Burnham will attack London
A grey horizon for the capital
Why are *some* young people moving to Australia and Dubai? Is Britain going to become like Ireland where only the especially indolent stay behind; where every town and city outside of Cork and Dublin is deprived of affluent young people (who enliven and enrich our lives)?
My suggestion for why emigration is happening is simple. Moving to a liveable part London is now an implausible for most people and having children there is impossible. Intelligent ambitious people who find they cannot live a decent life in London also find that there is very little point living in the UK. I will now illustrate this with some pairs of different landscapes, both rural and urban. I ask that you pick between the two photographs as to where you would choose to live, if you had the choice.
I hope what I have illustrated with these photographs is that when ‘Britain’ is compared to Australia there is a very clear winner. But Britain has London, which far outclasses any place in Australia including Sydney - which because of its size never be Global. There is a reason that you will encounter tens of thousands of Australians in London but nowhere else in the country.
In the City there is the acronym FILTH to describe second rate financiers who Fail In London and so must Try Hong Kong. This term is instructive as it underlies just how globally powerful the pull of our capital city is. Everybody, from Seoul to Buenos Aires knows that if you aren’t getting the Tube into work in the morning you are settling for second best.
I have never been to Australia nor Canada, nor New Zealand, but from a distance my understanding is that moving to any of these countries is the equivalent to ‘moving to the suburbs’ but doing so internationally. People move out there for a slower pace of life and to have a nice big house, maybe space for a dog or a car. It’s safer and the private schools are cheap. Salaries for skilled jobs are better. These are all reasonable desires, but it is ultimately settling for something less than the Metropole.
It is my view that the sort of person who has the self-starting nature necessary to move to Australia from somewhere like Sunderland would be better served by moving to a London which, if it was restructured slightly, could support these people’s ambition to live a ‘nice’ life. In order to do this, more ‘nice’ bits of London need to be made. The prescriptions for achieving this have been done to death in these pages but a novel political threat to the Capital is developing with the ascent of Andy Burnham which deserves discussion.
Andy Burnham is selling ‘Manchesterism’ as a settlement for devolution to enable growth in the regions. His argument for this is mostly positive as the moment, it is all Oasis and cheeky curry chips. Once Burnham is in power his main priority will be crushing Reform in the North of England. To do this Burnham will play a very divisive but effective populist card at his disposal which is to harness the anger and resentment that many northerners have towards London.
He will do this partly through framing (Farage is a privately educated southerner) but it could also take the form of much cruder redistributions reminiscent of his demand that the Opera be repatriated oop Norf. It could take the form of cannibalising infrastructure investment in London but it could also be symbolic changes which will disfigure the Great Wen thus satisfying Northern hatred. Parliament is falling apart and MPs/Lords are divided about whether they should leave the building while it is being reconstructed at colossal expense. What if Prime Minister Burnham decided now is the time to move Parliament to Stoke-on-Trent?
We cannot tolerate petty regionalism but we also cannot deny its effectiveness. Resentment towards the South was exploited very effectively during the New Labour years. Then, the memory of Margaret Thatcher was used to keep the North voting for a party which was encouraging mass immigration, legislating for Trans and tearing up cherished civil liberties. Careful mate, that southerner wants your cookie!
The reason that Burnham is dangerous is not that he will undo Mahmood’s reforms (which he has already u-turned on) – it is that he really is Labour’s last hope. Polanski’s support will collapse as even the ex-Corbynites are impressed by him. Burnham could do a bit of London bashing, have a media honeymoon during the ‘World Cup’ and then call an election this Winter. It is plausible, which is why it must be stopped.