It is always disturbing when someone sees straight through you. Ian Hargreaves, the former Independent editor, did it to me in 1997-just after I had been appointed Britain editor of The Economist. Informed that all my previous writing experience had been as a foreign correspondent, Hargreaves said: "Former correspondents always think they can write about Britain as if it's a foreign country. But you can't do that for a domestic audience." I felt suitably squashed.
Three years on I've been thinking about Hargreaves' comment. In certain respects, he was clearly right: a British audience will not be amazed by that foreign correspondent's stock-in-trade, an elegant rewrite of the local papers. And the lofty detachment of the correspondent is rather harder to adopt in your own land.
But in other ways, I think Hargreaves was too dismissive of the attempt to be a foreigner at home. It seemed to me then-and now-that national journalists in Britain can display a remarkable lack of curiosity about their own country. Put a British journalist in the US, and the first thing he will want to do is to start reporting from out-of-the-way places. The Washington correspondents I knew in the early 1990s competed to get the most bizarre dateline, from towns like Climax and Hot Coffee. But there was a serious purpose to all this gadding about. Foreign correspondents know that you can't get a sense of the US by sticking in Washington or New York.
That view has now become a truism. But move the same journalists to London and they often show a marked reluctance to get out and about. Early in my stint as Britain editor I proposed to one of our political correspondents that he might consider some reporting from outside London. A look of deep uneasiness crossed his face. "Why don't we wait for a by-election," he replied.
Suggest to most British journalists that they are failing to cover the country properly, however, and you get a variety of irritated responses. The first is simple denial. It is true that the "north-south divide" is a well-worn theme, and certain northern stories have now been done to the point of clich?: the street in Newcastle where you can buy a house for ?10; the estate in Leeds strewn with hyperdermics. But move beyond the "it's grim up north" story and things get patchier.
A more sophisticated defence is to suggest that the parallel with reporting the US is a flawed one. The US has a federal system, which means that there is a lot more real politics going on outside the capital. And-politics aside-it's a much bigger and more varied country than Britain. As an American colleague once explained to me sadly, when she moved to Britain she had started out excitedly going to a different historic English town every weekend but, after a while, they all seemed the same. They all had a cathedral with a pedestrianised bit in front of it and a Boots, a WH Smith's and a McDonalds in the high street. She found that if she wanted variety she was better off staying in London.
Most Brits can recognise some truth in that. But as it happens, Britain is actually a rather large and complicated country. Huge swathes of the population are wholly ignorant of how the other fractions live. Inevitably, London-based politicians and journalists often lack a feel for what is going on "out there." Perhaps that is why they get caught out by events like the fuel crisis.
I freely admit that-as the son of immigrants, born and brought up in London-I offer an extreme example of metropolitan introversion. The first time I took the train to Manchester I felt a genuine sense of excitement, not all that different from the first time I flew into Singapore or Jakarta. And like any foreign city, it was full of surprises. Nobody had told me that if you turn right out of Manchester's Piccadilly station, and walk for ten minutes you hit the Ancoats district-a huge stretch of derelict mills and canals dating back to the industrial revolution-an extraordinary thing to find in the middle of one of Britain's biggest cities. Was I uniquely ignorant? I doubt it. There are lots of senior journalists on national papers who, like me, have spent a lot more time in Paris than in Manchester.
People in northern cities know this, and resent it. When I unguardedly confessed to the man at the Trafford industrial estate that this was my first visit to Manchester, he remarked drily: "You've just confirmed every northern prejudice about the south." Many people in the north and Scotland seem convinced that Thatcherism was only possible because southerners had no knowledge of the north and no sympathy with it. A Glaswegian I met was convinced that Margaret Thatcher had been motivated by a personal hatred of Scotland and the Scots. "That woman literally raped this country," he said (an interesting visual image).
Being a middle-class southerner and an Economist journalist, I was raised to believe that Thatcher was basically right. But replace "hatred" with "indifference" and the argument against her seems plausible. Maybe Thatcher was right to take a cold look at the coal industry, decide it had no future and shut it down. But would she have been so resolute had she felt some sort of connection to the people who were being thrown out of work? What if Thatcherism had meant not that there were no miners left in Durham but-let us say-no stockbrokers left in Surrey? Would the iron lady have been quite so unyielding? Plenty of northerners think not.
Brits will sometimes say defensively that we're not the only big country where the capital dominates the rest of the nation. Think of Paris and France. True-but it's worse here. I've met high-flying Parisians who want to relocate to some other part of France-Toulouse is a particular favourite. How many ambitious London professionals want to work in the provinces?
Move to a truly federal country like the US, and the contrast becomes even more marked. When I spent a year at Princeton in the mid-1980s the students I knew were thinking of taking up careers all over the country-Chicago, LA, Silicon Valley, New York, the south, Washington. At Cambridge it seemed, by contrast, as if all the graduates were heading for London.
During the 19th century, Britain's dynamism came from its provincial cities. That regional pride and identity is rediscoverable. Regional government is often regarded as a recipe for more red tape, or part of an EU plot to chop up the UK. It need not be so.
Take Jeff Kennett. When I saw him in his Melbourne office in 1996, the premier of the state of Victoria bristled with contempt for the federal government. But he was able to turn his disgust into something positive. Kennett became a brash, populist champion for his state. Under his leadership sleepy Melbourne redeveloped its waterfront, opened a giant casino and slashed its budget deficit. He was not universally popular. Many voters took umbrage at the fact that Kennett was closing hospitals while opening casinos. The local press loathed him, and in due course he was chucked out.
No matter. The very controversy that a provincial leader like Kennett stirs up is a sign of a vitality, confidence and self-absorption that is in marked contrast to British council leaders who rattle around their Victorian town-halls, complaining about the financial constraints imposed by Whitehall.
Luckily, you don't have to go all the way to Melbourne to see an alternative. Scottish devolution already offers one. The politicians in Scotland's new assembly were startled by the speed and venom with which the Scottish press turned on their new political class. They should have been pleased. It was a sign that real politics had taken hold in Scotland.
Visitors to Scotland from London now swiftly find themselves completely at sea, amidst a political debate that they just haven't been following. Some British commentators see the inward-looking nature of the Scottish arena, as a sign that Scotland is drifting away from the rest of Britain, and a precursor to the inevitable break-up of the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is. But if you are familiar with a federal system, the idea that one part of the country has a vigorous political and cultural life that is incomprehensible to other bits of the country is not a frightening one. Nor is an aggressive regional identity that manifests an occasional urge to denounce the capital. Believe it or not, that is a sign of a healthy political system-not of incipient civil war.
In retrospect, The Economist-with a small staff, 80 per cent of our readers outside the country and a big London concentration among our British readers-was not the obvious place from which to wage war against metropolitan bias. Still, we did our best. And in the past three years I have become convinced that the most under-covered part of England is not the north, but the south outside London. This is often portrayed as a dull commutersville, where the only stories concern delayed trains and disputed housing developments. But in an extraordinarily long economic expansion, much of Britain's dynamism has come from the towns strung out on the motorways coming out of London. Newbury is the headquarters of Vodafone, Europe's biggest company; Cambridge has been transformed by its science parks; Kent is choking on the traffic generated by trade with Europe. I felt that we were closest to capturing how modern Britain is changing when we ran stories about Romford's efforts to create a "night-time economy" and Reading's efforts to overcome its labour shortages by retraining prisoners.
Now, having castigated London for being dominated by an introspective self-absorbed elite, speaking a language only they understand, and out-of-touch with the ordinary people they are attempting to govern, I am a making a clean break and moving somewhere totally different. Brussels. n
