HAS ANYTHING CHANGED FOR THE BETTER?
It's London vs Britain
The capital is the dynamic engine driving the UK. But the shires are growing weary of its irresistible force.
The genie is out of the bottle. One of the greatest ironies of the constitutional reform process is that the attempt to disperse power has created platforms from which different parts of the country can blast away at each other. The prejudices have always been there, of course. A.N. Wilson thinks of 'London as a City State with a number of boring and rather expensive appendages (known as England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) to which we have to be polite and which we are obliged, rather unwillingly, to subsidise, to ease the chips on their provincial shoulders'. But the prejudices are becoming politics: Trevor Phillips, when he was a candidate to become London's first directly-elected mayor, kick-started a debate about the level of subsidisation between London and the rest of the country, demanding that Scotland 'give back' £1-2 billion a year. The wars of distribution are likely to intensify once London has a mayor in place - and as the economic divide deepens.
Economic output is £13,000 per head in London, compared to a national average of £11,000. The gap between GDP per head in London and the rest of the country has increased sixfold in the past 15 years. The pay gap, already 30 per cent, is set to widen to 35 per cent by 2003 according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. House prices continue to soar in the capital. And with London's service-based, international economy booming, the level of subsidy from London to poorer regions is more than £20 billion a year - or £8,000 for every metropolitan household.
So while Britain complains about the political dominance of the capital, the capital moans about being used, in the London Evening Standard's phrase, as a 'giant cash machine'.
THE TROOF IS OUT THERE.
