The latest instalment of our weekly series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data tools to crunch some of the numbers on Europe’s cities.
Life in the Netherlands is pretty good. GDP per capita is the fifteenth highest in the world, the national Human Development Index is the fifth highest on the planet, and inequality is the ninth-lowest worldwide.
They’ve conquered the seas with an intricate system of dykes and dams making life in Europe’s toilet boil relatively pleasant, and they’ve got the art of the cycle lane down to a particularly strangely-pronounced tee.
It’s the land of brownie-munching liberal paradise Amsterdam, international legal rights enforcing hub The Hague, and hip-and-happening mega-port Rotterdam.
Even outside of these huge centres, cities in the Netherlands are faring very well – particularly when compared to our own urban blobs here in the UK. Unemployment is lower:
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities.
Amersfoort has the lowest unemployment level, at just 2.56 per cent, whilst even the city with the highest unemployment rate, Groningen, clocks in only 7.14 per cent.
By contrast, the range in the UK is from 3.31 per cent to 14.06 – almost double.
Similarly, GVA per worker – essentially, how much each individual worker contributes to the economy – is a lot higher in the Netherlands.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities.
Productivity in the lowest-performing city of Enschede runs at £46,300 – much higher than Britain’s worst figure, Doncaster, at £38,100.
And even the powerhouse that is London – £68,900 – can’t compete with the Netherlands, where Amsterdam comes in at £75,200, and Groningen churns out £80,000 per worker per year.
Dutch cities are more inventive, too. By patent applications to the European Patent Office, the Netherlands’ cities come out ahead of the UK’s:
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
The general range of Dutch cities stretches from just 3.31 patent applications per 100,000 people in Almere, to 19.28 per 100,000 in Arnhem. But then along comes Eindhoven, smashing everyone out of the park with 251.63 per 100,000. It’s not really fair, is it.
Even with the outsize beasts of Oxford and Cambridge included, Britain can’t rise above a piddling 74.05, while the full range of our pathetic pitiful lack of invention stretches down to Telford, with a formidable 0.9 applications per 100,000 people.
On the skill of its workers, too, the Dutch come up ahead.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities.
Cambridge and Oxford again sit vastly ahead as outliers in the UK, and the proportion of the workforce classed as high-skilled varies, from 18.61 per cent in Hull, to 50.39 per cent in Edinburgh. But once again, though, the Dutch powerhouses roust us – from Haarlemmermeer at 28.49 per cent to Utrecht at 56.66 per cent.
And, on the flip side, it has fewer lower-skilled workers.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
While Dundee registers an astonishing 46.65 per cent of the workforce as low skilled, the Netherlands can’t scrape above 32.9 per cent, in Rotterdam.
So with things this peachy, why is the extremely extreme far-right PVV party of terrible-haired peroxide-blond demon Geert Wilders jostling for first place in the polls – with one eye on becoming Prime Minister of the Netherlands?
Part of the answer, as ever, is that cities function as different political organisms. The gatherings of people in close quarters change the way people think, order priorities differently, and affects their political leanings.
The most Dutch-countryside picture I could find. Image: Peter Hessels.
But that doesn’t explain everything. After all, the PVV is polling around the 20 per cent mark, and between 82 and 85 per cent of people in the Netherlands live in cities.
So even if – as is most certainly not the case – every single person living in the Dutch countryside voted for the PVV, Wilders would still be picking up a fair few votes in urban areas.
Analysis of results and polls from the Netherlands’ last general election in 2012 suggests the clue may be our age-old friend in politics: education, education, education. The more qualified the population, the lower the level of support for the PVV, whether you’re in a city or in the countryside.
Which is why Amsterdam, full of nerdy well-to-do folk, tends not to rush into Geert Wilders’ arms, while a less educated city like Rotterdam does so to a slightly greater extent.
So the solution, long-term, may be a very simple one: whether you’re a city mayor or a rural regional official, get your education, education, education in order. And the rest will, hopefully, sort itself out.
In theory, anyway.
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