What is the London Premium?

I caught the first few minutes of a property programme a week or so ago, and before I became bored and turned it off wondered about the premium paid for living in London.

A young couple were looking for a starter home, and expecting to pay up to £300k for a flat in Peckham.  Two bedrooms, nothing special, £300k. Our house in leafy Fulwood would fetch a bit more than that, but not a huge amount. We have four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a long garden with a stream at the end, and the view from my office at the back is all trees no houses.

We probably go to the theatre as much as most in London (i.e. not very much at all), one of the arguments always put forward for paying a premium to live in the capital. The great wen is buzzing economically, but how much more do you need to be paid to afford to live there? Most city workers commute, paying a fortune to do so in vile circumstances, leaving home early, getting back late.

Austin Mitchell recently made a speech in the Commons about how the capital was sucking investment in Britain dry. Good on him. When Manchester bid for the Olympics the government provided one free pack of post-it notes by way of support; London got whatever it took. The National Football Stadium should have gone to Brum ('It's too far away' per Diane Abbot at the time), easiest for the majority of the population to get to, but no, had to stay in Wembley. The Dome anyone?

If any further proof of this ridiculous bias is needed, look at the plans for HS2, justified largely as helping 'the provinces': work is to start in London, and if it ever gets beyond Birmingham I will wear an Ipswich shirt for a day.

At some point the overcrowding, absence of lowly-paid support personnel (without the money to live within sensible commute), and presence of Boris Johnson must reach a point where they make life unbearable. Except our London-focussed MPs (Mr M an honourable exception) will not suffer in the same way as the rest, and many won't even notice.

[a few weeks after this was written I read that 89 per cent of all transport infrastructure spending scheduled in the UK is for projects in London and the Southeast. That, however, excluded HS2, which may never happen and as I wrote above is surely destined to stop long before it reaches the wilds of the North]

London journalists live in Waitrose

Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed various articles appearing in the national press where journalists have admitted shopping in supermarkets other than Waitrose. The condescending way some have written about finding decent food elsewhere is yet another example of the extremely annoying London-centric nature of our newspapers.

Some of us have been shopping in Lidl, farmshops, Aldi, and elsewhere for quite some time. The most irritating thus far reminded me of the old Punch cartoon, where two white explorers stand before Victoria Falls, surrounded by local inhabitants, and one asks the other: "Do you think they have noticed it?".

Perhaps I should not complain. If the present trend continues, there may even be more than the occasional token restaurant review from outside London in the Independent and Guardian (and no, it doesn't count if the reviewer does a place where they are holidaying).