London, The Dying Of The Light

Up to London yesterday and it was quite strange. Not too many people around, plenty of seats to choose from in the gardens and an air of detachment amongst many of those about. Take out the football supporters on the march and the theatre goers up for bargain price offers and there were not many others.

Because we had time in hand we decided to wander round a few streets that we hadn’t looked at in a while. A great many places had been turned into eating outlets of one sort or another and a surprising number were out of business. Also, a good many of the old specialist shops had gone as well as local suppliers.

London has changed again, but the question is whether that change is one that is part of a dynamic progress and growth or something else. It is all very well for politicians and media people to prattle on about how change must be for the better but it does not always work out like that.

In the UK I have seen a great many communities of one kind or another go through changes and there is little doubt that quite a lot are a lot worse off than they were. Many are on almost life support systems of public sector spending and benefits.

In London there has been, is and it is proposed to have spending of a vast amount of money almost across the board. Not simply in actual spending but in subsidies of one sort or another and allowing tax avoidance on a large scale by the major parts of the financial sector. The transport works already completed, in progress and planned must rival the total for those of the rest of the UK.

Additionally, many of the large scale property developments planned before the Crash are still under way and taking in a great deal of both private and public sector resources. The Thameslink work on the railways south of the river is well under way and beside them The Shard building has taken shape.

This will offer 12,000 jobs for the future it has been said of which a huge 150 are being reserved for local workers. Whether the future workers at The Shard are supposed to find housing in central London, unlikely at present prices; or commute is not known.

If they have to commute they will need good money because the season tickets to places like Sevenoaks are now hitting £3000 a year with a good couple of thousand if you need to park your car daily close to the station.

As for the situation in schools and hospitals for the most part the less said the better unless, again, you have big money available. For all the talk of diversity there is a diminishing amount of it in the London economy. Once it was a major manufacturing area but a good deal of this has gone, never to return.

Additionally, many other activities, minor, small in scale, but serving local, regional or national needs are gone or going elsewhere if not shutting down altogether. Their going is hardly noticed and does not register in the statistics and it takes someone who knew districts from the past to be aware of this form of attrition.

This could be a very long post but my feeling is that for many reasons and complex causes London is now an urban sprawl not just on the brink of decline but one that has begun already.

The real question is how fast and nasty it could be and that poses a great many other questions for the UK as a whole.

London - The Great Wen Revisited

Last Friday, John Redwood in his blog under “Central London Is Booming” wrote that escaping from the Westminster Oflag IV-C and looking around its hinterland of Central London he noticed how many people were there and evidently spending money. He contrasted this with the situation on many UK High Streets and how London seemed to be booming whereas beyond it is not the same.

All that glisters is not gold as The Bard said, who knew both London and the country. Many commentators visiting London during the 18th and 19th Century had a lot to say about its riches, style, spending and splendour. But we know that the reality for the majority of people in London, including those who serviced and supported all this, was very different.

On Saturday as we made our way from Charing Cross, avoiding the plump rats by the rubbish bins on the platforms, past the hordes of blank faced tourists, many of whom are there on the cheap and on their credit cards, we considered all those low and minimum wage employees who were required to keep it going.

Skirting past some noisy Hen Parties, a recent feature of the streets, we thought about the high rate of unemployment, the “swamp” and gang run estates and that the money involved in propping up the activity was from unreliable sources and highly vulnerable to serious disruption for reasons beyond any UK control.

As for the shoppers, the bulk of the consumables they are buying are imported. The energy they consume and that is needed to transport them etc. is also largely imported. The places they stay in may well be foreign owned or financed.

Where most of the profits end up from all the spending is not in the UK, it goes elsewhere and there are slim pickings from the relevant company taxation. VAT may be payable on some of this spending, but only so long as people can and will spend.

Just how much is supported by effective subsidy from other parts of the UK is a matter of continuing debate. This largely depends on whether you look at the more obvious and direct movements of money or whether you factor in the indirect.

Given the centralized nature of so much of government, finance and other activity, this must be pulling a great deal of money in to a greater extent than it is going out.

All this is partly an explanation of the divergence between The Great Wen and the rest of the UK. The centralized government and its agencies and hangers on have so far distorted the structure of the UK economy to the financial advantage of London that necessarily this is the only place that as yet is riding the storm.

Wikipedia has an interesting entry on “Potemkin Villages”, the original story may be something of a myth but as the term is applied to Stalinist propaganda gains a great deal of truth about his regime.

So much of The Great Wen is now a shopping, party playground and entertainment attractions all designed to extract money and give little in return.

Rather like Redwood’s Westminster.

London, The Great Wen, What And Why

Just when you thought it was safe to go out in the light a reminder that the Mad Max Spenders are still loose out there on the street. On 5th July in the LSE site:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/

Tony Travers, Professor of Local Government etc. at LSE, the author, had a predecessor in the job named Professor Smellie who introduced undergraduates to his lectures with the profound observation that Local Government was two things. First it was local and second it was government. Nowadays those institutions calling themselves by that name seem to exist in a virtual unreality of their own.

Travers therefore became a guru to the former government and adviser on matters local and such like. He had to come up with big ideas. Preferably ever so big that they entailed spending vast amounts of money, surprisingly mostly in Labour held areas. See the figures for London he gives above and weep.

The latest big idea, maybe destined for the next Labour manifesto, especially if either of the Brothers Grimm Miliband, purveyors of fairy tales to the media, take control is that Greater London should become a City State free from England but still within and presumably in control of the UK. He claims that England is now a nuisance to London’s ambitions and purpose.

He asserts that government spending is only one third of the London economy and needs to be a great deal more if it is to continue its growth. This of course is direct cost, he conveniently omits indirect, a Travers characteristic. He suggests a Barnett formula approach to the government funding of London, notably if Scotland forgoes the one it was given in the late 1970’s as a quick fix to a temporary difficulty, to levy its own income tax. Do I hear the skirl of pipes and shrieks of laughter?

Travers alleges that London is the great engine of UK growth and therefore needs to increase its population by around 9% a year to staff all those extra public sector direct and dependent jobs with tourism and entertainment. To do this London needs to run itself free from UK interference but still taking taxpayer money and likely free from Westminster and Whitehall interference. But if the government of England remains in London this raises some intricate questions.

It is just within the bounds of possibility that there might be special pleading here. Back in 2007 the LSE was sending 30% of its student output into financial services. How many went into the public sector and other related organisations is an estimate, but somewhere around 45% would be near the mark.

Could it be that many LSE graduates now have to submit to the indignity of more ordinary work? Is it that LSE no longer has the attractions it did on the world student market? So the UK should be broken up and London floated as the ultimate taxpayer funded financial service to support the LSE?

At this point I introduce the ghost of William Cobbett. In his “Rural Rides” of around 1830, when my in-laws were torching their local workhouses in Hampshire, he refers to London as “The Great Wen”, a growing running sore on the back of England sucking the goodness and wealth out of it eventually to destroy and ruin it. Most historians think he was over the top on this, but some of us are not so sure.

In any case perhaps Travers should do a little extra reading, the intellectual shoddiness of this piece suggests someone in a hurry who is careless both of his sources and conclusions. One place he could start is in the Robbins Library a few yards away, the British Library of Politics and Economic Science. It is part of the LSE. There he will find the Booth Collection, the detailed analytical studies of London population done by Charles Booth at the end of the 19th Century.

They are online, but it is much better to spend time on the originals with a good street map to hand. They are a fascinating reminder of what can happen when you allow unchecked inward migration without thought for the consequences. If he went further and cross checked the detail with some of the key districts against the 1891 and 1901 Census Returns he might be better able to understand migration patterns.

Also, he might return to the work of the Environmental Initiatives Network of a few years back that has retreated from interest and activity. This was based at LSE but in recent years its messages and purpose have been very much out of fashion there. This group were attempting to address the long term consequences of rapid environment change and the threats to the world economy and political structure.

One talk in the Old Theatre was a speaker who was explaining what it takes to make a large modern city work. He tried to convey this with the idea of each urban area making a footprint on the planet. The bigger, more complex, and richer the urban area was then the bigger and more demanding was the footprint. That for London was very big and increasing rapidly in size.

When that might become unsustainable would depend on a number of factors but when it did you might have a slow decline or you might have a rapid collapse. The rapidity of collapse might depend on how well London was controlled, who was controlling it, and how good its relationships with its hinterland were. .

The financial developments in London under the last government rather than creating a thriving economy as a whole, effectively took a wrecking ball to the economy of England, both urban and rural. The structural damage caused to local government is extensive. Travers might care to look at some of the detail.

Within the UK the situation was modified in some areas by imbalances in state funding, but over much of England the life has been sucked out of the private sector and local communities. See the item on Tuesday 19th May 2009 on “London Pride And Tamworth Pigs” for a fuller item on my views.

Perhaps London might become master of its own fate. How much would we in England charge London for its water, its energy use, its food supplies, and the other general services on which it might depend? If we could write London out of the Budget for England and charge for all this support at a level that would cover real costs, it might be worth it.

If England left the EU and London stayed within it would be interesting to watch the decay begin. It has happened before and can happen again. Where exactly and in which Royal Park would the Mayor of London start drilling for oil?

Another of Professor Smellie’s remarks was that in local government it was not a question of what local government might do for you, but what you might do for your local government. I believe that President J.F. Kennedy when he was at LSE sat in on some of Smellie’s lectures. Perhaps Travers might have a look around the school archives.