Simon Jenkins: Sorry, Archbishop — but London is where the action is

In deploring the capital’s dominance over the provinces, Justin Welby fails to grasp that this is the age of the big city
29 October 2013
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The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks London is “a different country” from the rest of Britain. Last week he said that arriving in February from the north to take up his new job, he and his wife felt “we almost needed a passport”. The reason was that “too much of the economic recovery” has been focused on London and not enough attention paid to “those on the edge”, such as his old haunts of Liverpool and Durham.

The cry is familiar. But what should London do about it?

The capital is on the brink of a new boom, fuelled by our old friends, financial services and tourism, and aided by continued central government spending. These have helped drive the housing market into an upward spiral. Even if this is loaded towards high-end foreign buyers, the added value makes householders more ready to borrow and spend. Any market that can rise by 10 per cent in a year is heading for bubble and burst, but for now the sun is shining and hay is made.

The truth is that London survived the recession astonishingly well. As Professor Henry Overman of LSE has pointed out, “London got away with it.” It was supposed to suffer most from the banking crash. Yet it saw a smaller decline in output and employment than the rest of the country. It was the chief beneficiary of state bailouts to banks, channelled to a buoyant stock market.

London theatres and restaurants are packed. Hospitals, schools and colleges are bursting with overseas clients. You cannot get a builder for love nor money. As Overman says, London jobs are biased towards professional activities. The downturn “was never a middle-class recession”. The cuts were down the line, out of sight, in the provinces. Big projects, such as the Olympics, Crossrail and preparing for HS2, surged ahead. At times such as this ministers behave like beasts in the jungle. They protect their own.

This is not unique to London. This is the age of the big city. Such places are detaching from their hinterlands. Travel inland from the vast new Chinese cities and you can be in a medieval countryside. London today has more in common with New York than it does with, say, Birmingham or Manchester.

Big cities are centres not just of political power but of finance, business, professional services, culture and fashion. They are where clever, enterprising people gather together, to be among other clever, enterprising people. They need a hinterland for dormitory suburbs, call centres and back-office services. They need the green belt and countryside for leisure and weekending. But they get their momentum from their financial potency and cultural electricity.

The reality is that non-metropolitan Britain is currently on a hiding to nothing. Centralised government in the UK is in reality a London phenomenon. It is a creature of the capital. It would not occur to government to invest the £50 billion it wants to spend on HS2 on improving provincial transport links. It would not dream of redistributing London’s arts subsidies from the capital’s booming museums and theatres to the provinces, where such places are closing by the week. This is despite 90 per cent of private arts giving now going to the capital.

When the BBC made a gesture of political correctness and opened a new media centre in Salford, it did not rely on northern talent to staff it. The corporation moved 850 Londoners north at £28,000 each in expenses, as if the Pilgrim Fathers were settling New England among the savages.

At one level London should clearly be less greedy. Its gobbling up of public expenditure is hard to defend. The Government keeps its local taxes ridiculously low by world standards. Ministers and civil servants treat provincial centres with little short of contempt, telling them how much money they can have and how often they must empty their dustbins. They dump wind turbines and power stations on the rural landscape. They hold back provincial transport links in favour of an ever more profitable London “hub”. Were Britain a separate eurozone, the north would become Greece and Spain to London’s Germany.

That said, as the gap widens between London and the rest, the nation needs to come to terms with the brutal fact that big cities are powerful. A spirited new book by American urbanologist Benjamin Barber is titled If Mayors Ruled the World. Nation states, he argues, are sinking back into chauvinism and isolation. It is in big cities that “creativity is unleashed, community solidified, citizenship realised”. It is they that can manage conflict and absorb racial diversity.

To Barber, cities are places of mobility and innovation, of outward-looking prosperity. Their leadership is coherent and targeted. The New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, boasts “his own army and his own State department” and has little use for national government. Barber thinks a network of city mayors would be a better global forum than a United Nations. The writer Norman Mailer even wanted New York detached from the American continent and declared an independent island.

I am not sure London’s Boris Johnson would make an ideal monarch of the global scene, though London has elected two mayors in succession with a political vitality no other British city has achieved. Mailer’s independence makes no sense for London. The capital sucks profits from the provinces even as it returns them through its taxes and grants. There is a clear interdependence between London and the rest of Britain.

That said, the metropolis is not just another British urban settlement. It is a de facto city state. If the Archbishop really felt strongly about its dominance over the nation’s life, he should take a lead and remove his residence back north, back to Durham or Liverpool. Of course he will not do this, and he knows why. London is where the action is.

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