Ken & high finance
There is a slightly uneasy relationship between Red Ken and the little gnomes in the City & Canary Wharf. There is an implicit acknowledgement of the benefits to the London region in his piece in yesterday’s thelondonpaper.
Sarkozy has overturned the tall buildings ban in Paris and has proposed making the Mayor of Paris leader of the city-region. This is an effort to replace London as the premier European business location. I agree with much of what Ken says as a result; specifically, we do need to be looking at Crossrails 2 and 3 and so on. The failure of Boris Johnson’s mayoralty thus far is that he has not made ‘the case for London’ and the absence of a vision rather than a particular policy-set’s presence.
However, Ken is at risk of wanting to have his cake and eat it too unless he is admitting that London alone is largely unable to contain the excesses of global capitalism.
xD.
