Why ‘great’ should be used with great caution

Sir Keir Starmer told his party conference last month that a Labour government would within a year set up a publicly owned company to be called Great British Energy. Perhaps it was thought to have a ring of the popular Great British Bake Off. (The series is called The Great British Baking Show in America because a company running competitive bake-offs there since 1949 claimed commercial ownership of the term.)

I’m not sure that all the echoes of Great British Energy are entirely positive. Great British Public has been in use, chiefly ironically, since 1833, when the popular novelist Catherine Gore, known simply as Mrs Gore, wrote in The Sketch Book of Fashion: ‘No man had ever greater cause than the ex-premier to loathe and despise the ingratitude of the Great British public.’ Since 1912 it has been designated by the initials GBP.

Great British had been used for 300 years by then, first as a neutral term for the mainland of the British Isles, no more praised by that term than the ‘great toe’ was on account of being the biggest. In 1865 the Saturday Review accepted the propriety of calling the island ‘Great Britain’, but added, ‘it would be simply grotesque to talk of the Great British nation, government, flag, or army’, rather than simply the British nation and so on.

No sensitivity about the absurd prevented Keith Williams from calling last year’s report to parliament on how the railways should be organised Great British Railways. It is true that railways have been given to adopting names incorporating Great. The name Great Western Railway was adopted in 1833, the year of Mrs Gore’s remark. The Great Northern came along in 1846, the Great Eastern in 1862.