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London has become a citadel, sealed off from the rest of Britain
Ukip and Scottish nationalism are symptoms of public hostility to the overweening power and dominance of the capital
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/14/london-oligarch-city-capital-cost-of-living
'Even if George Osborne’s property bubble is lifting prices all over the UK, London has long since left everywhere else behind.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles
Last week, an empty if sizable garage in Camberwell – somewhere to put a car, that is, not a repair business or petrol station – was sold at auction for £550,000, having been put on the market by Southwark council as a "development opportunity". A man from property website Zoopla told the Financial Times that "the buyer could create a significant return despite paying what seems like an extortionate premium today". In other words: bring us your sheds, kennels and cupboards, and watch the capital's globalised alchemy turn them to gold.
This much we know: even if George Osborne's property bubble is lifting prices all over the UK, London has long since left everywhere else behind. Over the past year, property values in the capital have risen by 18% and the gap between prices there and the rest of the UK is the biggest since records began. The average monthly London rent is now £1,126. Having moved out in 2004, I know what this means: unless you are an international plutocrat, a highly paid City type or someone either clinging on in social housing or putting up with life in a shared hovel, it is an increasingly impossible place to live.
Although the inequality London embodies is felt just as keenly inside its boundaries as outside them, the obstacles to living in the capital harden a view of it as a cut-off citadel – somewhere that not only fixes economic policy in its own interests but hoovers up public investment. The dire political consequences of this are all around us, though a capital-focused media often fails to see them. Nevertheless, London's mixture of economic isolation and huge political power are integral to the two biggest domestic stories of the year.
First, Scotland. At the core of the momentous debate that has seized that country is a justified resentment of how much power has been amassed by the distant UK capital. Alex Salmond recently spoke of London as the "dark star of the economy, inexorably sucking in resources, people and energy"; the influential Jimmy Reid Foundation's Common Weal projectcontrasts many Scots' ingrained belief in an essentially social-democratic society with what it calls "London orthodoxy".
And then there is Ukip – an anti-metropolitan revolt rooted in parts of southern and eastern England that often feel peripheral relative to London. Such divides are always favourable to the populism of the right, as evidenced by Paris's place in the demonology of the 1950s' FrenchPoujadistes, and the latter-day National Front. Here, although he was educated in Dulwich and cut his teeth in the City, what is Nigel Farage's entire act if not a huge raspberry blown at the values and privileges of the more elevated parts of the capital, and most loudly heard from counties such as Sussex, Kent, Norfolk, Hampshire and Lincolnshire? Plenty of numbers suggest that people there are right to be angry. In Ukip's heartland of the east of England, for instance, people talk endlessly about the state of the roads and railways and how difficult it is to get around. At the last count annual transport spending there was put at £30 per head; in London it was £2,600.
Think about all this and you begin to arrive at a political theory of everything. In Peter Oborne's prescient book The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), he nailed the cliques that have taken over the three main political parties as follows: "Their outlook is often metropolitan and London-based. They perceive life through the eyes of an affluent member of London's middle and upper-middle classes. This converts them into a separate, privileged elite, isolated from the aspirations and problems of provincial, rural and suburban Britain." Quite so, and if its insane cost of living makes London a closed shop to all but the most privileged, this will only get worse.
Only one thing could counter it: moving the machinery of government elsewhere – a step that would count as one of the most democratic reforms in British history. The prickly feeling of futility as I wrote that last bit was unavoidable: fat chance, obviously.
Like all the best political questions, this one has a strong cultural aspect. Maybe, as long as London was open to Britons who wanted to move there, the rest of the country could forgive its overweening dominance and understand the capital as a turbocharged Britain in microcosm, where there was a constant creative ferment and regional accents could be heard loud and clear. As with Manhattan, though, soaring living costs seem to have killed old sources of cultural excitement while also sealing off politics, law and the rest. What hope for the provincial hotshot when London life will load them with yet more debt? Even if they somehow make it, what will they do when the time comes to start a family?
A few things usually strike me when I come to the city I left a decade ago. I like its futuristic flash and amazing diversity but I miss its old bohemia. I marvel at its power but wonder about any accountability. I think about whether there are plenty of industries beyond financial services that will have to move out. And I sense a fundamental tension that will sooner or later explode – between London's place in the same swath of the world economy as New York and Shanghai, and the fact that even its most elevated corners are part of the same country as Leith, Skegness and Pontypridd. What is economically lucrative need not be politically sustainable and when the two begin to clash, things start to get interesting.
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