The Statesman last week has a pullout transcript of a round table discussion on the topic of ‘London’s economic strength’. There’s a PDF version here. The participants include Ed Balls, Chief Economic Adviser to The Treasury, Anne Seex, Chief Executive of Norwich City Council and various academics, agency heads and policy types. In the chair is David Walker whose Analysis programme I blogged yesterday.
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I notice since Dave wrote this piece (see below) you’ve only started blogging very very very serious things. I liked reading about CDs you were listening to that no one else had heard of and the kids’ illnesses.
Dave Green:
“On the other hand, it’s getting so easy to update a weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities, like a nation of Alan Partridges trying to fill an internet’s worth of dead air: CDs they’re listening to, scintillating accounts of their day at work, URLs of sites they feel they should acknowledge, despite having nothing new to say about them. It is like one of those terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single day of the year. ”
A depressingly shortsighted round table. Transport problems are mentioned (with general agreement that as much money as possible should be devoted to fixing London and the SE) but the key reason for any debate on the relative economic stature of London, the South East and the rest of the country is missing. The sewerage and water infrastructure of the entire SE is under pressure. It may be possible, at great expense, to upgrade it to handle a slight increase in population, but even that will take many years. Given this fact, if we want to avoid extraordinary inflation in the SE region (whose housing market is already very overheated) we need to look at diverting the growth to other regions before London et al implode.