Poverty in London

14 Dec 2005

Evening Standard

Back in the nineteen eighties, when I was a new MP, I shared a taxi with a Scottish Labour colleague to some event or the other. We were not particularly friendly, so the journey passed in silence as we both looked out of the windows at the London cityscape. Suddenly he turned to me and burst out “The trouble with London is that you have all the jobs.” I was amazed. The last factory in Hackney (Metal Box) had just closed down. Then, as now, Hackney was in the top ten nationally for unemployment. And that was not just my reality; it was the reality of most of my London labour colleagues in and out of parliament. We were all active in, or represented, inner city areas with crippling poverty and unemployment. It was a shock to me that the rest of the Parliamentary Labour party saw London so differently.

It remains London’s biggest problem, that whilst Members of Parliament, top civil servants and opinion formers are all clustered here, their London is the glossy prosperous city of Whitehall, Westminster and Soho restaurants. It is not the London of ordinary Londoners and London’s poverty simply is not real to them.

It is not surprising then that a recent government survey reveals that London has the lowest employment levels, the highest child poverty rates, highest number of pensioners living in poverty and yet we subsidise the rest of the country by at least £20 billion. Decision makers feel justified in diverting Londoners money elsewhere because of the fixed view that we are prosperous and can afford it. But the survey by the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) shows how poor London really is. And the contrast with the very real wealth that does exist in London makes the plight of the poor even starker. Just four bus stops away from some of the grimmest estates in Hackney are the gleaming towers of the City of London where some city traders take home more in a year than some Hackney people can expect to earn in a lifetime. The astronomic rise in property prices in London, means that inner city boroughs like Hackney and Islington are becoming places where you either have to be very rich or very poor to live. This is an inherently unstable situation.

So what does it take to make Government ministers and top civil servants give Londoners back some of our own money to deal with the poverty on our doorstep?. Sadly a riot always does the trick. But it should not have to come to that. Maybe a more ingenious solution is called for. The European parliament moves regularly between Strasbourg and Brussels. Perhaps the Westminster parliament should move regularly between Peckham and Tower Hamlets. And if MP’s, civil service mandarins and the attendant hordes of lobbyists and spin doctors were then exposed to the London they never see, maybe then they would pay attention to poverty in the capital.



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