Traducing London - politics in the age of pretending

The UK won't prosper and grow unless its leaders support its capital city, yet none of them seem keen on the idea

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It’s a year since a general election that brought a blessed end to government by culture war division, political game-playing and the feeding of “island nation” self-delusion. And yet Great Britain’s Great Pretending continues.

Yes, a stumbling Labour administration has its welcome long game, hard truths side, with its combination of fiscal rules, investment spending and emphasis on economic growth. But implementation of its Plan for Change has so far eschewed any reforming challenge to the vast populist fiction that London is nothing but a problem for the rest of the country rather than absolutely key to its renewal.

What is so very hard about devising a programme for national recovery than recognises the contribution that will have to be made by the nation’s capital city? It is, after all, a contribution that already includes Transport for London creating employment from Goole to Glasgow, London restaurants buying leeks from Lincolnshire and fish from Grimsby, and the Central London generating 10 per cent of the UK's economic output – a contribution without which lights would go out all over the rest of the UK.

Last year, London was named the world’s most student-friendly city for the sixth successive year. Last month it was found to be the best region at providing opportunities for its poorest children. Last week, it was named the world’s best city for the tenth time in a row. And yet the response of the Labour government to the successes of this mostly Labour-voting place has not been to applaud them, vow to sustain them and work out how best to spread them across the land, but to make a show of saying it will curtail them.

First came Rachel Reeves’s endorsement in her Spending Review of the highly contestable lament that the Treasury’s Green Book has had a built-in pro-London bias. Next, recycling Conservative “levelling up” hot air, came the government’s industrial strategy, with its repeated emphasis on projects “outside London and the South East”.

Now, London local government, much of it on its knees due to the costs of social care and homelessness, shudders at Labour signalling a shift of council funding towards what the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinks will be poorer areas in the urban North and Midlands. Has some Whitehall algorithm decided that their access to good schools and public transport and their geographical proximity to high productivity jobs means the have-not kids of Newham and Tower Hamlets must be rich?

In fairness to London MP Sir Keir Starmer and his team, their traducing of London is a display of tender of appreciation compared with the unending, obsessive denigration of the city by the increasingly desperate Conservatives and others on the hard Right with whom they are frantically competing.

Assorted Donald Trump tribute acts ranging from “Westferry Bob” Jenrick to sundry twits from GB News have maintained the same Tory attack lines on the capital that brought them nothing but ridicule and contempt during elections last year.

To the already failed charge that a once great capital has sunk into a crime-ridden decline – and all because of Sir Sadiq Khan, apparently – has been added the emboldened insinuation that London’s supposed descent into Hell is due to its being infested by people who aren’t properly British. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, despite representing a constituency in Croydon, is deeply immersed in this sewer.

Some of Philp’s fellow London Tories also believe that impersonating Nigel Farage will do more to help than hinder them in next year’s borough elections. Judging by last year’s mayoral contest, which saw their woeful, Reform-applauding candidate crushed, they need to think a little harder, if only for their own sorry sakes.

But both of the country’s biggest political parties would do well to refrain from, in their different ways, casting the UK capital as a Bad City to be disciplined and derided. London doing well and rest of the country doing the same are complementary goals, not competing choices. I cannot believe that Chancellor Reeves does not agree. Misrepresenting London as a lawless urban jungle, as do today’s Conservatives and those they see fit to mud wrestle with, is parasitic and unpatriotic.

There’s not a nation on Earth that wouldn’t be delighted to have a true World City, one recognised and revered around the globe, within its borders. Will our political leaders recruit London to the cause of improving all British people’s lives, or will they keep colluding in the appeasement of low nationalism and validation of baseless grievances that fuel anti-London sentiment and drag everywhere else down? Will they acknowledge and nurture London’s great strengths? Or will they carry on pretending?