London an economic black hole that sucks in everybody and everything.

It is impossible to talk about  and the regional balance within Britain without addressing the London question. Postliberalism does not share the metropolitanism of metropolitan commentators who think of London as a separate, and superior, country held back by the all those yokels who live outside of London.  As someome who lived in London for most of his life and got out because of poor air quality, the children were always going to down with some cough or other, I find that the real provincials are the ones who go one about London as 'the' place.

London with its population of 8m and rising is almost eight times larger than the next largest city in the UK, this is a ratio more commonly found in Africa, Latin America and East Asia than in Europe or North America. This year about 45 per cent of all advertised graduate jobs are based in London. And the gap is getting wider. As Tim Hames points out: ‘As far as the professional middle class is concerned London has become a form of gigantic black hole dragging everything into it. In England at least it is often London or bust.’

As Hames says this is not a positive state of affairs even for those in the capital:

It makes London an incredibly expensive city in which to live and work, with the property market distorted by its status as an international enclave rendering housing close to unaffordable to most normal residents. It can make the rest of the country feel inconsequential. This is despite the fact that cities like Aberdeen, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and Oxford and world leaders in certain fields.

London remains central to the success of the British economy, so rebalancing must be carefully managed and must focus on building up the second tier cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow not on reducing the economic might of London. Relocating more national institutions, such as the House of Lords, from London to the regions should be one part of that.

One reason British politics has been significantly more liberal, economically and socially, than the country it speaks for is partly because politics is based in London. It is the least postliberal part of Britain. It has the highest proportion of Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’—highly educated people who believe in the myth of their own self-invention and autonomy (and superior wisdom). And it has the smallest proportion of rooted, middle income/status people, and especially white British middle-status people, some of whom have felt themselves squeezed out both financially and culturally between affluent professionals and the growing ethnic minority presence.

This also helps to explain why a disproportionate amount of the national agenda is taken up with issues of race and diversity, sex (and sexuality) equality, environmentalism, higher education, social mobility, political participation: the issues of concern to the London-based mobile, liberal, graduate class. The rest of the country cares about these issues too but they loom less large and are balanced by other more basic issues like debt and decent, non-graduate, employment. And, increasingly, the rest of the country has come to resent being lectured by London on these matters; all contributing reasons for Brexit,