Will Self: London thinks only of itself. The rest of the country is just there to be bled dry

[MichaelMcGuire]

In conversation with John Gray a couple of months ago, the subject of Britain's future came up, and the philosopher opined that: "London will become a sort of Singapore, I think, a wealthy island of urbanity surrounded by impoverished satrapies." I found myself without any hesitation acceding to this dystopian vision, and with every successive week the Coalition's policies – acting as a turbocharger on the impact of international capital flows – only seem to be bringing this intensely divisive state of affairs closer.

The news this week that Newham council believes the Government's cap on housing benefit will result in the exodus of tens of thousands of the poor to urban centres as far north as Walsall is only – in my view – the continuation by other, more vicious means of the sort of "class cleansing" introduced by the New Labour regime's Pathfinder Scheme. Then the idea was that the brave new provincial cities would be made over in London's image: cloned retail and artists' quartiers paid for by an ever-bulging property asset bubble, while the less desirable would be rehoused using the profits. But, since 2007, this bubble has plangently popped – everywhere, that is, but in the capital itself.

Such noises that Cameron et al make about the regions now are hedged round on the one hand by constitutional worries, and on the other subjected to the Orwellian sing-song chant: "Public sector bad! Private sector good!" Obviously, given that the provinces – especially the North – are to a greater extent dependent on public sector funding means, ipso facto, that they are first in line for the chop – or would be, if they hadn't already been at the head of the queue since the late 1970s. True, you can find pockets of deprivation in London and the Southeast with intergenerational unemployment stretching back to the Thatcherite Götterdämmerung unleashed on manufacturing industry – but they are nothing like the entire districts of terminal desuetude you find in the Midlands, the North, and even such bosky cabinet ministerial holidaying spots as Cornwall.

Of course, the suspicion that London is sucking the lifeblood out of the rest of the country is nothing new – you can find medieval authorities aghast at the Great Wen's metastasising – but, in recent years, there has come a sinister new alignment of forces: the inertial dirigisme of central government has become allied to the dark star of the City of London, so that the political class find their institutional prejudices insistently reinforced by what they deem "economic realities". Naturally, they act to head off this riving apart of the country, and the creation of new mayoralties is part of this. However, as ever in politics: if you want to know where power really lies, follow the revenue. The tax base of the new city governance is no bigger than the piffling amount that has traditionally been allocated to local government – leaving all these municipal popinjays firmly under the control of Westminster.......

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/will-self/will-self-london-thinks-only-of-itself-the-rest-of-the-country-is-just-there-to-be-bled-dry-7685133.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Good article; at least the move of part of the BBC to Salford might even things up a bit

How to restart industry when you're competing against the rest of the world, I don't know. I remember being taught about 'industrial inertia' in geography, when industries build up skills and infrastructure in one area, and then keep it there, because it's hard to create that from scratch, even if any original advantage (eg raw materials) has since disappeared; and Thatcher's determination to throw away industry, rather than modernise it, threw away that inertia.

[ikri]

2. Yup

I heard someone joke about the Scotland referendum that it wasn't really about independence from most of England, Wales and Northern Ireland but independence from London.

Take public transport, London's Tube and bus system was never deregulated in the 80's like everywhere else in the country so the only public transport system that most politicians and law-makers use works very well and gets a massive subsidy, everywhere else in the country has to live with some really shitty trains and buses that are increasingly expensive to use, slow and often don't go anywhere near to where people need to go.

And, not unusually for this government, proposed policies to reduce the pay of workers outside London is the exact opposite of what's needed. They need to make working outside London more attractive for people and the quickest & easiest way to do that is to raise wages for people outside the capital.