I found this interesting. It’s mainly about how Brexit has introduced extra red tape when dealing with Europe. The article says how the EU is the UK’s largest trading partner, with the value of trade being over double that of the next largest trading partner: the USA.
Here are some quotes:
The days of freedom of movement for people, goods, and services between the UK and its neighbours are long gone.
The British economy has lost out and British citizens and businesses suffer from greater bureaucratic botheration.
Nor has immigration into the UK gone down since leaving the EU. The numbers have actually gone up, with people from Commonwealth countries, including India, Pakistan and Nigeria, more than compensating for EU citizens who used to come and go.
I really think you’ve misunderstood the nature and benefits of “investment in London”.
You can point at crossrail and endless tower blocks as in estment, but these largely cater to a commuter class of stockbrokers from outside London. In the shires.
You seem aware of this, perhaps you’re not aware of the poverty figures for parts of London are genuinely shocking, even compared to other poor parts of the country, largely due to housing costs.
By accepting the media framing of this group , exploiting londoners for their own benefit, as “London” you are hurting our cause. Providing opportunity and ending squalor across the UK needs a focus on the people not how close they are to those benefiting.
I’ve already addressed how putting more investment into other areas of the country would directly benefit Londons housing situation due to it being such a over centralised hub for well paying jobs & Im fully aware London itself suffers from severe inequality.
However the budgets London & the South East gets for virtually everything are signficiantly higher than elsewhere in the country, I genuinely think that via investing in Britains secondary cities more (which compared to French & German secondary cities they are extremely underinvested in and unproductive) it’d benefit the entire country and serve to cool off the political radicalism that has been festering for a solid decade now.
Over centralisation on London is a well understood issue for the UK & we are a very unusual country by European standards for how centralised we are. Even the way the living wage is calculated is a bit unfair, there’s a special allocated “London” living wage due to high costs of living while other areas of the country such as Bristol have similar CoL expenditures but no preferential treatment in the living wage.
The transport network both road and rail is overcentralised around London even, all the major airports (with exception of Manchester) with decent numbers of destinations are also overcentralised.
The fact that London has the only signficiant underground system in the country is absolute insanity and a perfect representation of the issue (Yes I know the Weegies have one but its a tiny loop that hasnt been expanded for over a century).