning: dominant cities don’t stay that way forever – and neither do dominant companies. The tendency towards economic concentration is driven by factors that shift over time. Taking active steps to spread the productive potential of a nation isn’t just a matter of maintaining social cohesion, still less is it an act of ‘charity’. Rather, it is the policy of keeping options open in a world where change is inevitable.

Or, to put it more succinctly, don’t put your eggs all in one basket – Amazon baskets included.

Geography is to the academic disciplines what sculpture is to the fine arts – something you trip over while gazing elsewhere.

Above all, the subject suffers by comparison to history. How many TV geographers can you name? When did you last hear someone solemnly insist that we must learn the lessons of geography? Who has ever spoken of feeling the hand of geography upon their shoulder?

Further reading

TV can't ignore flyover country – but nor can it look it in the eye

By Peter Franklin

One might assume that the digital age has handed a further blow to the discipline. If electronic communication has overthrown the tyranny of distance, then, surely, geography matters less than ever?

Not a bit of it. In fact, our online activities are revealing just how relevant it still is. That much is made clear in a brilliant feature for the New York Times by Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui :

“In the millions of ties on Facebook that connect relatives, co-workers, classmates and friends, Americans are far more likely to know people nearby than in distant communities that share their politics or mirror their demographics. The dominant picture in data analyzed by economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and New York University is not that like-minded places are linked; rather, people in counties close to one another are.”

The data was incorporated into an interactive ‘heat map’ of America. Users can choose any particular US county, and see the rest of the map coloured according to the likelihood of local people having a Facebook connection with the residents of the reference county:

“Even in Washington, D.C., nearly half of friendship links extend to people who live within 100 miles. Nationwide, in the average county, 63 percent of friendship links are that close, probably reflecting that many people on Facebook know one another through real-world sites like grade schools, colleges and offices. Other research shows that these sites tend to be close to home: The typical American lives just 18 miles from his or her mother. The typical student enrolls in college less than 15 miles from home.”

Though technology allows us to communicate with complete strangers anywhere in the world, we tend to use social media as an extension – or, perhaps, an attenuation – of real world relationships. Which is why geography matters. This, by the way, includes the physical geography of mountains, rivers and islands:

“Friendship links from Belmont County, Ohio, extend east but don’t cross the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania or the Blue Ridge range in Virginia. In Scott County, Ark., friendships do cross state lines, into Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas. But they don’t cross the Mississippi River to the east. In Nassau County, N.Y., the likelihood of friendship links declines steeply off Long Island.”

This is fascinating stuff and I’d love to see the same analysis done for the UK. A comparison of areas that voted for and against Brexit would be especially interesting. My guess is that geographical patterns of digital connection would be more concentrated in leave-voting areas and more dispersed in the remain-voting ones (the ‘somewheres’ versus the ‘anywheres’).

Further reading

Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

It’s tempting to say that hyper-mobile, super-connected cultural elites have forgotten the importance of place – because, as commentators like David Goodhart have pointed out, they’re not pinned down to anywhere in particular. And yet the act of leaving one’s home area to gather in global cities – and engage in an expensive struggle for space within those cities – should also be seen as a sincere, if tacit, admission of the importance of place.

But then that’s the thing about geography – you just can’t get away from it.

Suggested reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

When we speak of a place being ‘left behind’, the people who leave it behind are, first and foremost, its very own, it’s ‘brightest and best’.

That’s why I fully agree with Phillip’s people-before-place prescription for northern revival. “The North,” he says, “has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach.”

Spot on, but investment in places – as long as it serves the primary aim of attracting people – has an important part to play. Moreover, the ‘who?’ of the decision-making process is just as important as the ‘what?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ of the actual decisions .

It’s a point brought home in a piece by Tom Arnold for CityMetric:

“Saturday 23 June marks a significant anniversary in British political history. No, not that one: it’s four years since George Osborne, in a speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry, first coined the phrase ‘Northern Powerhouse’”

Real devolution to the North of England is in fact a bit older than that – starting with 2011 Localism Act and the launch of the City Deals process in the same year. Furthermore, its true driving force wasn’t George Osborne, but Greg Clark – who I had the honour of working for at the time. Nevertheless the Northern Powerhouse label was a touch of genius – and has long since passed from being a mere government slogan and into the full ownership of the North itself.

Suggested reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter FRanklin

Arnold notes that “right now… Osborne’s promise of improving infrastructure to the point where traversing the North is the ‘equivalent of travelling around a single global city’ appears laughable”. However, he also acknowledges some real achievements:

“Its most significant achievement is the creation of Transport for the North (TfN), the UK’s first ever pan-Northern government body. Established in 2015 and granted statutory powers in April this year, TfN can now be regarded as the Powerhouse project’s civil service.”

Significantly, this new ‘civil service’ is reshaping the policy agenda it inherited from the actual (London-based) civil service. The previous “over-emphasis on the North’s largest cities, and Manchester in particular” has given way to a more holistic vision. This makes sense because no one city dominates the North to the degree that London dominates the South. A much better analogy is with Germany’s most important conurbation, which isn’t Berlin or Munich, but the Ruhr. With a population of over eight million, it is Germany’s industrial heartland and the third largest urban centre in the EU; but how many of its individual cities could you name?

It is surely right for the North of England – and especially its Liverpool-to-Leeds core conurbation – to aim for the same degree of cohesion.

Tom Arnold remarks that the “the Northern Powerhouse probably isn’t what George Osborne thought it would be”. But that’s the whole point of devolution: London politicians shouldn’t be making the big strategic decisions anymore.

One can’t expect the North’s natural leaders to stay in (or return to) the region if it isn’t in charge of its own destiny.