Evening Standard comment: The PM is wrong - London is the model

The Prime Minister should acknowledge that, and hail the capital as the success it is
Evening Standard3 October 2013
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The Prime Minister’s speech to the Tory conference has been hailed as a return to its traditional values. Which made all the more surprising his remark that “this country has been too London-centric for far too long”. Granted, he was addressing delegates in Manchester. Granted, too, the bid to win back seats in the north of England is a challenge for Tory party strategists. But pandering to anti-London sentiment is simply misguided.

The reality is that London exemplifies all the virtues of enterprise and hard work that Mr Cameron wants the nation to follow: London is a city of opportunity, which is why it exerts such a powerful pull on those who come here to live and work. If business, not government, is the primary agent of growth as Mr Cameron says, then it is London where private sector growth is pre-eminently happening — not just in the City, but in the tech and creative sectors which have gravitated here. As today’s survey of global universities shows, London leads the world. And population is an agent of growth: London’s is growing more quickly than anywhere else.

Growth is not a zero-sum game. As any scrutiny of infrastructure spending on Crossrail and the Tube shows, much of the manufacturing is carried out elsewhere.

Mr Cameron made his point about the north-south divide as a way of showing that HS2, the high-speed rail link, is necessary. Yet there is now a debate about whether the rail link should terminate at Old Oak Common or at Euston: the silliness of contemplating a north-south link that terminates outside central London is symptomatic of the reluctance to be seen to be prioritising the capital.

In a global economy, the capital attracts investment from abroad more successfully than anywhere. A new move by Chinese developers to recreate the original Crystal Palace is just one example of our attractiveness to foreign business. Any audit of the revenue that London generates for the Treasury and the spending we get back shows London gives far more than it receives. The Prime Minister should acknowledge that, and hail the capital as the success it is.

Expensive airports

The cost of air travel from Heathrow looks likely to increase now that the Civil Aviation Authority has given Heathrow — already the most expensive airport for charges — permission to increase the average landing charges by the rate of inflation over the next five years. Gatwick’s charges too will increase, by inflation plus 0.5 per cent. Airlines such as BA had been lobbying for a 10 per cent decrease in costs: as BA boss Willie Walsh points out, Heathrow enjoys a monopoly position as the sole hub airport in the UK, so airlines cannot simply go elsewhere.

Heathrow’s chief executive Colin Matthews says that keeping charges at inflation levels could deter investors. This debate has a bearing on the far bigger question of expanding London’s aviation capacity. If the decision is made to do this by expanding Heathrow, how would this affect the cost of flying? We should be told.

Football at 50 degrees

Fifa, soccer’s governing body, meets today to decide whether the 2022 Qatar World Cup will be rescheduled to winter — playing havoc with domestic schedules — to take account of the fact that it is too hot to play football in Qatar in summer. Fifa is anxious to bring the blessings of the game to the Far East but small matters such as climate should have weighed in its considerations as much as money and global evangelism.

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