Mr Johnson is a very clever man, classically trained and a highly skilled rhetorician.
But then so was Enoch Powell. In the 1960s, my (politically Liberal Party) English teacher had us précis and critique the latter's "Rivers of blood" speech and when coldly analysed it could be seen for the meretricious, tendentious and inflammatory propaganda that it was.
Public speaking is not at all the same as logical argument. It is about persuasion rather than a path to the truth. Socrates criticised the rhetoric-teacher Gorgias for that reason, saying, as Wikipedia puts it, "Morality is not inherent in rhetoric and that without philosophy, rhetoric is simply used to persuade for personal gain."
Clearly the speech of a couple of days ago was yet another stab at demonstrating why Boris should be the Conservative Party's leader in due course, and it is not impossible that some of what he said was more a twitch of the skirt to his audience than a platform in which every plank would remain should such a promotion come to pass; but this is all the more reason to examine his publicly espoused ideology.
Whether you are for or against capitalism, inequality, globalism, Mrs Thatcher or Mr Johnson himself, I invite you to study BoJo's argument, extract the relevant logical points and assertions of fact, and see for yourself what principles it proposes and whether, when drily dissected, it stands to reason.
(The text is from the Daily Telegraph of 28 November 2013.)
"The amazing thing about the funeral of Baroness
Thatcher was the size of the crowds, and the next amazing thing was that they
were so relatively well behaved. The BBC had done its best to foment an
uprising.
With habitual good
taste, they played Ding Dong the witch is dead on taxpayer-public radio. Asked
to find some commentators to give an instant reaction to the death of Britain’s
greatest post-war prime minister – an event that was not exactly unforeseen
–they reached instinctively for Gerry Adams and Ken Livingstone, two of her
bitterest foes – if you exclude the Tory wets, that is.
As her cortege wound
its way from St Brides to St Paul’s there were a few people so stupid that they
heckled the mortal remains of an 87 year old woman. A few turned their backs.
Some wore twerpish Guy Fawkes masks or carried signs saying“Boo”. But the mass
of humanity was on her side, and when the dissenters erupted they were swiftly
drowned by cries of shhh or calculated volleys of applause.
I know all this
partly from media accounts and partly because I walked through the crowds and I
saw how various her mourners were. There were some tweedy types and some suited
thrusters, and people who would generally not look out of place at a Tory party
conference.
But there were also people from all over London, immigrants
of every race and colour – people that the BBC might not have marked down,
perhaps, as natural Thatcherites – and yet who had come to pay their respects
to a woman who spoke to them and spoke for them as no other politician has
done.
The Thatcher backers commanded the crowd, and some young
people were frankly taken aback. I read an excellent blog post by Lucy Sheriff
pointing this out.
She interviewed two
students, from UCL, who had plainly come hoping for a bit of the old G20-type
argy-bargy. "We are pretty surprised at the lack of protesting," said
one of them.
"Considering she
was such a divisive figure there's been very little on that front."
"And,” the
second one admitted, “we're a bit disappointed."
Well it is easy to see how anyone who had been exposed to
the educational curriculum in most UK schools would form a low opinion of
Margaret Thatcher. Look at the questions they set for politics A level. I have
the papers for the last couple of years.
“The industrial
disputes of the 1980s were primarily the result of Mrs Thatcher’s desire to
destroy the power of the trade unions.” (45 marks).
“Decline in support
for the Conservatives and their continued electoral unpopularity were due to
the legacy of Margaret Thatcher” (45 marks);
“Margaret Thatcher’s
achievements as Prime Minister in the years 1979 to 1990 were limited” (45
marks). And so on.
I wonder how many candidates got 45 marks by dissenting
vigorously from any of these ludicrous assertions? For millions of poor
misinformed students she is simply a name to hiss – a byword for selfishness
and bigotry; and yet I don’t blame young people.
All they have to go
on is Russell Brand and the BBC and what their teachers tell them. They weren’t
around in the 1970s. I was, and I remember what it was like and how this
country was seen. Our food was boiled and our teeth were awful and our cars
wouldn’t work and our politicians were so hopeless that they couldn’t even keep
the lights on because the coal miners were constantly out on strike, as were
the train drivers and the grave-diggers, and the man who was really in charge
seemed to be called Jack Jones.
I remember how
deserted London seemed, as people fled to Essex or elsewhere, and the stringy
grass and the spangles wrappers and the bleached white dog turds in the park,
and the gust of Watneys pale ale from the scuzzy pubs.
I even did a painting
to express my feelings about this country. It is modelled on the old
advertisements you used to find at Taunton station – “Welcome to Taunton, home
of Van Heusen shirts”. My landscape was a bleak and uninviting vista of the
white cliffs of Dover, in the rain, with a few runty-looking gulls.
The caption said,
“Welcome to England, home of the economic crisis.” I produced this meisterwerk
in January 1975, so you can see that I was already a pretty irritating 9 year
old.
Four years later
things were even worse as Red Robbo paralyzed what was left of our car industry
and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of
discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister’s
Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper
in blankets for extra insulation.
In March that year
Sir Nicholas Henderson was retiring from Paris and writing his traditional
valedictory letter to the Foreign Secretary. “Our economic decline has been
such as to sap the foundations of our diplomacy”, he lamented.
“Today we are not only
no longer a world power, but we are in the first rank even as a European one.”
Two months later Margaret Thatcher had won her first majority, and began the
process of reversing that view of Britain, in this country and around the
world. In 1981 she took on the expert opinion of 364 economists who wrote a
pompous letter to the Times, calling for a U-turn on her budgetary policies;
and she routed them by delivering a supply-side revolution in Britain whose
benefits we enjoy to this day.
In 1982 she showed
positively Churchillian pluck by deciding to tell the Americans and the
Peruvians to stuff their peace plan, and she sent the navy half way round the
world on a spectacularly risky venture; and by the end of the year Galtieri was
gone and the military junta was no more, and the principle of the Falklanders’
right to self-determination had been vindicated.
In 1983 she took on
Neil Kinnock and gave Labour an epic drubbing. In 1984 she squared up to the
miners all right – but she didn’t provoke the confrontation, to answer the A
level question. She was facing a challenge from a Marxist demagogue who had no
real interest in the welfare of his miners and who had refused even to call a
ballot before a strike whose avowed purpose was to bring down the elected government
of the country.
She took on the
European Community over UK contributions to the budget – and won. in 1986 she
took on the member for Henley (always a risky venture) over some question about
helicopters; and though she won that round on points, she sowed the seeds of
her future destruction.
By the time she was
eventually felled by her own MPs – cravenly hoping that they would save their
own seats – her achievements were not limited; they were colossal, and they
were in many cases irreversible. She had introduced millions of people to the
satisfaction of owning their own home; she had widened share ownership
immensely; she had tamed the power of the unions and she had given back to
management the power to manage.
She had also done
something less tangible and far more important: she had changed the self-image
of the country. To grasp what she did, you have to remember how far we felt we
had fallen. Our country – Britain - used to rule the world – almost literally.
Of the 193 present
members of the UN, we have conquered or at least invaded 171 – that is 90 per
cent. The only countries that seem to have escaped were places like Andorra and
the Vatican City. In the period 1750 to 1865 we were by far the most
politically and economically powerful country on earth.
And then we were
overtaken by America, and then by Germany, and then we had the world wars – and
we ended up so relatively weakened that the ruling classes succumbed to a deep
spiritual morosity that bordered on self-loathing, and we gave in to the
reverse of the fallacy that gripped the Victorian imperialists.
The Victorians were
so vain as to believe that because they had managed to extend their dominions
so far, and because the map was pink from east to west, that this must somehow
reflect the reality of divine providence: that God saw a special virtue in the
British people, and appointed them to rule the waves.
And because they had
grown up reading such tosh the post-war establishment drew the logical but
equally absurd conclusion that the shrinking of Britain must also represent a
moral verdict on them all, but in this case the opposite – that we were now
decadent, and that decline had set in with all the ineluctability of death
watch beetle in the church tower.
Thatcher changed all
that. She put a stop to the talk of decline and she made it possible for people
to speak without complete embarrassment of putting the “great” back into
Britain. And she gave us a new idea – or revived an old one: that Britain was
or could be an enterprising and free-booting sort of culture, with the salt
breeze ruffling our hair; a buccaneering environment where there was no shame –
quite the reverse – in getting rich.
She transformed the
idea of Britain, the schwerpunkt, the mission statement – from sick man of
Europe to bustling and dynamic entrepot. Nowhere was that transformation more
extraordinary than in London.
The other night I was
sitting next to the great director and producer Stephen Daldry, who did such an
imaginative job with the Olympic ceremonies, and so helped with the most
amazing global advertisement this country has ever seen.
“What’s going on?” he
said. “I have just been to Brazil, and all they can talk about is London,
London, London. The whole world wants to come here. What’s it all about?” He
seemed genuinely amazed; so I mumbled some discreetly self-aggrandising answer
about how we were all working very hard to promote the capital abroad, and only
afterwards realised what I should have said.
It is this same
Daldry, after all, who was responsible for giving British kids their most vivid
and terrifying image of Margaret Thatcher – the evil termagant from Billy
Elliott. It was the cast of Billy Elliott the musical who had decided to keep
singing one of their biggest hits – in which everyone prays for the death of
Margaret Thatcher – on the very day she was laid to rest.
Had I been thinking
faster, I should have pointed out that Margaret Thatcher laid the foundations
of the prosperity the city enjoys today. It was she who went for the Big Bang
in 1986, unleashed the animal spirits of the Essex men and women who mingled
with ever growing numbers of suave American and European bankers and restored
London to its Victorian eminence as the financial capital of the world; and it
was that 1980s boom in the city that financed the restaurants and the tapas
bars and the arts world, including the musicals; and it was that change in the
quality of life in London that brought people back to the city.
We forget how far
London had shrunk by the time she became prime minister – down from 9m in 1911
to 6.9 m by 1981. It is now back up to 8.2 m – up 600,000 since I have been
mayor. It was Margaret Thatcher – who put in the fixed link to Paris, who
pioneered Canary Wharf, who greenlighted the Jubilee Line extension, who
turbocharged the city, who cut personal taxation from 83 to 40 per cent, and
laid the foundations for modern London’s success.
That’s what I should
have said to Stephen Daldry, and I might have added that it sometimes feels as
though the 1980s are about to come round again. I can see it in the cranes on
the skyline, in the traffic jams – even though we have heroically increased
average traffic speeds from 9.3 to 9.4 mph; I note the queues for restaurants
and the house prices, and though I may be wrong my impression is that the vast
and intricate machine of the London economy is starting to throb on the
launching pad like a Saturn V, and as the vapour starts to jet from the valves
I sense a boom in the offing.
Gerard Lyons, my
economic adviser, thinks we could be looking at growth of 4 per cent next year;
and so I hope that in many ways it is NOT like the 1980s all over again. I
don’t imagine that there will be a return of teddy bear braces and young men
and women driving Porsches and bawling into brick sized mobiles. But I also
hope that there is no return to that spirit of Loadsamoney heartlessness –
figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless; and I hope
that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their
greed – valid motivator thought greed may be for economic progress – as for
what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have
experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years.
And if there is to be
a boom in the 20-teens, I hope it is one that is marked by a genuine sense of
community and acts of prodigious philanthropy, and I wish the snob value and
prestige that the Americans attach to act of giving would somehow manifest
itself here, or manifest itself more vividly.
But it was Mrs
Thatcher who made the essential point about charity, in her famous analysis of
the parable of the Good Samaritan. He wouldn’t have been much use to the chap
who fell among thieves, she noted, if he had not been rich enough to help; and
what has been really striking about the last five or six years is that no one
on the left – no one from Paul Krugman to Joe Stiglitz to Will Hutton, let
alone Ed Miliband – has come up with any other way for an economy to operate
except by capitalism.
We all waited for the
paradigm shift, after the crash of 2008. The left was ushered centre stage, and
missed their cue; political history reached a turning point, and failed to
turn. Almost a quarter of a century after the collapse of Soviet and European
communism – a transformation that Mrs Thatcher did so much to bring about –
there has been no intellectual revival of her foes, whose precepts are now
conserved only by weird cults in south London.
Ding dong! Marx is
dead. Ding dong! communism’s dead. Ding dong! socialism’s dead! Ding dong!
Clause Four is dead, and it is not coming back.
Like it or not, the
free market economy is the only show in town. Britain is competing in an
increasingly impatient and globalised economy, in which the competition is
getting ever stiffer.
No one can ignore the
harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably
accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on
human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not
spiritual worth.
Whatever you may
think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about
equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while
about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the
easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.
And for one reason or
another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent
of boardroom inhabitants - the income gap between the top cornflakes and the
bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don’t believe that
economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential
for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a
valuable spur to economic activity.
But we cannot ignore
this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes
brings. Last week I tried to calm people down, by pointing out that the rich
paid a much greater share of income tax than they used to.
When Margaret
Thatcher came to power in 1979 they faced a top marginal tax rate of 98 per
cent, and the top one per cent of earners contributed 11 per cent of the
government’s total revenues from income tax. Today, when taxes have been cut
substantially, the top one per cent contributes almost 30 per cent of income
tax; and indeed the top 0.1 per cent – just 29,000 people – contribute fully 14
per cent of all taxation.
That is an awful lot
of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich.
So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent
British people? Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin’s
Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record
tonnages of coal?
I proposed that we
should fete them and decorate them and inaugurate a new class of tax hero, with
automatic knighthoods for the top ten per cent. Well, my friends, I am proud to
say I have often been accused of being out of touch, but hardly ever have I
produced so frenzied and hate-filled a response.
People aren’t
remotely interested in how much tax these characters pay. That does nothing to
palliate their primary offence, which is to be so stonkingly and in their view
emetically rich.
The other day I was
stopped in the street by a woman who was sobbing with anger, and there were two
aspects to her complaint. The first was pay disparity: she worked in accounts
in a large UK firm, and over the last 20 years she had seen how salaries at the
top end had been pulling away from everyone else. The next was her belief –
which I believe is ill-founded, or at least only partly correct – that the
London property market is dominated by rich foreigners, and that they had so
driven up house prices as to make it impossible for her daughter even to hope
of finding somewhere to live in London.
As I say, I believe
this antipathy to foreign investment is very largely misplaced. Yes, there are
certainly parts of the city where a large proportion of sales are going
overseas, and yes, it would be a good thing if new homes were targeted first at
Londoners and not sold off-plan in foreign capitals. But even in the hotspot
areas foreign sales are running at the same rate as they were in 1990, and
across the city as a whole they are about 6.5 per cent by value – the same as
20 years ago; and as I tried to explain to this woman, it is foreign investment
that enables us to go ahead with developments, like Battersea, that would
otherwise be stalled forever; and it is those new developments – tens if not
hundreds of thousands of new homes –that offer real hope for her and her
daughter.
I think, in the end,
I won her round, and I think she could see the logic of some of what I was
saying. But sometimes in politics you have to recognise that you are dealing
with feeling, not reason. After five years of recession people are feeling this
inequality –much greater, after all, than it was in the 1980s – and rightly or
wrongly they care about it.
It seems to me
therefore that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to
try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to try to stamp out inequality, that
we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions: one, that we help
those who genuinely cannot compete; and, two, that we provide opportunity for
those who can.
To get back to my
cornflake packet, I worry that there are too many cornflakes who aren’t being
given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top. We gave
the packet a good shake in the 1960s; and Mrs Thatcher gave it another good
shake in the 1980s with the sale of the council houses.
Since then there has
been a lot of evidence of a decline in social mobility, as Sir John Major has
trenchantly pointed out – and as some people may know, it is one of the many
black marks against me that I went to the same school as the party leader:
Primrose Hill primary school, Camden, alma mater of me and Ed Miliband.
There are many
explanations for this decline in social mobility, this apparent freezing of the
canals of opportunity. Some put it down to assortative mating –the process by
which the massive expansion of the female population in higher education has
meant an intensification of marriages and partnerships between university-educated
couples, and an increase in their economic advantages.
Some say it is a
function of work ethic, and draw unflattering comparisons between the
get-up-and-go of indigenous kids and many migrants from EU accession countries.
Some say it is all to do with the abolition of the grammar schools; and here we
must sorrowfully acknowledge that the record of our heroine was very far from
perfect.
Indeed, she closed
more grammar schools than Tony Crosland. But the question I am asking today is
not what did Maggie do then, but WHAT WOULD MAGGIE DO NOW?, because I think she
would have taken the question of social mobility very seriously indeed.
I think she would
want to help smart and hardworking kids everywhere. She was a grammar school
girl herself, and she knew what it was like to be up against the kind of smug,
sleek men who never dreamed that she would be Prime Minister, never thought she
would have the guts to sack posh public school chaps like them.
I think she would
have instantly brought back the assisted places scheme, that helped 75,000
pupils find excellent education in the fee-paying sector. She might not have
flooded the place with grammar schools, not under that name, because that would
have been a U-turn, and we know what she thought of U-turns; but I hope that
she would have found some way of making far wider use of that most powerful
utensil of academic improvement – and that is academic competition between
children themselves.
I remember once
sitting in a meeting of the Tory shadow education team and listening with
mounting disbelief to a conversation in which we all agreed solemnly that it
would be political madness to try to bring back the Grammar schools – while I
happened to know that most of the people in that room were about to make use,
as parents, of some of the most viciously selective schools in the country.
I might be wrong, but
I hope she would find a way to use that device, to help bright children
everywhere to overcome their background; and even if I am wrong, I feel sure
that she would direct a beam of maternal and terrifying devotion upon Michael
Gove and everything he does.
If we haven’t quite
restored academic competition between pupils, there is a new spirit of
competition between those who are the driving force behind the academies. Talk
to the hedge fund kings who are supporting this new breed of maintained sector
school, and they will rave about how their school has just been rated Ofsted
outstanding in every category with the joy of the Queen beholding her horse win
the Derby.
I think Mrs Thatcher
would approve of this spirit of rivalrous emulation, as a means of driving up
standards, just as she would approve of apprenticeships and every other means
of giving young people the cunning and confidence to succeed in a place of
work. She would have understood that the best hope of social mobility is an
open and flexible labour market where people can move from one career to the
next, as they do in America, and where business is always creating new jobs.
As we come now to the
juddering climax of our discussion, I realise that there may be some confusion
in my prescriptions between what I would do, what Maggie would do, and what the
government is about to do or is indeed already doing, did we but know it.
I don’t think it much
matters, because the three are likely to turn out to be one and the same.
What would she do
about tax and spending? What is the right approach to the economy? I hope it is
not too obvious to say that she would cut the cost of government wherever she
could, and she would cut spending as the economy recovers and she would cut
taxes such as business rates and she would ensure that our personal taxation
was at least competitive with the rest of Europe.
What would Maggie do
on housing? She would recognise the squeeze on her core voters, their desperate
shortage of homes; she would revive her great mission of a property-owning
democracy and encourage the creation of hundreds of thousands of new homes in
which people had at least a share of the equity themselves; and she would
remember the lessons of Baldwin and Macmillan and Thatcher – that Tories are
most successful when they help middle Britain to find the housing they need.
What would she do
about the infrastructure that a growing economy depends on? There are some who
remember her hostility to rail, born of her conflict with chaps like Jimmy
Knapp, her preference for catnapping in the back of her Jag.
She would certainly
want to upgrade the roads but we are talking here of the Thatcher who gave
Britain its first and only High speed rail, not to mention the DLR. I think she
would understand the capacity argument for HS2, though she might get it cheaper
and get a bigger contribution from business. As for our aviation capacity, let
me remind you of what Nico Henderson said in that valedictory letter I have
already cited, on the eve of her accession.
“So far as the
management of major capital projects by government is concerned our vision
appears limited and our purpose changeable…We started work on two large plans,
the third London airport and the Channel Tunnel, only to cancel both.”
Does anyone doubt
that she would have the cojones to rectify that second mistake, and give this
country the 24 hour hub airport, with four runways, that it needs? When she was
in power there were flights from Heathrow to more destinations than from any
other European airport.
Would she sit back and watch the rest of them eat our lunch
– the French and the Dutch and the Spanish, the Finns, for heaven’s sake, who
now send more flights to China than we do? She would understand that the plane
is the 21st century means of travel, and the vital importance of connectivity
to her vision of Britain: open, free-trading, as turned to Asia and Latin
America as it is to its traditional markets.
She would see that the best place to build that airport
would be to the east of the city, which is, indeed, the area with the biggest
potential for new homes.
What would Maggie do
about the rest of the country; what about regional policy? I think she would
now be fighting like a lioness for the union, and that she would comfortably
see off Salmond, as she saw off so many smart alecs, because she would have instinctively
identified the heart of the matter: that this isn’t about whether or not the
Scots will be £800 per year worse off per head.
This is about the
demolition of Britain, about taking the blue background from the union flag,
lopping the top off the most successful political union in history. It would
diminish both Scotland and England, and it would be no consolation to her that
the loss of Britain, as a concept, might also mean the end of the British
Broadcasting Corporation.
She would win the
case for the union; but she would also recognise that England has been so far
short-changed by devolution. So I like to think that she would look at what is
happening in the great cities of England, where the population is also rising
and changing, and a London effect is noticeable as people flee the high costs
of the capital and start dynamic new businesses in tech and other sectors.
I hope that she would
remember the municipal Conservatism of Joe Chamberlain and indeed Alderman
Roberts and give those cities more powers to raise locally the taxes they spend
locally; give the politicians an incentive to go for policies that promote
growth; and give the electorate an incentive to kick them out if they fail, and
instal Conservatives.
What, finally,
amigos, would she do about Europe? Last year we heard Charles Moore tell us
that she had decided to pull out, and since Charles has papal infallibility, I
accept that – though it is obviously one of those things that is a bit easier
to say to your trusty biographer when you are out of office and you aren’t
immediately besieged by a panic-stricken foreign office and CBI and nervous
international investors and the White House on line one saying you are out of
your mind, lady.
As it happens, I
don’t think she would pull out of the single market that she helped to create;
not like that, not if she was now the tenant of Number Ten. I think she would
recognise that there is a chance to get a better deal. It’s time to sort out
the immigration system so that we end the madness.
At the moment we are
claiming to have capped immigration by having a 60 per cent reduction in New
Zealanders, when we can do nothing to stop the entire population of
Transylvania – charming though most of them may be - from trying to pitch camp
at Marble Arch.
David Cameron is
right. about giving countries more flexibility over the time-lag before other
nationals may claim benefits, and I can’t believe he is alone among EU leaders.
It is time we ended the Soviet absurdities of the CAP, time we sorted out the
working time directive and time we generally persuaded the Eurocrats to stop
trying to tell us what to do.
First they make us
pay in our taxes for Greek olive groves, many of which probably don’t exist.
Then they say we can’t dip our bread in olive oil in restaurants. We didn’t
join the Common Market – betraying the New Zealanders and their butter – in
order to be told when, where and how we must eat the olive oil we have been
forced to subsidise. Talk about giving us the pip, folks.
Mrs Thatcher would never have put up with it. I reckon she
would get a better deal for Britain and indeed the rest of Europe, and
simultaneously keep Britain in the internal market council.
But at the back of
her mind, during the negotiations, would be this comforting truth: that the
stakes are lower than they were. The EU has shrunk to only 19 per cent of the
global economy, compared to 29 per cent when she was in power. The big growth
markets lie elsewhere, and there is a paradox in our relations with the EU. We joined
in the early 1970s in what I have described as a mood of weakness and
defeatism, and since then things have changed.
It is not just that
we stayed out of the euro – another thing she got completely right – or that we
are recovering fast while the eurozone is a still a microclimate of gloom.
Consider the demographics.
By 2050 Britain will
be the second biggest country in the EU, and by 2060 – when I fully intend to
be alive – we will have more people than Germany. And yes, I can see you gulp,
and no, I don’t know exactly where they will all go either; though when I drive
through the cities of the north I see plenty of depopulated space.
Nor can I easily tell
you what it will be like for us suddenly to be the biggest and most
economically powerful country in Europe – but I will chance my arm and make
some prophecies. By the middle of this century we will still have a crown, we
will still have a union, we will have a dynamic, diverse, globalised economy
and we will have dealt eupeptically and by the normal romantic human processes
with the recent period of mass immigration so that our cities are not just
proudly British but also boast a vast mongrel energy.
As for London, it
will have lengthened its lead as the financial, artistic and cultural capital
of the world, with more banks than New York, with more Michelin starred
restaurants than Paris, less rainfall than Rome, more green space than any
other European city – all true now, as it happens. We will have Crossrail two
linking Hackney and Chelsea and Crossrail three taking you out to Margaret
Thatcher international airport in the estuary.
Some things will
still be the same: we will still have parks and pubs and the Tower of London
and Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy, wasting police time and
resources.
But one thing will
have gone forever – and that is the myth of British decline. Here in London we
already lead in law, in universities, we have the largest tech sector and
biotech sector in Europe, we export TV shows around the world. Five of the last
6 best-selling music albums were made in London and we have exported Piers
Morgan to America.
We may not have many
gunboats any more, but we hardly need them, because we are already fulfilling
our destiny as the soft power capital of the world – and that is thanks to a
woman who knew all about soft power and the deep Freudian terror that every man
has for the inner recesses of a handbag. It was her fundamentally positive and
can-do vision that turned this country around and that we should remember
today.
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