London has lost its soul
National renewal must start with the capital
What is London for? It’s not a question that, for most of its millennia-long history, the city has ever needed to ask. London is older than England itself, its significance and purpose a raw fact of geography. The answers were all around, and visible everywhere. A traveller could just look about, and see goods being loaded and unloaded, ships being built, textiles, timber, meat poultry and fish being exchanged in bustling markets. London was a hub of commerce and exchange, skilled craftsmen settled there, the arts flourished, and it was a no less natural site for a centre of law, governance and politics. Industrialisation only made London more crucial in certain ways. Shipbuilding came and went, but factories and power plants took its place. The rise of law and finance were the logical products of a city that was increasingly the administrative heart of a global empire.
Look around London today, and you will find far fewer answers. Millions have gathered from around the world for the chance to live in London, and what they seem to do, by and large, is consume, and type on laptops. It’s certainly all I ever seem to do. As a writer, there is a basic dignity and consolation in feeling one is informing or entertaining a society engaged in useful labour — there’s a point to what you do, because there’s a point to what they do. You are trusting that you are adding to the pleasure and intellect of a vital, healthy culture. But as a writer in our modern age, I have the horrible feeling that we are all facilitators, entertainers, performers, manipulators, aggregators, and managers for one another, without ever hitting a bedrock of people who actually produce, trade or construct. Even the “real” economy seems to mostly consist in packing, loading, unloading, transporting and selling goods from overseas, or driving around, serving, and cleaning up after indolent laptop-bothering people like myself.
One corner of London has always reflected its original and ancient purpose. Meat has been traded in Smithfield Market since the 12th century. Though Smithfield has changed and modernised, with live animals being banished in the 19th century, the Victorians also built a magnificent covered market dedicated to butchery and wholesale, and it continued to flourish. Even today, there are dozens of small businesses that supply independent London butchers and restaurants. The simple happy fact of a portion of the city where physical goods are traded, and you can still witness the healthy rhythms of traditional urban life, was a reassuring factor in an increasingly alienating city. It was a rare remaining link to London’s past and identity. So of course it had to be severed by the City of London, a corporation whose purpose is now far removed from the messy business of real world trade. Instead of a market, Smithfield will likely now be turned into flats or retail outlets, as will the traditional fishmarket in Billingsgate, which will no longer be troubling the sensitive nostrils of neighbouring bankers.
The depressing reality of London is that behind the euphemism of it being a “service export centre”, it is increasingly not a city built around any kind of workers, even service workers, but rather a place that exists to service money, rather than support working people.
Foreign capital has flooded into London like poison, rendering a living city a sterile store of abstract value
Houses are not homes, but instead investments, to be traded, speculated upon and rented. Forget putting home ownership out of Londoners’ reach, the city’s denizens can’t even expect a modestly comfortable flat in exchange for the extortionately high rent. It is no coincidence. Foreign capital has flooded into London like poison, rendering a living city a sterile store of abstract value, rather than a place of physical exchange or human flourishing. There are more Indians who own property in London than Englishmen, and the country of Qatar owns more property in London than the Crown and TFL combined.
Foreign investment is treated as an unalloyed good by many policy makers, but there is all the difference in the world between a Japanese company opening a car factory, and overseas oligarchs buying up our housing stock. The former adds skilled workers, productivity and exports, the latter depletes our national assets, and makes it harder for business to open or professionals to rent and buy in London. Some international investors are genuine entrepreneurs creating meaningful partnerships that mutually enrich both parties, whilst others are little more than rent-seeking predators, despoiling the dying carcass of the British economy. As well as ruining life for Londoners, the money is often the product of graft and corruption, which we facilitate by warehousing ill gotten gains in the London property market.
It is not only cash that is parked in London, but hundreds of thousands of recent migrants placing intolerable strain upon its housing and infrastructure, further driving up the price of property. Many of these people are not contributing substantially to the city, and are in irregular work, seeking to exploit the benefit system, or are even involved in organised crime. They treat London as a VISA mill and a bank machine to send cash home from. Twenty two per cent of households in London live in socially rented accommodation, far higher than all but the most deprived areas of the country, yet only half of those households are economically active, and half are headed by an individual born overseas.
Ordinary people are squeezed from both sides, facing competition from a cheap, global workforce and exploitation by international capital and the super-wealthy. On both sides there is fraud and criminality, and the mass of people and money act in tandem to drive up rents and property values to new and insane heights, costs passed on not just to London, but the entire South-East.
The ultimate blame for this situation, however, resides entirely with our home-grown economic and political leadership, who have sold out Britain’s capital from under the British people. The City of London is shutting down the last vestiges of life, commerce and tradition, in favour of its real focus, which is the rendering a once-proud city nothing but a plaything for borderless capitalism. This last, cruel betrayal in a decades old story of decline and desertion has begun in the City, but will be completed in Parliament, which will have to legislate to end the City’s “centuries-old obligation to host markets”.
One day, I believe, we will have to reclaim London for England
Once the market is sold, and the law repealed, London will have completed its transition into a rootless, financialised, soulless city, and the Corporation will have severed its last link with the real and tangible economy.
One day, I believe, we will have to reclaim London for England, and create an economics of human flourishing rather than of usurious speculation and rent-seeking. We will have to fight bitter battles to break the grip of the property barons, and brave the wrath of the financial markets that increasingly dictate our collective fate. But there is no other path to salvation — if we are to rescue our country, we must first renew our capital.
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