Conservative Majority
- Thread starter SteveRuss
- Start date
I always thought manufacturing made the weath. The money made in London is by shuffling the stuff about.
Someone has to produce something first.
Someone has to produce something first.
Still daydreaming, London's wealth does not come from the rest of the country, most of it comes from overseas. Such little wealth that is made from the rest of the Britain is more than counterbalanced by the large areas that have to be carried by London all the time.
Read the article I linked you to. Even if London was independent with no income from the rest of the UK, London would still be immensely wealthy and most of the rest of the UK much poorer.
As for the criticism that London has no industry, as I pointed out, it did have loads and was a very industrial place until successive governments continuously stole our success by moving it all to needy regions.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter where the wealth comes from, only that it's made. London is successful and the notion that governments cause that is a nonsense, it's the reverse. Every time we create business and wealth it's taken from us and moved to the needy regions, that outflow has been continuous for more than 50 years now. When government attracts and subsidises foreign companies to set up in the UK, it's solely to the regions with never a penny or any inducement in London's favour.
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Read the article I linked you to. Even if London was independent with no income from the rest of the UK, London would still be immensely wealthy and most of the rest of the UK much poorer.
As for the criticism that London has no industry, as I pointed out, it did have loads and was a very industrial place until successive governments continuously stole our success by moving it all to needy regions.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter where the wealth comes from, only that it's made. London is successful and the notion that governments cause that is a nonsense, it's the reverse. Every time we create business and wealth it's taken from us and moved to the needy regions, that outflow has been continuous for more than 50 years now. When government attracts and subsidises foreign companies to set up in the UK, it's solely to the regions with never a penny or any inducement in London's favour.
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Only 8% of the UK economy is manufacturing, and it's not very profitable, far too much of it "bought" through subsidies. Financial income from overseas is just that, income we use to buy in from overseas all we need that we cannot supply ourselves with.
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That's simply not true of London, I'm surprised at how little you know about this. As I've said, London does not have income from elsewhere in the UK and sucks nothing from the rest of the UK.
London does not have the UK HQs of businesses based elsewhere in the UK. Take the car manufacturers, Nissan, Peugeot, Honda, BMW, Toyota, none have offices in London. The electronics companies like Sony for example, HQs elsewhere. Even Rolls Royce Aero Engines only have a London regional corporate office HQ for UK corporate business, basically the financial stuff. All their business offices are scattered elsewhere, even their defence division that one might think would be in London is in Bristol.
The HQs we have are mostly of foreign or one-time foreign companies and companies operating overseas, and even what we have the government keeps taking from us and moving them to the needy regions.
In my own borough the latest such loss is Swiss company Nestle persuaded to move it's HQ out, losing my borough almost a thousand jobs, a huge blow. Formerly my borough has had many such losses, we at one time had Dutch company Philips Electrical UK HQ and TV manufacturing and numerous smaller foreign and British company industrial operations.
At one time in the last sixty years London manufactured cars, vans buses, coaches and trucks, we made all our buses up to and including the Routemaster and our own London Underground trains. We had almost all the key coachbuilding companies like Duple, Park Ward, H J Mulliner, Hooper and Barker making luxury cars and coaches for the world. We even made aeronautical equipment and missile components and at one time I worked on the latter in inner London. All of it has been taken elsewhere by government persuasion and back door subsidies, and much of it since lost by those other areas. But we still have the UK's only mass production bicycle factory, Brompton, who have stubbornly refused to move out and export to the world from here.
Of course it's not only London that has suffered this, any area that dares to be successful can get hit the same way. The West Midlands has long suffered in the same way, from long ago when the Rootes Group were persuaded to shift Hillman Imp production to Scotland through to the recent persuasion that resulted in the BMW Mini made elsewhere, they've lost out. Luton too with it's successful Vauxhall company had the bulk of car production moved to Ellesmere Port, a needy area.
Of course we have the embassies in London, but that's peanuts income, London's £56 billions income from international financial services dwarfs such trifles.
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[quote="mike killay, post: 262159, member: 5185
London is only apparently wealthy because it sucks blood from the rest of the country.[/quote]
When I travel around London, apart from the obvious tourists, most people don't look rich to me. Most of the time the opposite seems to be the case.
London is only apparently wealthy because it sucks blood from the rest of the country.[/quote]
When I travel around London, apart from the obvious tourists, most people don't look rich to me. Most of the time the opposite seems to be the case.
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Cyclezee
Guest
Interesting read as always.
With regard to moving services out of London to "needy regions", it can't be ignored that those regions are usually much cheaper to operate from. Lower property costs. Lower business rates and a cheaper labour force. Who would operate a business that may realise no benefit from being in London when it is much cheaper to operate elsewhere.
Although those conditions are truths, almost all the companies were in fact "persuaded" to move out with threats, bribes etc, almost none showed any inclination to move until government got involved. Many struggled to stay in fact, and as I've just posted above, the odd ones like Brompton still refuse to budge. As Brompton's boss says, there's huge kudos gained in overseas markets from being made in London, and that can be worth the extra cost. And we didn't want to lose our self-manufactures of buses and tube trains, it made more sense to do that here where they were wanted.
Skill availability is important too, banking and other financial services don't want to move out either, since the right work force is based here in London. The ex-manufacturing and mining needy regions just don't have appropriately skilled work forces.
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Cyclezee
Guest
I'm just disappointed we didn't have an SNP candidate in Milton Keynes
Maybe next time
Maybe next time
It seems to be government interference each time. Politicians are people who think they know what's best for everyone else.
I remember the successful Leyland truck business being strong armed into taking on the BMC cars. Wedgie Benn I think did that one. BOAC loss making because the government insisting on which plane to use, BEA made money until the forced merger with BOAC.
I could go on but going on the bike instead.
I remember the successful Leyland truck business being strong armed into taking on the BMC cars. Wedgie Benn I think did that one. BOAC loss making because the government insisting on which plane to use, BEA made money until the forced merger with BOAC.
I could go on but going on the bike instead.
What is the use of cake if you can't eat it?Is there someone who doesn't want to have cake and eat it
I'm just disappointed we didn't have an SNP candidate in Milton Keynes
Maybe next time
It will be interesting to see if the SNP repeat this almost clean sweep for the Holyrood election in May next year.
I doubt they will repeat it for the next general election after five years of having to live up to expectations.
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Sure. The banking industry own their own part of the city and have their own appointed police force. If you wander around there taking pictures of buildings you start to get that East Germany feeling from the private security companies dressed up like British police officers telling you porkies about what rights you have in a public place. They have no reason at all to move out and there is nobody more powerful than them to tell them to do so. No one.
And if they are classed as a skilled financial work force that is unavailable from the rest of the uneducated country, then they will likely require an environment without scruffy poor people around them. The consequence of which requires them to pay a couple of million quid for a flat in a building that looks like an office block.
The docklands are full of banking and investment types as well. They're safe as they are in charge of this country when they want to be. Other than that, I suppose we must be being quite specific about the type of company you claim had no choice but to move out. I know and work for a few London companies that I don't believe have received any requests to leave. One of the worlds largest lighting companies moved to Birmingham for cost reasons and hold an office above a pub in the middle of London to have that "London, Paris New York" style moniker.
I remember a time (and maybe this is still sadly the case) that an 0207 number showed that a company was probably more successful than one with an 0208 number. Wow. What a sad little world we live in.
Maybe what the London financial sector really wants is a Qatar style system where little brown people are driven in from hovels outside the city who then work cleaning their apartment floors for either a pittance (or nothing quite often) for 14 hours a day and then get driven out again so these financial types can enjoy their chateauneuf du plonk without an unsuited reprobate in sight. Who knows. I do know though that we gave them £850,000,000,000 when they lost all the money. That does not sound like a very skilled workforce to me.
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They still make around £56 billions a year for Britain though, so not entirely stupid!
You don't seem well informed about the way in which government has acted to move out many companies, but I agree it's far from everyone. It started with the manufacturing sector and then spread to both many government functions and commercial organisations in some sectors. As you say, London's rising costs helped too, as has modern communications which remove much of the need to be in any particular location.
However, the impression of London that some in this thread seem to have is hopelessly outdated. Most of the large number of companies we used to have represented in London fifty and more years ago have either moved out, have been absorbed into larger companies, often foreign, or they no longer exist.
My own borough is not untypical. Fifty years ago it was packed with British companies and had a large manufacturing sector. Now we have very few British companies, none of any size, and manufacturing no longer exists at all, most of it moved away like our large commercial sector. Currently one of our largest office blocks, the former Nestle head office, is being converted into flats in the absence of any company big enough to need it as an office. That's also been happening to offices and commercial buildings elsewhere throughout London.
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I wouldn't move out Tony - looks like you could be soon living in the next newly developed Banking/ Insurance zone:
http://www.egi.co.uk/news/croydon-hq-for-metro-bank/
Local house prices should soar away
http://www.egi.co.uk/news/croydon-hq-for-metro-bank/
Local house prices should soar away