
Has London succeeded at the expense of the rest of the UK? - porker
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-248d9ac7-9784-4769-936a-8d3b435857a8
======
sjclemmy
I live in Northern England, and this disparity has long been a source of
irritation to me. In the 19th century there was a reasonable balance between
north and south, mainly due to the wool and cotton industries in the North.

At some point in the last century that parity ended and moving to London to
pursue ones interest was the only way to further ones career. This created a
virtuous circle as far as London is concerned and a brain drain for the rest
of the country. The BBC's Evan Davies touches on some of these points in his
TV programme 'Mind the Gap'.

If you want to work at a decent tech company and work with like minded folk in
an inspiring environment, London is really the only answer.

The friends and family I have in London who have a similar education / skills
/ upbringing to me generally earn more and work for better companies but their
quality of life is nowhere near as good as mine with respect to general
living. The main trade off is the paucity of like minded friends who live near
me.

The price of property in this country is absurd and I find it very difficult
to see how the situation has not been gamed by the land owning moneyed /
political elite over the last 20 years or so. From personal experience there
was a 4 fold increase in property prices between 1997 and 2005. There was not
a corresponding increase in wages. Who does this benefit?

I'll end with a joke: [http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/northerner-
terror...](http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/northerner-terrorised-
london-by-saying-hello-20151001102473)

~~~
simonh
We're doing it to ourselves. We have an effectively fixed stock of housing,
but everyone wants to live in a better house. So we're continuously bidding
against each other, driving up the cost of houses trying to move up the
ladder. Government subsidies intended to make cheaper houses more affordable,
to help people get on to the property ladder, just mean that new entrants into
the housing market can afford to bid even more against each other for those
houses than they would otherwise. That just drives the cost of low-end housing
up even more.

~~~
sjclemmy
It's the fixed stock of housing thing that bugs me. There is no shortage of
space in this country. There are ineffective planning laws and most of the
land is owned by offshore trust funds controlled by the wealthy few. /rant.

------
mavdi
It's funny how the article considers overpriced housing, zero social mobility
and a conversion of once a great city into a luxury den for super rich a
success.

The very people London needs, nurses, doctors, programmers, firefighters,
artists, carers etc are leaving the capital. And not to suburbs, a lot of them
to other European cities.

~~~
vacri
What do these 8.5 million super-rich londoners do, if _doctors_ can't afford
to rub shoulders with them!?

~~~
gutnor
There is a lot of social estates in London. There are area like East Dulwich
where you are either living in the estate and pay fuck all (while you
qualify), or you can afford 1 million+ to buy a place.

So that's a weird mix where the rich lives with the poor, but the middle class
is excluded. ( well, from time to time, one of the estate flat goes on sale
for between 300 and 400K which is somewhat accessible to middle class, but
then less than 20% of the housing on an estate are privately owned via right
to buy scheme, and most of the time the original owner are still living in as
they can't really buy better anywhere else )

edit: note that for nurse, there are help scheme available via key worker
shared ownership ( you buy a share and rest the rest ). So you have more
chance to find a nurse living in the center than a doctor.

Also note that the problem comes from the price explosion of private housing
over the last decade. 10 years ago, where I was looking, there were estate,
shared ownership (50% of 200K) and private properties starting 200K and up.
Now, you have estate, share ownership (25%!! of 600K) and private for 600K and
up. The salaries are about the same and the level of help to access government
assistance hasn't changed much either. So you can progress from poor to lower
middle class, but then there is huge gap to be able to afford your place.

~~~
notahacker
Strictly speaking the middle class aren't excluded so much as expected to
follow the young professional norm of sharing a property with other renters,
paying a little more per month for their bedroom than they would to rent whole
house in most other UK cities. So the students and junior doctors are fine,
but doctors contemplating starting a family are probably looking to commute in
from somewhat less expensive towns on rail lines into London.

~~~
gutnor
Even more strictly speaking, that's a trend.

In my area, the cheapest you can find still in inner London, the average price
of a 2 bed is 300K and new flats are 500K and up. All but 1 landlord in my
building bought their flat since 2007, all the rest bought them between 60K
and 80K when they were built in 2000.

That's the tricky bit when thinking about fixing the problem. Even though only
people that can afford 300K and more can move in, the majority of private
landlords are of modest means and that's going to be that way for decades.

------
branchless
Very weak. Briefly touched on something of substance here:

> Financial regulation in New York was far stricter than in London, where the
> relatively light-touch oversight regime proved attractive to investors.

The UK is playing regulatory arbitrage. They let banks come and do whatever
they want because the UK is going down and they are desperate (and corrupt).

London is controlling the rest of the UK because the banks are there and it is
the banks, not our government, who decide how much money is issued. They are
drug pushers and The City is a cancer.

~~~
ig1
I don't think you understand how finance work, the UK has one of the best
financial regulatory regimes in the world, market participants want to be in
London not because it's unregulated but because it's well regulated.

If you have too much regulation you stiffle innovation and development, but
too little means that investors don't trust institutions with their money. So
it's a trade-off between the two factors.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "I don't think you understand how finance work, the UK has one of the best
> financial regulatory regimes in the world"

If it's that well regulated, why did the subprime mortgage crisis hit us so
hard (compared to the countries that escaped relatively unscathed)?

~~~
dagw
The regulation was optimized for making the normal case as efficient as
possible, not for mitigating the worst case.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Yet other countries avoided the bad deals, how did they manage to do that?

There are a number of countries that experienced no recession after the
subprime crisis... Australia, Brazil, China, India, Poland, etc... If the UK's
financial markets were well run, why did they suffer?

~~~
dagw
They where well run from the point of view that they made finance fast, simple
and safe for a regulatory stand point for the companies involved. This has
nothing to to do with insulating the wider economy from the folly of those
financial institutions.

~~~
ZenoArrow
"This has nothing to to do with insulating the wider economy from the folly of
those financial institutions."

In that case that's where we differ, because that's certainly what I'd expect
a country to be guarding against to earn the 'well run' status.

------
simonbyrne
If you include commuters, London's population is much larger than 12.5%:
approximately 14 million people live in the "commuter belt" [1], which would
put it at 21% (and a lot more people commute from even further, myself
included).

Still, London has nothing on Seoul, whose metro area encompasses 49% of South
Korea's population.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_commuter_belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_commuter_belt)

------
stevetrewick
tl;dr: We may never know as the article doesn't address the question, choosing
instead to list the author's favourite reasons why London is so awesome. I beg
to differ, personally. Poor air quality, overcrowding and hopeless mobile
infrastructure put it low on my list of desirable places. If your idea of
'culture' is state subsidised opera and looting then maybe London is for you,
but there are superior and more diverse cultural offers around the UK. YMMV.

Anyhoo, a more cogent statement of the question the article poses might be
'London has recently greatly benefited from globalisation in ways the rest of
the U.K. has yet to duplicate, why ?

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
TLDR its "I dont want to go to Salford"

The BBC to curry favor and to save money and screw people on pensions moved a
load of its shows to salford in Manchester.

You do understand thats why Dr Who and other shows are made in wales.

~~~
rjsw
There are plenty of nice places to live in Manchester.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Well ill give you Alderly edge as long as you don't mind having footballers as
neighbors.

~~~
rjsw
Have you been reading glossy magazines ?

------
throwaway049
"32,000 businesses were created in one modish postcode, EC1V"

I suspect a big part of this is businesses being registered to accountants'
addresses, and people registering as self-employed many of whom work for a
single 'customer'.

~~~
Hansi
Yes correct, I actully lived in EC1V, there are not a lot of businesses there.
But there a whole lot of businesses all over the UK registered with a
'registered office address' with
[https://www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk/](https://www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk/)
. Including me when I was running my own company (contracting business, rental
agreement where I lived forbade using address as registered office address).

------
kraftman
That's a whole lot of scrolling just to read an article

~~~
branchless
It's the new BBC: looks nice, almost no content.

------
IkmoIkmo
In many ways London isn't just a centre for the UK, it's also a centre for
Europe. i.e. if we assume a natural tendency for most young people who are
able to want to move to a more metropolitan area, then London is pretty much
in the list of destinations for all European countries in a way that virtually
no other city is to that extent, and it has to do with language.

For example I'm in the Netherlands in my early twenties. I know pretty much
3-4 people whose German or French is good enough to consider studying or
working in say Paris or Berlin. Compared to that I can easily name 100 of my
peers whose English is good enough to study or work in the UK. So if they list
their destination choices, it's basically Amsterdam & London miles ahead of
anything else, and then come some Dutch cities like Utrecht or Rotterdam or
Haarlem. Paris and Berlin are sort of on the list, but with the caveat of
either 1) having to take a job that's way below what you could have had in the
Netherlands or UK, a job where language isn't important, e.g. waiting tables
when you have a Master's in marketing, because landing a marketing job on your
level in German or Spanish or Italian or French is just not doable without
knowing the language very well. 2) investing a few years into mastering the
language, a significant (opportunity) cost.

Of course there are exceptions, like international English-speaking
companies/jobs in France, but you'll find most jobs in Germany require German,
in France requires French, in Spain requires Spanish, same for university
education (although English programmes are rapidly on the rise, particularly
at the Master's level and in certain fields like business schools), and
obviously not everyone in Europe speaks fluent English, but if you look at the
ratios, language should play a major factor.

Either way, at the end of the day young people in say Spain either choose
Madrid or Barcelona or a few other cities like Sevilla/Valencia, or London. In
the Netherlands they choose Amsterdam, a few smaller cities, and London. In
France they choose Paris, maybe Marseille or Lyon, and London. etc etc.

In effect, London is the top destination city for the EU, a union of 500
million people who require no visa or permission or anything like that to move
and work anywhere else in the EU including London, and 40% of them speak
English as a second language. Every other city is either not the top dog (e.g.
Liverpool), or excludes hundreds of other millions of Europeans straight away
on the basis of language (e.g. any city in the Netherlands (99% of EU doesn't
know Dutch as 2nd language), Germany (86% of EU doesn't speak German as 2nd
language), Spain (93%), France (86%), Italy (97%) etc). Then add to that a
similar language-driven attraction from the US, Asia, middle east, who must
all be rich as they'd need a visa, and you get this ridiculous demand for
London fuelling network effects and feedback loops. The demand has led to some
pretty perverse mass-gentrification as of late and to a large extent it's from
natural (language, in particular) causes I think rather than very specific
British policies which obviously also play a role but not a dominating one I
think (outside of course the concept of the EU which plays a huge role in not
discriminating between any member of the EU and prevents the UK from just
having to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the UK and
forces it to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the EU,
but that's an EU policy not a UK or London policy).

~~~
thorin
This is an excellent post, but in the experience of colleagues I've had in the
EU doing software development, BA, management etc is that for most jobs with
international companies in whichever city they are able to work in English. It
does happen that a lot of the jobs are in London, but also Switzerland
(banking), Brussels (EU admin), and quite a bit in Scandinavia also (generally
not EU I know).

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely
really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been
unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern
some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so
much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and
research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English,
too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be
discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a
national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't
disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic
affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they
used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for
decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you
couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for
example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job
although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at
foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still
beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed.

Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts
about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and
peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than
their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to
improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with
France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private
schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of
it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively
multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority)
was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was
locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was
relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling
50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that
radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-
distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know
the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the
world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population
starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was
for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now
it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly
imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our
first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the
Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French
first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly
personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare
up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people
now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for
the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian
first.

Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but
then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking,
there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually
anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few
times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being
internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left
out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what
you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of
customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something
about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the
Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big
complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try
a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if
you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch
friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's
still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I
still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow
and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for
France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go,
Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except
translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the
difference is pretty big.

------
biokoda
firefox reader view actually makes this article readable. First time I've
needed it.

------
guard-of-terra
In Latin American countries, 1/3 of respective country's population live in or
near the capital. The countries in question are already pretty sparse by
european standards - doesn't prevent population from skipping home even more
and coming to capital, both best and worst.

Seems like UK implemented the same principle.

------
billybofh
Brings back to mind the row about Eddie George's comments :
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/197995.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/197995.stm)

------
sinzone
Same problems in SF. City booming, high cost of living, not enough houses for
everyone.

~~~
simonh
I wonder under what circumstances do those three things don't go together?

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
In San Francisco it's a ridiculously low density of building.

~~~
Kurtz79
It should be even worse in London, where outside of the very center most
buildings are single family houses (with garden!), unlike most other European
capitals, where the most common living spaces are flats in high rise
buildings.

------
ilurk
I'm an european citizen who just moved to London and I can attest that is
insane trying to find a room in London. A room! I'm not even talking about a
house.

It's so complicated that there are flatmatting speed dating events. I've been
to 5 or 6 now and the ratio is like 15:1.

There are even ads on the tube for websites with that purpose.

I've spent more than 2 weeks as a full time job! trying to find a place is at
walking distance (0-15m) from a tube station. Any! tube station. And there are
a lot of them.

Finally settled with long term Airbnb room. Which was what I should have done
in the first place!

750£ for a room, which is on par with what is being offered in non-Airbnb
sites.

To put it in perspective the average salary in London is £35k, which gives ~
£2,240 liquid per month. A studio costs you between 1k and 1.5k. Add bills,
council tax, transportation (which is quite expensive), and you don't end up
with much at the end of the month.

If you're emigrating to London and don't have a job and no friend to help you
– despite having money – go with Airbnb.

If you insist on ignoring that advice, then please avoid agents like the
plague! They'll ditch appointments making you waste 2h, ask for 12 months
upfront, and leech their 250£ commission from you for basically doing nothing.

In the recent years there has been more people moving into London and fewer
houses being built. London has a housing problem and the Mayor should fix it.

Right now we have a generation of young people in their 20s to early 30s
living in houses of 3 to 6 people. This is just nonsensical to me.

If you are unable to have your own life in order then how are you supposed to
go further and do things like constitute a family. Hence the birth rate
decline and the need for a crazy influx of immigrants. In the name of what?
Banks and real estate?

[https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20in%2...](https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20in%20London%202014%20-%20Final.pdf)

~~~
harryc2011
I assume that you mean any tube station within Zone 1 because otherwise this
is just not true. For 1.5k you can rent a 2 bed flat in Zones 2-3 and get much
more than this further away if you're willing to flatshare. I have a friend
who shares a 4 bed in Morden and pays something like 650pcm all in.

~~~
acrooks
That seems a bit high to me. I pay £650/month all-in for a room in a three-bed
just around the corner from Stockwell station.

Granted, my room is small, and the only real common area is the kitchen. But
the only thing I need in London is a bed and a shower, I'm spending most of my
time not-at-the-flat. So it feels like the inflection point between location
and price.

------
seanhandley
Yes.

------
vegabook
What a beautifully presented article. So beautiful, in fact, that I didn't
feel like reading the text.... I just wanted to move on to the next picture.

------
edsykes
it's not rendering properly on chrome: Version 45.0.2454.101 (64-bit) on OSX

~~~
d_j_s
Yep:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8g3HU3qENs&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8g3HU3qENs&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
iliaznk
same here

~~~
parsnipsumthing
Me three

------
venomsnake
Well ... London real estate is a textbook case or resource curse. You cannot
expect anything different.

------
PythonicAlpha
A success that is based on basically gambling and helping super-rich people to
avoid taxes, is moral bankruptcy.

Even without believing in a universal power, one can only hope, that such an
endeavor (of the British government since Thatcher) will ultimately collapse.

~~~
branchless
Can't believe this is down-voted. Clearly by people who are not in London
having the life squeezed out of them as they toil for usurers who are in
complete control of the money supply.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
To those that downvote my post without reading it: You can downvote this post,
but not the truth -- because one day it will stand behind your own neck!

\--

The problem, IMHO is, that many educated people still don't see what is
happening in real life. They dream the capitalistic dream of never ending
wealth -- but capitalism never was crafted to make all people happy and it was
even not crafted to make the diligent people happy, but it was crafted to make
a few random people happy by taking from the rest.

Capitalism might be the best system crafted by humankind, but it is still a
system, that is not sustainable and in today's form it brings us sooner or
later back to the dark ages of industrialization.

You can see it first in the developing countries, where communities exist,
where big corporations come, take the water sources away from the people and
sell the water with big profits to the better of people in the big cities.

Days will come and have already come, that also in the western countries, many
people (will) see, how capitalism is destroying those which created the wealth
to give even more to those which own the wealth.

~~~
hiram112
I've noticed that there are two groups that downvote posts like this on both
tech forums and in general:

1) 25 year old software guys making $100K while their friends are at half
that, possibly living at home.

2) Older people (i.e. Boomer generation).

The software guys in their 20's are doing alright - for the moment. In 10
years, they'll have hit the glass ceiling due to offshoring and H1Bs, while
they're friends in marketing and business will have caught up in pay, and
won't be nearly as disposable due to globalization in tech. Living in a shared
apartment with the bro's won't work either, when kids, wife, etc. are taken
into account.

The boomers, OTOH, really don't understand how things are much more difficult
for younger generations. They had it made, and anyone who doesn't have what
they got must be lazy and entitled.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
You are very likely right in my opinion. There are still very many people,
where the arguments that where spread from the Reagan/Thatcher era on, stick.

It is a seducing thinking, to have a simple explanation for the difficult
questions in life, eg.: Why do people earn differently? It is so simple and
seducing to be just able to say: "Hey, the others are just not diligent enough
or not smart enough. The African/South-American people are just to corrupt and
that is the reason, most of them live in poverty!"

Once I also belonged to those people that would have downvoted my posts,
because I believed in the system. Today, several years later, I see the
outcomes and also where this is leading us to. I also see, that there are no
such simple answers to the questions and that exist.

The problem is, that I get the impression that humanity might not learn in the
long term. We already had the industrialization era, where we thought,
industry will make the world a better world, but it made the world a horror
for so many people. We already had all these simple explanations -- but
education does not stick, not more than 50 years.

What really haunts me, is that those politicians that harmed their countries
most, are often those which are still the most popular ones. Those that really
made a difference (or tried to) are forgotten much to fast.

Thank you very much, for your answer!

