My friends in the UK don’t come from Hong Kong’s British connection, but from the people I’ve worked and studied with in continental Europe and North America. London is the financial centre and poster child for a prosperous Britain. It has theatres, gleaming skyscrapers, high-paying jobs, and world-class restaurants. But the further a visitor strays from London, the more they realize how deprived most of the country is.
Most of Britain has never recovered from the economic decline from mid-20th century de-industrialization. Places in northern England are some of the most deprived in the country with many pockets of economic exclusion, enclaves of ethnic groups that migrated from former colonies, and unemployment of low-skilled workers from factories moving to former colonies like India and Pakistan.
Bradford, for example, used to be a textile manufacturing town and now has wards with 25% unemployment rate. Even in larger, well-known cities like Liverpool, more than 22% of the population is living on some sort of disability benefit and youth are struggling to complete secondary education in public school. The Beatles, born in Liverpool, grew up in poverty—still, the city has 10% of the UK’s most deprived areas.
This never was a rich country. I wasn’t civilized until the Roman conquest, has no natural resources to export (which led to the Opium War), and has no unique national culture. Its domestic cuisine consists of battered seafood, fried potatoes, and pies and sausages of mashed meat, organs, and oats. Its Tudor architecture recycled Roman stones and medieval wooden beams, and its Georgian architecture is a copy of Graeco-Roman ruins. It has no globally significant technology sector, the spoils of its financial sector aren’t evenly distributed, and public infrastructure is frozen in the Thatcher era.
It was poor in the medieval period, kings were corrupt before parliament was established, capitalists oppressed workers during the industrial revolution, and incomes are still low compared to other former colonial powers. After its vast Empire dissolved into bloody independence movements, the United Kingdom lost most of Ireland and Scotland is continuing to threaten the unity of the kingdom.
There’s nothing great about Great Britain.
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