On the day of his inauguration as Mayor of London, Livingstone played the
populist card by claiming that every Londoner, man, woman, and child, pays
£50 a week in subsidy to other parts of the country.
This amounts to over £19 billion per year.
Livingstone is good at popularising statistics and the arithmetic no doubt
backs him. However the argument is in essence chauvinistic.
It is similar to the argument that the rich developed countries have the
greatest financial stake in the IMF and in the United Nations and should
therefore have a disproportionate influence on the world economy.
London and the South East of England is overwhelmingly the richest part of
England, although there are islands of poverty. It illustrates the economic
concept of regional city centred economic zones which form the basis of the
European Union's economic planning.
The volume of commercial traffic may be greatest at the centre, and
therefore the wealth greatest, but the regional market must be considered
as a whole. Without the large poorer penumbra there would be a much smaller
market for the centre to sell to, and exploit. Without a pool of cheaper
labour moving gradually towards the centre, wage costs would rise more
rapidly and cut the upturn short each time in the capitalist upturn. The
law of value must be interpreted dynamically in the economic area as a whole.
Without a concept of the non-equilibrium nature of regional economies, and
indeed the global economy, the left will be vulnerable to the sort of
populist interventions of people like Ken Livingstone.
Chris Burford
London
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