What’s in a name? A government minister has a good answer for Shakespeare’s question. “Names aren’t just convenient labels for people, places and things. They come with expectations,” the minister said. “Countries don’t normally have these pressures. But Great Britain? It’s quite a name to live up to.”
The words are from the opening of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back, published last year by the Labour MP Torsten Bell, now a Treasury minister. Bell’s book is about why this country is, and feels, broken. But it is also spot on about this country’s enduring naming problem. As Bell puts it: “What began as a statement about our geography has become one about our quality.”
This may seem merely semantic. It is not. Great Britain may have been originally so described because of its relative size, not from any claim of superiority. But the name has slowly acquired some of these more pretentious associations. Particularly in recent times, governments have actively tried to promote the idea of distinctive British greatness. This deliberate freighting matters. It does this country, and the effort to rebuild trust in politics, few favours.
On Monday, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, unveiled the logo and colourful livery of Great British Railways, the renationalised rail system that will soon replace the fragmented and privatised network that has existed since 1997. There are positives in the new structure, and even the new look. The name, though, is definitely not one of them.
The name Great British Railways is puffed-up, misleading, tin-eared and backward-looking. It is puffed-up because, despite the purely geographical origin of the words Great Britain, the name sounds boastful for no reason. It is misleading because the railways are not great; tin-eared because the public is not so easily deceived; and backward-looking because it panders to a version of this country that no longer exists. Everyone knows it is a nonsense.
But the rail rebranding is not alone. Keir Starmer’s government has a fondness for Great British namings. As well as Great British Railways, it is also bequeathing Great British Energy, the publicly owned clean energy company that was briefly Starmer’s flagship national infrastructure project back when Labour was in opposition. If other industries require public rescue, new candidates may follow. Great British Water, anyone?
Institutions matter. They provide stability to a nation-state and, just as important, a sense of order. But that vital task cannot be wished into existence by a rebranding exercise. It is one reason why the right name is important. British Railways, as the rail system was known after nationalisation in 1948, was a good name at the time, because it was exactly what it said on the tin. The same was still true after it began calling itself British Rail in 1965.
None of this should in any way imply that such institutions are so important they should never be reformed. Not a bit of it. One big reason why no government today would dare go back to using the otherwise-obvious name of British Railways is that the 1948 system became associated, unfairly or not, with a resistance to modernisation and efficiency. Calling it British Railways would suggest a naive reversion to an unlamented past.
Yet the naming of Great British Railways is also silly for two serious reasons. The first is that it is a hollow Brexit-era conceit in what is now an increasingly post-Brexit era, with which it obviously jars. The second is that greatness and Britain have a particularly strong, although not universal, resonance in England, but are not echoed to the same degree in Britain’s devolved nations.
In 2011 David Cameron tried to rebrand British global soft power in terms of supposed “great” businesses, creativity, entrepreneurialism and assorted other “great” qualities. After the Brexit vote, this drive became more bombastic. Boris Johnson won the Conservative leadership with what he dubbed “a vision of Britain as the greatest place on Earth”. The “great” effort was then relaunched in time for the G7 and Cop26 meetings chaired by Johnson. Ever keen to jump on a bandwagon, the then-Tory transport secretary Grant Shapps promised a new public body in 2021 to replace Network Rail under the name Great British Railways.
Labour has now adopted that same name for its own rail plans. The effort is misplaced. The public does not regard Brexit-era national triumphalism or ersatz Johnsonism as the key to restoring the railways or the energy supply industry. It wants things that work efficiently, are well-run and provide good value. To brand the renationalised rail system as “great” takes the public for fools. For a government that needs all the friends it can get, this is a mistake.
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But it is also a mistake because there is a missed opportunity. This government wants to show that the United Kingdom can still deliver for its nations and regions. It is right to try. But it would have a rather better chance of achieving it if, instead of pretending to restore lost British greatness as Johnson did, Labour instead saw such infrastructure and utilities issues within a framework of a strengthened UK that works with the devolved nations.
Merely to rebrand major projects as Railways UK or Energy UK would not, of course, be sufficient. It would certainly not be enough to save Labour from its likely defeats by the nationalist parties in the May 2026 elections. But it would provide a much clearer institutional framework within which to try. It would give more intellectual and political coherence to the changes that are needed in so many places in the UK. Get it right, and the results might actually be great.
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Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
