London is no longer an English city

[Leafyhouse]

Said by John Cleese (he of Monty Python fame), recently. Link to story is here:

www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48451384

What do other people think? I do see London's diversity as being its great strength, but maybe it's just because I live in the London bubble - and maybe the view from the rest of the country is utter horror that the capital seems to be becoming increasingly disconnected from the country. Both economically and culturally. Hence the Brexit vote - Remain in a sea of Leave.

What's the view from others?

You are talking to me Helmet like I think Farage is a good thing. I don’t. I think he is vile. Sadly, desperate people are taken in by him. As for your list of politicians former jobs, you should remember that since this generation of career politicians have emerged people don’t have a choice other than to vote for former bankers, insurance types and City boys, no matter which party they want to support.

Zipee I can’t remember ever seeing many coal mines in London.

The opportunities are fair by the way, everyone gets educated, no one has to stay in their area. London is full of people who have moved for work, in fsct they make up a huge chunk of the.population.

I moved here for work and have never looked back, it was hard, it sometines sticks in my craw that Londoners are accused of sucking up all the resources by people who live n their home town and complain that they get nowt.

So what? Where do you think the coal went? Who do you think created the trade for goods made? The north got loads of investment for decades and still gets mor3 than it pays for.

Not everyone can move to London and pupil premiums are wildly unfair actually. A council which has suffered a 40% slash to their budget is not going to be able to provide as good an education as a council which has not suffered these cuts. It’s basic maths.

yeah, thats why it is important to listen to scientists, unions, medical groups, charities, academics- all of whom are against hard brexit which they call catastrophic - and mostly against brexit.

School budgets are independent of local councils budgets. It comes out of a seperatw pot.

Students in Wigan get above the national average spend per head.

Oh and yes London boroughs do get above the national average, however, this is mostly inner London where London weighting is higher, oh and they have more than double the national average level of pupil premium students.

You don't have to move to London. Manchester? Liverpool? Leeds? All growing cities

howwudufeel what I am getting at is that the disparity is not as straightforward as you make out. London has the highest rates of deprivation and inequality in the country. The only reason that London appears so wealthy to you is that some people there are very wealthy indeed but a lot are not. What Wigan has is not so much that it is deprived in an absolute sense, you have a much lower cost of living, it is much easier to get on the housing ladder, people who earn more than minimum wage can have a much better standard of living than their equivalents in London.

The issue is one of inequality of opportunity. The only reason many of us are in London is that Maggie Thatcher decided that all but high tech manufacturing could not compete with the rest of the world so she reengineered the economy, deregulated the city (and rendered Nigel Farage’s old boys club obsolete) and focused on services which centred on London. Successive governments have done nothing to create the infrastructure to prevent places like London and places like Oxford and Cambridge developing economically ahead of the rest of the country. That speed of development has actually created problems for the people who live there because housing and other costs have rocketed. However Brexit will just make matters worse since it will hit the parts of the economy that are actually thriving hardest. You don’t make the rest of the country richer by making London poorer, you make us all poorer.

The answer was to create the infrastructure to attract those thriving industry north, actually pretty easy in science and tech, link places like Barnsley Wigan Rotherham etc into the academic centres in Leeds Manchester and Sheffield then all those companies that are going to London Oxford and Cambridge will see the benefit of their employees having a better standard of living and be attracted there. Of course that means Rotherham, Barnsley and Wigan would be one “less english” as well as richer.

That is not going to happen now because Brexit is going to deprive those industries of the EU networks that are so important to them and damage the global connections those industries need, and the companies and their employees will go elsewhere in the world, indeed are already going elsewhere in the world.

The amount spent on 'infrastructure' be it roads, public transport and a 'basket' of all the other amenities is up to five times greater in parts of London compared to many Northern areas. If it were reduced to say 3:1 it would represent a massive boost to many areas outside London.
There are strategic failures in many areas, basically very poor governance which has been going on for many decades.

I honestly think you live in cloud cuckoo land Zipee. You can’t grasp the fact that education funding is fundamentally flawed and unfair. Your comments about people having the choice to move is chillingly similar to Norman Tebbit’s ‘ get on your bike’ comments.

To be fair Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and lots of other university cities have lots.of jobs in tech and research, and lots of growing industries.

Even the infrastructure stuff is interesting, Tyne wear metro, Sheffield tram, Manchester tram, Mersey Rail have al had investment over the years.

They still carry fewer passengers a year combined than the Victoria line.

I am appalled by your post Emilyontmoor.

Zipee You can’t be carried on trains that don’t exist or are constantly cancelled. You have no grasp of the politics of train travel in the NW. It has been chronically underfunded for decades. You really don’t have a single clue do you.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/10/northern-newspapers-demand-revolution-in-regions-treatment

you may want to read this Zipee and Emily. No doubt the editors of all these newspapers and wrong and you are right...

Public transport outside greater London is very patchy with bus routes cancelled and aged, unreliable trains as investment has not been made over the years.
Pathetically slow internet is another feature of huge areas outside major towns.

You cant expect the opportunities to appear on your doorstep!

Teachers salaries make up something like 70 percent of a schools costs. In outer London the NQT starting salary is 3000 more than in the rest if the country is 13 percent higher, in inner London where the big differences are its 20 percent more.

land costs more, paying the cleaners coste more. They have higher concentrations of children who are PP.

It is utterly meaningless to try to pin down what is 'English' and what isn't.

Well, apart from when it's used in the Cleese context, in which case it clearly means 'there are too many people who aren't white and don't have English as a first language.'

I really can’t believe you don’t grasp that not everyone can move to London. Firstly the house prices are prohibitively expensive. Secondly, people are tied to certain areas for family reasons. I couldn’t leave my dmum to look after my ddad on her own. There are thousands of other reasons. Norman Tebbit would love you!

paying the cleaners costs more

I didnt say they were wrong, note I said that the north needed more investment.

However it had had investment in transport in cities. Transport between London and other towns outside is just as bad as it is between northern towns.

TFL recieves no government subsidy and when it did it made up a fraction of its total revenue.
l

{Transport for London (TfL) is a local government body responsible for the transport system in Greater London, England. ... The rest comes from government funding (23%), borrowing (20%), Congestion Charge and other income (9%) and Crossrail funding (8%).}

I didn't say you had to move to London, grt it right.

Also evetything about operatinga school in London costs more. Hiring staff, business rates, getting contractors. Kids in Wigan get about 600 per head less than kids in most outer London boroughs, exactly the difference in cost of hiring an NQT.

London is also full of people who moved away from family like me!

Leclerc, the government funding listed there is from the GLA and raised from London Business rates. It isnt a central government grant.

London is a global capital city... and I feel proud of that! Londoners have a strong sense of identity. It's not Londoners who voted for Brexit or the Tories... not even the ones John Cleese would probably label 'properly British'

Zipee You did say move to London. You are also wrong when you say that transport from London to other areas is just as bad. It isn’t.