February 15, 2024 - 2:00pm
Perhaps the most striking feature of the recently-renamed Overground lines is not (or not only) their “wokeness”, or the odd moral equivalences implied. It’s the collectivism.
Soviet Russia made much of collectivism as a policy, to the point of being willing to commit genocide in its pursuit: some 30,000 kulaks were shot and two million more deported during Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture. But even as Soviet propaganda and policy enforced conformity, it still made room for great men: the faces of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin are instantly recognisable today thanks in no small part to their lionisation in Soviet propaganda.
Crude parallels between the contemporary West and Soviet Russia are the hackneyed stuff of boomer Facebook memes. But we might justly argue that at least where public iconography is concerned, if not on genocidal follow-through, Britain in 2024 outstrips 20th-century Soviet Russia in fanatical commitment to the collective — and in corresponding virulent aversion to the particular, the distinctive, or the exceptional.
The Overground names have occasioned a barrage of angry contempt, much of which (ironically) directed at a named individual — London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan. But, in truth, TfL has been less woke than prudent. And targeting Khan is a mistake: for the opinion that counts, always, is that of the chattering classes. Today, they are deeply averse to anything that smacks of “Great Man Theory”, whether in history, art or public life.
Many of London’s most famous pre-war landmarks commemorate noteworthy individuals. Perhaps the most iconic of all these is Admiral Nelson, looming atop his 169-foot column, whence he surveys the pigeons, tour groups, mime artists and bewildered provincial families usually milling about in Trafalgar Square.
Built in three years, between 1840 and 1843, today it is as impossible to imagine a single individual being thus honoured as it is to imagine a structure of such scale being built without decades of bureaucracy, bloviation, and lawfare. No matter who you proposed, chattering-class critics advocating for some interest or other would complain that they were unjustly elevated.
Now, kings, queens, and leaders are out. In their place we focus on structural forces, “systemic” ills and other more nebulous dynamics: the wholesale replacement of Great Man Theory with a more flat-structure, soft-skills-and-spreadsheets “modern” outlook we might call Greater Managerialist Theory.
The new Overground names align with this moral and aesthetic shift: none commemorates an individual. Instead, we find swarm heroes such as the NHS (Mildmay), women’s sport (Lioness), mass immigration (Windrush) and feminism (Suffragette), plus one (perhaps ironic, given some of Khan’s other policies) abstraction: “Liberty”. The overall effect is of a kind of moral flattening, in which state-funded healthcare, militant feminism, and football are all somehow on the same footing, via a vague sense that all represent officially sanctioned forms of swarmist moral endeavour.
But the real reason critics are fuming is not that this is an ill-judged imposition on an unwilling public. Rather, it accords perfectly with elite tastes, and with the mode of government these prefer: the diffuse contemporary style I think of as “Our Democracy”, as distinct from the 20th-century understanding of “democracy”. Here, named leaders and the electoral process serve largely as confirmation of (or at best temporary obstacles to) decisions made pre-politically and largely unaccountably, via the interaction of rules, institutions, and seemingly leaderless pressure groups. The Overground consultation itself was a note-perfect instance of Our Democracy in action: a decision taken, as TfL boasts, via an opaque caucus of committees, activists, “communities” and other “stakeholders”, all overseen by a for-profit branding agency, DNCO.
Critics may point out in vain that the iconographic collectivism of Greater Managerialist Theory elides as many tensions as the uncritical lionisation of (say) an Edward Colston under Great Man Theory. For example many of the cottage hospitals, of which Mildmay was an example, fiercely resisted incorporation into the NHS. Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst asked Sylvia and her East London suffragettes to separate from the Women’s Social and Political Union, on the basis that working-class women were unfit for the vote. And the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush was not, as the more recent mythos has it, at the invitation of the then-Government, which at the time treated it as a political problem.
No matter. Public opinion in Colston’s era was content to ignore his flaws. Ours will continue to look past the fractures in modern swarm idols. For one thing is as true of Greater Managerialist Theory as it was of the Great Man variety: the winners write the history books.
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SubscribeAbsolutely brilliant.
“Our Democracy”!
That’s a great way for MH to describe where we are, although i can’t help thinking it’s reminiscent of something Tony Blair might have thought up? Perhaps… that’s the point!
I suppose that the cancelling of ‘great men’ means that I will never suffer the indignity of travelling on The Blair Line. Not that I am suggesting that there is anything great about the wretched man.
The Bojo Line has a ring to it.
I’d like the Gove Line that runs from the extremities of the East and South and goes via all the club hostpots.
I’m a contrarian. I want the Rees-Mogg line. Not the younger. The elder.
I don’t mind Mildmay as a name as it sounds like the sort of quirky London placename you might expect a London line to have. And at least Windrush was a boat, so it’s vaguely transport connected. The rest are rubbish.
Windrush is originally a river in the Cotswolds. It has been culturally appropriated !
The Mildmay line runs through the remnants of Mildmay Park station, which before closing in 1934 served the Mildmay Park neighbourhood located north of Balls Pond Road. The Mildmay line station closest to Mildmay Mission Hospital is Dalston Kingsland, more than a mile away. Post-rationalisation perhaps?
Back in the day we used to call this “rustling jimmies”. Your guys’ jimmies are rustled. Pretty sure many in London would be completely content or non-fussed with this. By objecting to it and “fuming” you are playing into their hands. Londoners love all those “woke” things named but what they really love is irritating the little englanders.
Isn’t part of the justification for the royal family and plastering their names onto our infrastructure something to do with them reinforcing our collective identity as a nation? The writer happily ignores the recently opened massive “Elizabeth” line running through the core of London and stopping at some of its main stations.
Shall we look at some of the other names on the TFL map? Northern, circle, piccadilly, district, bakerloo, metropolitan, jubilee. I suppose the USSR influenced all of those too.
Our entire existence is a lionisation of the individual and various individuals. Go to any of these new supposedly “collective” lines and you’ll see hundreds of posters and adverts aiming to separate and slice each individual to encourage them to put a product/service into their self.
There are murals depicting individuals all over London. In the trendy neighbourhoods named individuals are painted on the sides of buildings.
Trafalgar square obviously commemorates the battle of Trafalgar, a collectivist act. Obviously Nelson deserves a special place there but commemorating the battle does more than lionise his role.
This entire piece is so flawed.
And the cherry on top is being told that apparently collectivism has ruined democracy! A famously individualist pursuit…!
It’s simply a performative act that no one really asked for, that cost over £6 million pounds while the people celebrating this, bang on about a “cost of living crisis”.
Has Khan’s investigative body finished renaming all those “racist” street signs yet.
“£6 million pounds” is less than 50p per Londoner. That doesn’t even get you into a public toilet anymore.
I don’t deny that it’s a performative act but they obviously had to name them something and would have had to spend some money picking them regardless.
Don’t know what your racist sign thing has to do with anything but the green thumbs seem to like it.
Ah, that old chestnut. The money still could have been spent on something more worthy, surely. Why was the naming necessary, the British overland network doesn’t require any names.
“Don’t know what your racist sign thing has to do with anything…”
Yet more performative waste of public money, just because of some hurty words but hey some consultancy did well out of it.
“.. but the green thumbs seem to like it”.
They do, don’t they 🙂
What a shocking attitude towards the spending of public money! Don’t you realise this is taxpayers’ money? Even 50p of that is precious, because it was taken, by the force of the State and under threat of violence, from someone who earned it by providing value to the economy.
yes and it was spent on “someone who earned it by providing value to the economy”
One day you may learn the difference between an arms’ length transaction, and a state-imposed solution.
A £6 million pound expense could have been a £600 million pound revenue generator. The Coca Cola line, Heineken line, Tesla line…let the bidding begin!
It was David Bowie that started all this what with his “Suffragette City”.
‘You can’t afford the ticket.’ He was ahead of the game on public transport, as with so much else.
Seriously: “the Bowie Line” – no one would have objected. The ‘Michael’ line maybe not so much, but the ‘Wham! Line” (with exclamation mark)?
Surely with its prevelance in society today one of them should have been the Cocaine Line?
Possibly The Robbie Fowler Line?
Lines.
Taking the Michael?
“Britain in 2024 outstrips 20th-century Soviet Russia in fanatical commitment to the collective — and in corresponding virulent aversion to the particular, the distinctive, or the exceptional”.
Mary at some point you’re going to need to decide whether you think Britain in 2024 is a land of collectivist levelling out, or one of atomised hyper-individualism and permanent selling of the self. It’s hard to be both!
Naming these segments of the overground network is an expensive waste of time. That’s the story here I think.
They needed to be named, as the Overground system is labyrinthine. However not after a women’s football team which has already been largely forgotten. Lionneses? What a farce.
I know, the names we used to use “North London Line”, “East London Line”…!
Collectivism is in. Individualism is out
So no statues of George Floyd anywhere?
The entire argument is totally flawed. From my perspective individualism and the failure to act truly collectively is what prevents the modern left from actually achieving anything. Protests are more about being seen with the wittiest placard than actually enacting any meaningful change.
De Gaulle asked of France “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”. Well how can a creed of 246 genders be considered collectivist?
It’s this very great man individualism at the root of so much of what apparently ails the modern liberal world.
Anyway aren’t the right-wing supposed to be pro-nation? Don’t they believe in preserving the past so the whole can pass it on to the next generation? Don’t they believe in limiting immigration because of its impact on the carefully crafted and fragile collective? Don’t they want the restoration of our communities and local spirit?
The whole collectivism = soviet genocide thing is as valid as saying windrush = holocaust.
As someone who has invested much time and effort in having the wittiest placard at many a protest, I take offense, sir, at your off-hand dismissal of this art form.
“wittiest placard at a protest” – Don’t you find the phrase “Socialist Worker” gets the biggest laugh?
Well done for using a Great Man, Charles De Gaulle, to bolster your argument. Perhaps there was something to that idea after all. As for the rest of it, no thanks.
okay thanks for that unsubstantiated response.
Eh? Collectivism has in fact always been an economic disaster and very often a political one as well. Wartime might be a partial exception. Please give an example to the contrary.
The chattering classes seem fine with the statue of Engels in Manchester. So I think as long as the Great Man in question is a socialist icon then its fine. Even if, like Engels, he was a racist who considered Slavs to be sub-human.
Engels also liked his fox-hunting.
Didn’t he also like the profits he made from his factories?
Perhaps we could add the Party Line?
The deeper issue here, Mary, is that you Brits have seemingly lost your greatest gift to the world: your sense of humour. I move to change the Overground lines thusly:
Trainy McTrainface Line
“Shortest distance between two points” Line
“B0ll0xed by ULEZ” Line
Doomscroll Line
Stab Line (because it’s East London)
and finally, going deeply geeky here…
Non-Euclidian Line
Well played!
The official reason for Mildmay disguises its evangelical Christian origins in the nineteenth century. There is a reason why it was called the Mildmay MISSION Hospital. Being in the East End it received many sailors with tropical diseases and so many missionary nurses and doctors were sent there as part of their training. (As a child I used to see it referenced often in missionary biographies). Due to its background it was appropriate that it was used for HIV/AIDS treatment. Even after becoming part of the NHS “the Mildmay Mission Hospital remained committed to its dual role as both a medical facility and an evangelical Christian centre. Prayers echoed through its wards and biblical verses adorned its walls.” I remember at the time that evangelical Christians appreciated ‘their’ hospital being used to treat AIDS patients. I am very happy that the Mildmay Mission Line honours the place of Christians in our capital city’s East End.
From the Mildmay website,
“TFL and the Mayor of London selected Mildmay for our work during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s, which has made the hospital “the valued and respected place for the LGBTQ+ community it is today”.”
Sorry to disappoint old chap…
Of course that is the reason given. But it ignores why Mildmay was selected and more to the point it ignores its longer history in the East End, which is easily researchable if you want to make the effort.
Except as all the other line names show, it wasn’t this wider history that was taken into consideration, just a narrow “progressive” woke one!
When put up against the many other injustices being forced upon us in the name of “Social Justice”, this one looks like a storm in a teacup.
I have not been on the London overground, but it is my understanding that rather than persisting with a complicated orange spider’s web, quite sensibly, it is being broken down into individual lines with individual names – like the underground has had for decades. There will be a cost to that, regardless of what names are chosen. Clearly an attempt has been made to find inoffensive names and by doing so that has ignited a small section of the population in outrage, which will all be tomorrow’s chip paper anyway.
I dislike the inference created by placing a range of specifics in the same list as a single ideal: liberty. None of the specific items truly relate to liberty – relating to forms of equity or diversity is quite different from liberty, unless you are in Animal Farm.
The worst sin of all is to be ‘cringe’.
The newly named “Lioness” line, which runs through Wembley Central was expected to be named the Empire Line, in reference to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition (AKA Wembley Stadium), the 1934 Empire pool, and the 1934 British Empire Games which were held there.
I understand a certain Mr S Kahn of London couldn’t understand the historical context of the location and events, and therefore vetoed the idea.
An entertaining riff of an essay, although I’m not sure the premise — the names chosen — are quite as sinister as made out. If the lines had new names chosen like “Rainbow Line”, “Pride Line”, “Sharia Line” and so on, we’d be onto something. Others here in the comments have already taken apart Mary’s framing, fair enough, let us not forget essays are an artful construct, as opposed to a study in objectivity. But a fun read, and good points embedded within.
This is a bold assertion. The revulsion at man-stealing and slavery runs in the very marrow of English law and history. Abolitionism, as it came to be known, was an almost entirely British invention with huge support all over the Kingdom, particularly in the working class and evangelical constituencies. By Colston’s time Smith v. Gould 1702 had recently reiterated that Slavery was illegal under the Common Law It was never widely accepted as either moral or legal. Samuel Johnson, for instance, called slavery an ‘immoral state’ and was known to have proposed a toast to the “next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies”
We insult our forebears when we think their common culture was as monolithic and conformist as ours seems to be.
Yet it looks like all that abolitionism that was prominent in Britain failed to stop a large statue of a man-stealing merchant from being erected in celebration of his achievements notwithstanding his flaws.
The Coulston statue was erected in Bristol as a counterpoint to the statue of the abolitionist Edmund Burke. We could handle that kind of honesty and historical subtlety until really quite recently. Gandhi and Churchill, Smuts and Mandela, Cromwell and Charles I all share the public space around Whitehall.
More to the point, though, I suspect that the energies of abolitionism were focused more on the long hard road, against international vested interests, to abolish and eradicate the existing Slave Trade as well as dismantling the real system of chattle and plantation slavery – rather than fretting about street furniture.
Lest we forget, barely 25 years before Coulston’s statue was erected the West Africa Squadron was about the Queen’s business freeing slaves and maintaining the Blockade of Africa against Spanish, Yankee and Portugese slavers. It only ended in 1862 with the passage of the Anglo-American Lyons-Seward Treaty which effectively ended the Atlantic Slave Trade.
It belongs to our own age to vapour fume and brag about symbolic trifles, our forbears knew what the substance of the matter was.
Here in the US, we have monuments to “great men” in the way of ugly paintings on buildings and walls commemorating the likes of George Floyd.
“…decisions made pre-politically and largely unaccountably, via the interaction of rules, institutions, and seemingly leaderless pressure groups.”
We have learned to our horror that such diffuse but rigidly agenda-aligned groups are extremely hard to fight effectively. That explains why there are so many of them and how they’ve amassed such unaccountable power over so many once-reliable, non-politicized institutions.
On goes the march of progress. Just as self-assured today’s activists are of themselves, coming generations will marvel at how stupid or offensive they were.
It’s utterly Barking, and seeing as that’s where the Suffragette Line ends I propose it be named the Barking Line in tribute to Sadiq Khan. Kinda says what it does on the tin.
Liberty Line. Harrod’s Line? Harvey Nick’s Line?
What, is NO ONE going to suggest renaming: the Ted Bakerloo Line?
The Lenin Line?