J D Vance is right that London doesn’t feel English. It’s so much more than that and always has been.
If you were born, bred and largely educated in Ohio, you may well find London intimidating. Much smaller in size but roughly equivalent in population, the city founded by a bunch of pushy Italians two thousand years ago has a lot more to boast about.
Ohio’s capital is named after one of the most adventurous men in history, but there is little in Columbus to reflect the broad horizons and huge ambitions of the 15th century explorer.
I went to the state once, as a journalist, to do a television feature on fast food. Like everywhere else in the world there were good people living decent lives, but most neighbourhoods and many streets in London have more to offer than that so-called city.
London, of course, had a head start, and some overwhelming advantages. Every clock in the world takes its cue from Greenwich. Our position allows us to trade across most time zones. English is the dominant language of business, diplomacy (sorry Macron) and popular culture. Our restaurants, shops, theatres, museums, galleries and universities set the standards for others around the world and, despite Brexit, our financial sector remains second to none. As a big blond champion of the City used to say when he was Mayor, we sell tea to China, bikes to Holland and cake to France.
Critical to the success and sustained pre-eminence of London is its magnetic pull on some of the most dynamic and driven people on the planet. Whether you are serving drinks, selling shares, performing surgery or playing football you are competing with the best. It makes it a tough place to live, but that Darwinian dynamic has kept the city on top for a long, long time. Pulling up the proverbial drawbridge to freeze the city in whatever mythical age is envisioned by JD Vance would have destroyed that. Inbreeding has never been good for the gene pool.
Like most people in London today, I wasn’t born here. In my case it was only a 160 mile trip up the M4 but wherever your starting point London’s track record for assimilation and social mobility is formidable. My father in law moved here from Mumbai, made it his home and now has bunch of grandchildren whose dominant roots and reference points are clearly not in southern India.
The fact that our current Mayor is the son of a Pakistani bus driver is a source of pride
Then there’s the second generation flag-flying stars. Mo Farah was trafficked here from Somaliland, and became one the greatest runners of all time. Johnny Boufarhat, born in Sydney to a Lebanese dad and Syrian-born Armenian mother chose the U.K. for university and founded a £5 billion company here. Adejoké Bakare joined us from Nigeria, swapped microbiology for catering and swiftly acquired a Michelin star at her Fitzrovia restaurant. Evelyn Suna was a midwife in Sierra Leone before marrying J P Cleverly and raising her son, James, to become foreign secretary. You hopefully get my drift.
There are countless others but I have selected them because I suspect that what JD Vance is saying has less to do than how London “feels” to him than how it looks. And what he means about looking “English” is a lot to do with the colour of skin. Watching him with Donald Trump the other night, in matching blue suits, white shirts and red ties, I wondered how a great country that was built by migrants could be offered such a narrow choice. To hear him pontificate on the meaning of true diversity is almost hilarious when you consider what little character so many midwestern cities like Columbus have, not to mention the monotonous, mediocre fast food brands that they’ve sent out to colonise the world.
To be fair to JD Vance, I have to agree that the national identity of many Londoners is perhaps less straightforward than his average constituent in Ohio. In my case, quite simply, I am not English. I’m Welsh. But I’m also a Londoner and London is the capital of England so I’m part of that package. Its ability to attract the best bankers, ballerinas, bar staff and all the rest doesn’t make London less English. It just elevates it above a national capital to be a truly global city, arguably one of the best in the world.
That is not to say London doesn’t have major challenges at the moment. This week’s budget will drive many of our wealth creators overseas. Small businesses that are the backbone of the economy will struggle with new regulations and punitive taxes. The streets aren’t safe enough, moving around can be a nightmare and the cost of living here is crippling. We should also be more assertive about our values. Tolerance cannot be a one-way street where we welcome into our midst people who reject the principles and traditions that allowed them to move here in the first please. But that does not justify this latest attack from the vice presidential candidate on the look and feel of London.
The fact that our current Mayor is the son of a Pakistani bus driver is a source of pride. I just wish he was better at the job, so I was appalled when the same JD Vance had a dig some months ago about the U.K. being the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”. All’s fair in love, war and the heat of an election but this man could be the American vice president next week, a senior partner in the NATO alliance that has been central to our peace and security for many decades. Our “special relationship” with the USA often feels overplayed or even contrived, but it’s genuinely disturbing to hear a man so potentially close to the White House having a go at London on such a misguided basis.
Guto Harri is a former chief communications officer at City Hall
