Like all such platitudes, the beauty of the Tory slogan is in its vagueness. Nevertheless we can try to sketch out where Britain, and London, may or may not be going wrong.
Unemployment is arguably the best way of measuring the economic wellbeing of a city, especially in London where ‘average’ earning figures mask a huge gap between high and low earners.
In leafier boroughs, such as Richmond, unemployment remains lower than 2%, even in this apparently biting recession. In more deprived areas, such as Tottenham and Tower Hamlets, the figure is nearly four times that, with almost 8% out of work.
Certainly this is no time for complacency, but people elsewhere in the UK probably look at London with envy. In post-industrial Britain, particularly the West Midlands and Wales, unemployment is as high as 11%.
It is in these areas of Britain where the word ‘broken’ seems most apt. The machinery that once drove the economy of much of the north of Britain has long ago ground to a halt, leaving a semi-functional service economy and lengthening dole queues. Even that most venerable of British companies, Cadbury’s, has fallen foul of the forces of globalisation.
So Londoners should be thankful of their relative prosperity – or should they? Even for those of us fortunate enough to be in work, housing is so expensive that even renting eats up a sizeable chunk of our income.
For those lucky enough to hole themselves up in the more affluent areas of town, things are quite all right. Good schools, low crime and decent local amenities are par for the course if you live in Kensington and the like. The flipside of this is that those who are least able to spend on housing find their poverty compounded by a litany of social problems.
But what alarms one about London is the proximity of affluence to destitution. Unlike Paris, where the poor are shunted out to the margins of the city, both physically and metaphorically, London’s princes and paupers live cheek by jowl.
As Nick Cohen pointed out in the Standard, there are people in Islington unable to afford £20 to send off a university application, living along streets where a
cocktail might set you back almost half that sum. It is this crazy disparity, rather than simple poverty, that makes it difficult to take David Cameron seriously when he says ‘We’re all in this together’.
To read much of the press, one might imagine we are in the midst of a murder epidemic, but the homicide rate in London has seen no significant rise in the past decade.
Conservative MP Chris Grayling (then the Shadow Home Secretary) once made an error with crime statistics that received far less media coverage than his comments regarding gay rights and B&Bs. Grayling got into a contretemps with Sir Michael Scholar of the UK Statistics Agency for his claims that crime had shot up under Labour, when the Agency’s figures suggested it had actually fallen.
Writing a year ago, Dr David Spiegelhalter of the Royal Statistical Society pointed out that our perceptions of a rising murder rate in London were largely a media invention.
“In fact the numbers have remained more or less stable”, said Spiegelhalter.
A quick comparison with the US shows London to have a much lower murder rate than New York, which itself is only 136th in the US’s most dangerous cities. What’s more, according to the British Crime Survey, the risk of being a victim of crime in 2009 was just over half that of being a victim in 1995.
But this is not taken on board by certain sections of the media.
Referring to the murder of 15-year old Sofyen Ghailan at Victoria station, Evening Standard columnist Sam Leith declared that this was ‘not a freak horror, but systemic’. In the same way as the Baby P murder or the ‘feral youths’ or Edlington, a few examples of unimaginable depravity are held up as mirrors of society, when in fact they are aberrant events.
The very reason that Leith wrote about Ghailan’s murder was because it was unusual, hence its newsworthiness. If teenagers were being mown down in their dozens, this murder might have passed with little comment – the fact is they are not. We continue to be outraged because murder and brutality are overwhelmingly the exception rather than the rule of our society.
Certainly Britain, and London, have their problems – disgruntled youth, high unemployment and sclerotic government to name just a few. But is London broken? Absolutely not – and anyone who tells us otherwise is probably spinning a line.
5 things to do if you know London is broken and needs fixing:
1. Help David, Gideon & Co. fix London. They may have massaged the figures a little, but you know it was just for emphasis. Sign up to support the London Conservatives and give them the tools to fix London. If you are a tax exile peer, why not give them some extra cash too?
2. Lobby T-May for higher sentences for London’s juvenile killers. Stop all those loony lefties who keep harping on about the rights of the child. You know we don’t want a replication of Doncaster in the capital. Or maybe you are the caring, sharing type? So help London’s delinquent children by clicking here.
3. Campaign for fewer bureaucrats and better pay for frontline workers. You may baulk at neo-liberal ideas about efficiency savings, but you cannot deny that all that extra NHS money has gone to administrators and not nurses.
4. Give up and emigrate. You love London, but you can love it even more offshore, in the same way that Lord Ashcroft and Sean Connery love their countries. How about here? If you can’t bear to emigrate, stay in Britain and move to the Outer Hebrides, it’s a relatively hoodie-free zone apparently.
5. Stop complaining and vote for the local people who can make a difference. Alternatively, put your money where your loud, brash, opinionated mouth is and start your own party. Click here for the form. With any luck, you’ll get more votes than Esther Rantzen. But then again, who wouldn’t.
5 things to do if you know London aint broke:
1. Click here for a list of the community initiatives that make London great.
2. Report the paper whose flagrant abuse of crime statistics most offends you. The PCC may be toothless, but at least it will get it off your chest.
3. You know that London is doing just fine, but a bit of lively debate doesn’t hurt. You don’t want to be complacent, but you don’t want piss-poor sensationalism either. Get involved in the measured and well-informed debate on www.brokenbritain.org
4. Were you one of the 15.5million people who voted against spending cuts in Britain this year? Let Melanie Phillips know that you are not an irrelevant minority, but the majority. Perhaps you should drop Nick Clegg a line too and remind him and London MP Vince Cable of their pledges to Londoners. That’s the last time you wobble in the ballot box and give a yellow cross.
5. How about some self-congratulatory navel-gazing? Wander round the streets of London and remind yourself of the great and the good who have lived and worked here. Click here for a list of London’s blue plaques. Or make your own here!
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