Westminstenders: Welcome to 2019

[RedToothBrush]

Welcome to 2019.

Bit of a different thread starter; instead of me speculating what are your predictions for the coming year politically? Will be interesting to see how people are viewing things right now.

How is Brexit going to play out?

Who is going to be framed as the scapegoat for whatever scenario you think likely?

What are going to be the biggest political issues that the media / politicians push (as opposed to what the real issues are)?

What is going to be the most shocking thing that will happen either here or abroad?

What will happen with Trump?

Who will be the next Tory leader and when?

Whats on the cards for the various political parties in general?

London and SE is part of the UK, it isn't subsidising the UK, it is the UK! or where do you draw the line? is Exeter subsidising rural Devon? or a 40% tax payer subsidising a 20% one? this is all highly divise.

No the fault (as said by 'japan) is that the Government doesn't spend enough full stop.

The billions wasted on brexit and the subsequent drop in gdp & tax take is nothing short of criminal, we simply cannot afford to waste money like this.

The main benefit of London is the numerous stations to get you out quickly. I have been visiting and sometimes working there for over 40 years so it is not just an irrational dislike.
The idea of spending a ridiculous amount on HS 2 to drag even more into London where a fraction could have been spent on Leeds/Liverpool corridor is so misguided. Sending knackered old trains 'up North' and giving them a coat of paint and calling them 'new' (based I suppose on the trains in the North were even older) is downright shabby.

cat Brilliant post. I have always found Mumsnet to be vehemently anti London and there is a never ending supply of tedious posts asking Londoners how they can possibly live in such a shithole, saying how rude and unfriendly we are etc etc.
There absolutely is a problem with government and the media being massively London and South East centric and I totally understand people’s anger about that but that is not the fault of ordinary Londoners.
The vast majority of Londoners are not oligarchs, media types or bankers. We are teachers, nurses, admin workers, Police officers, cleaners, hospital porters, retail staff etc etc.
I think many Londoners are genuinely baffled by the fear of immigration from people who live in places where the population is 98% White British.
39% of Londoners were born outside the U.K and London voted to Remain by a substantial majority.
On a lighter note, I just got this belated Christmas present from my sister. She also bought me Nick Clegg’s How to stop Brexit book. She knows me well

The anti-London stuff often focuses on transport.

Sure, it's an issue - but a previous poster has discussed that.

Honestly, it helps keep the focus on anti-London sentiment rather than taking a step back and seeing that de-funding, via local government, means we all have show-string children's services, mental health services that are scarcely fit for purpose, local authorities going bankrupt and areas that - already - can't keep the lights on.

Seriously, it's time to get really, really angry at the government that is forcing us to abandon our vulnerable children, our vulnerable citizens; to be callous and uncompassionate at an institutional and ultimately personal level.

Trains are important, sure, but I swear to God, they are way down my list, ahead of the old, the suffering, and children who have no hope of protecting themselves. ☹️

London massively subsidises the rest of the UK

I can see where you are coming from but London also drains the rest of the U.K. too.

If you are young, educated and ambitious you head for where the opportunities exist. For the most part that is London. Many areas of the country lose their best entrepreneurs to the south. I don’t for one moment blame the individuals or Londoners in general.

Where I live we lose our ambitious young people to London and get retires back in return. The result is a wealthy but elderly population, this has huge impacts on social care and council tax.

Below, not ahead of.

Yes, PC. I'm not an elite. I'm one of the needy, working with the needy. And I'm OK with that. I need the support of others to survive. And acknowledging that need is OK - I actually think it is good to see your existence as radically interwoven with the fate of others; that you are intrinsically bent towards the need for common goods.

Most Londoners are 'needy': not these 'elites' of which we hear so much.

And what a great present.

Excellent post thecat.

I could never live in London, but that's down to general bumpkin-ness. Realisation of that prevented me from going into my chosen profession, which was hard. It's not the fault of ordinary Londoners though! I think the banking crisis made a lot of people think city of london = londoners = greedy, corrupt bastards. You don't have to think about for very long to realise how stupid that is, but people have been manipulated by the great and good for such a long time. It's the same thinking that has middle Englanders wishing Scotland would vote for independence because "they'll never succeed without English subsidies". The lind of mindset that invites manipulation and division, in my opinion.

It takes all sorts to make a world, something we seem to have rather lost sight of recently.

In an attempt to lighten the mood a little: I did some phone canvassing amongst Lefties recently.

It was about something else entirely BUT, in the course of conversations, I was surprised to find that the subject of a command economy cropped up quite a lot.

Not just command economy lite, either. No. Amongst a certain demographic, there was a great enthusiasm for the idea that the state/government should be able to compel (not just incentivise, through, day, favourable temporary tax rates, but compel) businesses to set up in designated areas.

And likewise workers. People (and by that, they mainly meant young people) should have to work in designated areas. Either short-term (I think Greece still does this for certain professions in lieu of military service) or long-term.

I was a bit and I did notice that a lot of the people proposing this didn't actually see themselves as part of that compelled demographic.

It was ... interesting. We are definitely living through some interesting contradictions and issues these days. I hope we have the patience and resilience to listen, to empathise, and to find solutions that are thoughtful, compassionate and fully cognisant of the real, actual humanity of others.

(And now I think I sound like Pope Francis!)

London is pretty much unique in the world. In no other country is 1/6th (thats one in every six ...) of the population live in a single city - let alone the capital.

Londons population is bigger than the next 5 cities put together.

When you start to visualise that, it's quite something. Whether right, whether wrong, it is and needs to be dealt with as such.

Until it sinks below the waves in a few decades.

As always very interesting perspectives on the thread today...

{state/government should be able to compel (not just incentivise, through, day, favourable temporary tax rates, but compel) businesses to set up in designated areas.}
To a an extent this used to happen. Cambridge was a hot spot for computing in it's early days for example.
However it needs to be done intelligently, which is something the continuously changing governments with their wish to 'stamp their mark' then messes up. With the political system encouraging short term ideas rather than plans to encompass decades it is too divisive.
To be an MP does not necessarily mean you have any great knowledge about anything but just that you can persuade enough people to vote for you.

Yes. 1 in every 6.

That's another thing I don't get about the rendering- monstrous of Londoners.

Most people, surely, will at least have kith and kin who are these monstrous 'Londoners'.

And, yes, to the whole flooding business. Our politics are alarmingly short-term, when you think about it.

I'm wc from a major UK city. Our local vibe about London is that your wc are being isolated and othered by other (read posh) Londoners....We see the people struggling.

Also see @rgay 's tweets about a recent trip to London in terms of race and racism. Very helpful to have an outside perspective sometimes.

Plonky I totally agree about the lazy stereotyping. I think a lot of people don’t understand that ‘the City’ of London is only the square mile which accommodates the financial sector and that that area is another world to most Londoners.
There aren’t many ‘out and proud’ Londoners on Mumsnet considering the percentage of the population that lives here.
My observation is that there are a disproportionate number of posters from Scotland and from people who live in villages.

Rgay on race and London mobile.twitter.com/rgay/status/1073644542828703746

Her thought on brexit
mobile.twitter.com/rgay/status/1072796274548719616

Hazard gentrification is definitely an issue. I live in what used to be a very rough area (think Delboy and Rodney) that is gradually being gentrified and colonised by hipsters- you can literally see it spreading from the top end of a street which is now mainly populated by roasteries, vegan cafes and wanky coffee shops selling artisan bread and seaweed smoothies whilst the other end remains stubbornly full of chicken shops, pound shops and nail bars.
There have been a number of grassroots campaigns to protest about this - noticeably in Shoreditch and Hoxton which used to be the last bastion of areas close to central London with a high number of WC residents and social housing but have now been completely taken over by hipsters. The benefits cap has contributed to the social cleansing of areas like these.
There is a hipster cafe in Shoreditch which only sells artisan breakfast cereals (at approximately £9 a bowl) which had a brick chucked through the window not long ago during an anti gentrification march.

I remember a really good article on optimum city size theory and can't find it now. Had good clear graphics to show that a capital should (according to the theory) have 3 or 4 smaller cities of about 50% of its size, and then another 7 or 8 of 50% again etc. Most (?) developed countries sort of manage this but the UK is significantly out of kilter.

Anyway, I found this article instead

The finance curse: how the outsized power of the City of London makes Britain poorer

Some key bits (for me):

''A growing body of economic research confirms that once a financial sector grows above an optimal size and beyond its useful roles, it begins to harm the country that hosts it. The most obvious source of damage comes in the form of financial crises – including the one we are still recovering from a decade after the fact. But the problem is in fact older, and bigger. Long ago, our oversized financial sector began turning away from supporting the creation of wealth, and towards extracting it from other parts of the economy. To achieve this, it shapes laws, rules, thinktanks and even our culture so that they support it. The outcomes include lower economic growth, steeper inequality, distorted markets, spreading crime, deeper corruption, the hollowing-out of alternative economic sectors and more."

And this

"Or, consider the financial structure of Trainline, the online rail ticket seller. When you buy a ticket, you may pay a small booking fee, perhaps 75p. After leaving your bank account, that 75p takes an extraordinary financial journey. It starts with London-based Trainline.com Limited, then flows up to another company that owns the first, called Trainline Holdings Limited. That company is owned by another, which is owned by another and so on.

Five companies up and your brave little 75p skips off to the tax haven of Jersey, then back again to London, where it passes through five more companies, then back to Jersey, then over to Luxembourg, another tax haven. Higher up still, it passes through three or more impenetrable companies in the Cayman Islands, then joins a multitude of other rivulets and streams entering the US, where, 20 or so companies after starting, it flows to KKR, a giant US investment firm.

It flows onwards, to KKR’s shareholders, including banks, investment funds and billionaires. KKR owns or part-owns more than 180 real, solid companies including the car-sharing firm Lyft, Sonos audio systems and Trainline. But on top of those 180 real firms, KKR has at least 4,000 corporate entities, including more than 800 in the Cayman Islands, links in snaking chains of entities with peculiar names drawn from finance’s arcane lingo, like (in Trainline’s case) Trainline Junior Mezz Limited or Victoria Investments Intermediate Holdco Limited."

www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/05/the-finance-curse-how-the-outsized-power-of-the-city-of-london-makes-britain-poorer

Cat, I think the polarisation has caused the exact opposite to be true too. Its not just 'anti-London' stuff.

The idea that in the North everyone is 'in touch' with reality is just as much nonsense. I come across attitudes of people up here who can not see the poverty next to them. Its simply invisible. There's also a vision of Northerners who are all working class and a bit stupid.

It drives me nuts when the BBC go 'let's get some views from' ordinary people' or 'the average leaver' and it's straight to Stoke or Grimsby and so rarely to places which were split much more 50:50. Its all about making a certain impress and taking it to the extreme 'so the public can understand' more easily.

Brexit - and austerity - have reinforced and strengthen stereotypes which had been in decline in this manner in many ways.

I did find it fascinating to watch the drama about the Warrington bombing and the portrayal of Colin and Wendy Parry and the reaction to it. I have mutual friends who have known the Parrys forever and a day. They commented on how amazingly fantastic the drama was but "why did they 'northern' them into a working class characature"? The point wasn't that its a bad thing to be working class more that Colin and Wendy are incredibly middle class and articulate and it almost 'dumbed them down' to fit a working class northern stereotype for TV. Apparently there was a comment (which may have come from Colin himself) that his character wore a vest and Colin had never wore one in his life!

My feeling is there is this feeling that people want to 'keep to their own' more than I've ever seen in my lifetime. But I don't just see it along race lines, I also see it along class lines and where they come from even within the UK. It's exceptionally narrow minded and about imposing comformity.

Where I live there is a mix of people who have been here forever (somewheres) and people who have moved into the area (anywheres). They don't mix anywhere as much as they should do. There isn't a 'foreign' thing at play. Just very different cultural values and outlooks on life. I can see how this could translate into racism in some areas or be interpreted as racism even when it's not. And why London might present as different because somewhere and anywheres might talk more in a way that isn't true elsewhere, because of the necessity to because of the lack of space / issues with transport. Somewhere and Anywheres shop in completely different places where I live - this is largely dictated by transport (or lack of it). I note in London how EVERYONE is united by the fact they use public transport to some extent and don't tend to rely on their own cars. It crosses diversity boundaries. It affects what services are accessible in a huge way too.

Diversity of any kind is somehow being erased across the country. People who are different are not talking to each other anymore. At best they are shouting at each other.

The Queen's message resonates across the country in all quarters for this reason.

And politicians and the media absolutely have to lead the way on that, because their rhetoric has been pivotal in normalising such polarised language and behaviour through being lazy in their own work and narrative creation.

In other words a massive 'scam' which only works if all the plates keep spinning. It is the fact it is so far removed from the people actually making or doing 'tangible' things that is the issue.
As it is all 'virtual' there is no sense of feeling for the real lives of the 'workers' at the bottom of the pile. Bit like in Pretty Woman where companies bought and sold are just numbers on a bit of paper. To me, this disconnect is 'immoral'.
{your brave little 75p skips off to the tax haven of Jersey}
I love the 'visuals' of this!

Late to the party, but Happy New Year to everyone. Fingers and toes crossed that this is the year sense will prevail. My mantra for the year - bin Brexit, fix Britain.

{Where I live there is a mix of people who have been here forever (somewheres) and people who have moved into the area (anywheres).}
Where I used to live if your family hadn't lived within about a mile radius for 4 or 5 generations, you were an 'oncomer'.

Anywheres have always tended to be middle class and somewhere have always tended to be more working class.

Looking back on family history it's surprised me how, when and why people moved.

Movement of people in that context and how its valued is interesting.

That's interesting, Red. And I think I agree with you.

I went to Midnight Mass at Southwark Cathedral. The sermon placed a real emphasis on the need to be more considered in our engagements with others and in public life this year, as we meet more of the challenges of Brexit. To resist the intemperateness that flattens and drains the present politics of nuance and other people of their full humanity. To demand of oneself the need to take time to think (because reality is multivalent and unfolding that is not the work of a moment) things through.

Between the lines, it was urging us to beware of those offering simple solutions, simple 'truths', that have an immediate comfort/appeal but a longer-term danger - and a suggestion that we don't do that ourselves.

We went to Southwark partly because that was where the Marchioness memorial is.

We were affected by that, as a family, many years ago. I remember the 'narrative' of the young people on that boat othered and dehumanised them. It closed down sympathy and scrutiny.

It's easy to see- and utterly devastating - when that same strategy is used against others.

I have to say, the sermon has pretty much formed the foundstion of my resolutions this year. It's going to be hard, because I think a lot of social and political discourse is deliberately aimed at arousing immediate, unreflective responses. I'm not immune to that. God knows, many things make me incredibly, uncontrollably angry. But I really am going to try to listen more.

Which may be one way of saying: I may not post much, but I often read -- and I am so, so grateful to you (all of you) for Keri g this thread going.

With much love - and hope - for all of you, 💐💐💐💐

Where I used to live if your family hadn't lived within about a mile radius for 4 or 5 generations, you were an 'oncomer'.

This.

It's true of where I am. I know older people who have 3 generations here who live here who regard themselves as new as they were not accepted by 'the locals' who had all been here for 4 or 5 gens. Yet people who have moved here within the past decade regard anyone who has lived here more than 15 years as locals.

The old traditional families in the area are very much in decline and increasingly rare as all the younger generations have moved away. That is a definite break from the past.