How globalisation makes London great
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The nice thing about London is that it has few Englishmen. In the best neighbourhoods, the only people who look like they belong are driving taxicabs. We rarely meet anyone who was born here. Instead, the streets are full of people speaking strange languages – Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Afrikaans, American. But this huge tide of immigrants make central London one of the most dynamic, interesting and expensive cities on earth.
On the other hand, what makes Paris a second-rate city is that it is home to so many Frenchmen. Everything happens at the margin, as economists say. At the margin, Paris is a French city; London is an international one. Paris has plenty of immigrants too… but of a different sort. The French tend to put them in public housing in the suburbs – supported by taxpayers. In the city centre, except for tourists, one finds French people almost everywhere.
One of London’s many immigrants, a young man with a Eastern European accent and a carpet cleaning truck, showed up at our door in London on Saturday morning. “I haf come to clean carpets,” he said. He was a blond man of modest stature. Not bad looking. His eyes were blue, shrewd. He also seemed impatient.
“I don’t haf paperwork,” he continued. “But it could haf been landlord who organise.” After several attempts to call, we could reach neither his boss nor ours. “Well…den jus let me wash the carpets,” he said. In an hour and a half he had cleaned the carpets – been paid £97 in cash – and was on his way.
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“What? You paid him in cash?” When we finally got the head of the house on the phone, she explained gently that we were idiots. “I never called a carpet cleaner. It’s a scam. That’s why his office number didn’t work. I’m surprised you fell for it.”
But it was a good scam. The guy worked fast. And the carpets really are clean. At least he was an enterprising crook. Besides, if we had got the job done by a legitimate service, it would probably have cost more.
With that kind of competition, the honest, homegrown, working man must be feeling a little pinched. “Families worse off than five years ago,” says a headline in The Daily Telegraph. The typical English family has lost 10% of its spendable income over the last five years, according to accountants Ernst and Young. While income increased 18% during that period, costs for national insurance contributions, taxes, mortgages and utilities increased even more. “The cumulative effect on the average family,” says The Daily Telegraph, “has been to cut the cash it has to spend on whatever it likes by one tenth.”
How could it be? During the biggest boom in history… with soaring house prices and near full-employment? The economy has changed. It now rewards a talented class of well-trained polyglot professionals at the top.
But it exposes the middle and lower-level workers to new, globalised competition. Simon Nixon explains what it means to investors in his article on why we have to learn to live with globalisation.
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