Warring kingdoms

This week: my favourite medieval French kings, and a map of Europe’s lingering imperial ambitions. But first: the growthless recovery.

On Monday, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner reeled off some unnerving figures to the House of Commons. “Fourteen years of Conservative government – a government elected on a promise to level up the country – has left working people worse off”, she argued, putting the loss for the average household in Manchester at £8,000. Down the road in Burnley, “the loss amounts to £28,000”.

Little surprise that Rayner would focus on the impact on working people or the north; but by doing so she was, if anything, understating the scale of the problem. For Cities Outlook 2024, the latest instalment of an annual report from which the data was taken, the Centre for Cities think tank examined what Britain’s urban economies would look like if pre-2010 growth trends had continued.¹ It shows that the average person in the UK is £10,200 poorer than they should have been. This is a cumulative figure, not an annual one, but even so: eesh.

And when you start drilling down into the data, things get even worse. Just seven of the 63 urban regions surveyed outperformed previous trends – in almost all cases, “due to underwhelming growth in the 1998-2010 period”. Some of these figures are very funny, in a manner that highlights the limit of this kind of research. The outperformance of expectations in Aldershot means that, over those 12 years, residents there earned an extra £190; those in Bristol, £50. I’m not sure how meaningful it is to suggest everyone in Bristol has earned just over £4 a year more than you might have expected, had pre-Tory trends continued; but the Tories are so desperate for good news by this point I half-expect them to stick it on their election leaflets anyway.

The vast majority of cities, though, underperformed expectations. And these were not simply places on the wrong side of the economic chasm that runs down the middle of our economy: they include motors of the economy like London, Cambridge and Milton Keynes. This is why, in short, everything is broken.

The odd thing about all this is that there has been no shortage of jobs: the vast majority of these cities (61 of the 63) saw growth in employment numbers. On the other hand, though, very few saw significant growth in productivity, with only five growing ahead of the previous trend. Indeed, 18 cities – more than a quarter of the total – had actually gone backwards, and were less productive in 2021 than they’d been in 2010. In the early 1990s, the economist Nick Perna came up with the term “jobless recovery” to describe a situation in which automation allowed economies to grow without creating jobs. Britain has recently been through something worse: a growthless recovery.

Not all of this can be blamed on the Tories: Europe, too, has seen a slowdown; by far the biggest underperformance, in Aberdeen, is almost certainly down to the decline in the local oil industry. But a lot of it is down to specific policy decisions: Brexit, or the refusal to build infrastructure or homes. As ever, in a Mandy Rice-Davies kind of a way, the Centre for Cities thinks the answer lies in better cities policy, and its proposed solution involves a mix of planning reform and devolving more powers, especially financial ones, to local areas. 

This to me smells to me a lot like my favourite think tank is positioning itself to influence the next government (although the Labour party currently seems strikingly more enthusiastic about the planning reform bit of its agenda than the devolution one). But these figures also highlight exactly why that party is likely to be the next government. Because it isn't just the deputy leader of the Labour party that says the Tories’ economic record has been dreadful. It’s objective reality.

You see the problem? Image: the Resolution Foundation.

Some of the more optimistic Tory strategists still point to the 1992 election as a time when their party came from behind – admittedly, nowhere near this far behind – to win. In 1992, sure, the previous 13 years had seen entire industries lain waste, and the country divided as never before. Against that, though, the disposable income of the average household had increased. More people owned their own homes. There were measures on which things had got better. 

This time incomes have been essentially flat. But costs, especially housing costs, have increased, and home ownership is harder to access than ever. We’ve suffered through echoes of the 1980s – the divide and rule, the gutting of the state – but we’ve had none of the growth.

A lot of commentary on the upcoming election focuses on the rolling crises of the last few years: the humiliation of the Truss premiership, the partygate scandal, the revolving door of 10 Downing Street. All of these no doubt have had an impact. But if you knew none of that, were aware only of the fact that the economy previously grew and now it doesn’t, would you expect that government to be reelected? Or, once inflation started to eat away at the security even of those retired people in whose interests the Tories have governed, would you expect them to be 20 points behind in the polls?

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One of the book’s essays concerns the Treaty of Verdun of 843, which saw the division of Charlemagne’s empire. Which brings me to my next topic…

Some medieval French kings

English royal history, whatever else it is, is a fantastic stock of archetypes. Richard the Lionheart was brave and good; his brother John, cowardly and bad. Henry VIII was the guy with all the wives; Charles II the party king; and so on. These received ideas about what particular monarchs were like are often contested, if not wildly inaccurate. But nonetheless these sixty or so men and occasionally women, give form to eras, adjectives and ideas as reliably as characters from Dickens or the MCU.

Not having been force-fed the foreign equivalents of Little Arthur’s History of England at an early age, I am less familiar with the occupants of other thrones, and less able to instinctively grasp what they “mean”. (The French also, one suspects, have a rather different attitude to their royal history, even though they executed precisely the same number of kings as the English.) But occasional forays into the history of pre-revolutionary France nonetheless feel like a trip to a parallel universe: the archetypes are familiar, but the names and dates are different. Here are a few of the more amusing or noteworthy kings I have found there.

Clovis I (509-11). Often listed as the first king of France, even though that sentiment contains about as many questionable statements as it does words. For one thing, in the early 6th century, France didn’t actually exist: Clovis was actually king of the Franks, a bunch of Germanic tribes who’d been pootling around the western empire for centuries when it dissolved after 476. And while his territory did include bits of northeastern France it also held chunks of the Low Countries and western Germany. He probably didn’t think of himself as the first king of the Franks either, so much as the most successful king of the Salian Franks, the tribe he’d led to domination over the others. Even his name is an issue: “Clovis” is just an archaic form of Louis, and the fact the four Merovingian kings of that name take the old version while all later ones take the new is probably convention as much as insight into what they were actually called.

Anyway. Clovis was the first king to rule the unified version of an early medieval polity from which France, among other things, would one day evolve, and his heirs would rule for a couple of centuries as the Merovingians. Given that it’d take another four centuries for the lowland bit of Britannia to knock its “warring petty kingdoms get repeatedly invaded” phase on the head, this isn’t bad going.

Some historians today prefer to cite the first king of France as...