Britain contains two economic realities.
One is visible in the glass towers of the City of London, the technology companies around King’s Cross, the luxury developments overlooking the Thames and the law firms, banks, consultancies and media companies that serve clients across the world. London remains one of the wealthiest, most internationally connected cities on the planet.
The other Britain can be found in former industrial towns where secure employment disappeared decades ago, transport links remain poor, local services have deteriorated and young people often leave because opportunity appears to exist somewhere else.
This is not simply a cultural division between London and “the regions.” It is measurable in income, productivity, investment, health and access to opportunity.
According to the Office for National Statistics, gross disposable household income per person reached £35,361 in London in 2023. The UK average was £24,836. In the North East, it was only £19,977.
The divide is visible in health as well. In 2022–24, male life expectancy in Blackpool was 73.7 years, the lowest of any local area in the United Kingdom. Healthy life expectancy—the number of years someone can expect to live in good health—was only 50.9 years for men and 51.8 for women.
Britain is not poor. Nor is every Londoner rich. London contains intense poverty, overcrowding, homelessness and economic insecurity of its own.
The deeper problem is that Britain has become unusually dependent on one highly productive economic centre while too many of its other cities operate far below their potential.
This did not happen overnight. It was built over decades through industrial decline, monetary shocks, financial deregulation, housing policy, weak regional investment and one of the most centralised systems of government in the developed world.
London did not become rich because it stole a fixed amount of prosperity from everywhere else.
It became rich because Britain built a new economic model around activities London was uniquely positioned to dominate—and then failed to create equally powerful engines of growth elsewhere.
Britain Is Wealthy, but Its Prosperity Is Geographically Concentrated
National statistics can make Britain look more balanced than it feels.
Add London’s financial sector, property wealth, professional services, corporate headquarters and highly paid workers to the rest of the economy, and average national income rises. Remove London and much of the Greater South East, and the country’s economic performance looks markedly weaker.
That does not mean London is an artificial statistical trick. The wealth it creates is real. Its banks, insurers, lawyers, accountants, creative companies, universities and technology firms sell valuable services to the rest of Britain and the world.
The problem is concentration.
Research from the Harvard Kennedy School argues that Britain’s regional inequality is now primarily a productivity problem rather than an employment problem. The defining divide is between London and the Greater South East on one side and much of the rest of the country on the other, driven substantially by the underperformance of non-London cities.
This distinction matters.
A region can have relatively high employment while still producing less value per worker, offering lower wages and supporting fewer specialised companies. People may be working, but too many of those jobs are in low-productivity sectors with limited opportunities for progression.
The result is not necessarily mass unemployment of the kind Britain experienced in the 1980s. It is a quieter form of economic weakness: stagnant wages, insecure work, declining town centres, overloaded public services and the persistent feeling that prosperity is happening somewhere else.
Even the phrase “London versus the rest” can mislead. London has some of Britain’s richest neighbourhoods and some of its poorest households. High housing costs mean that a London salary does not provide the standard of living its headline figure suggests.
The true divide is between places connected to Britain’s most productive economic networks and places that have struggled to replace what they lost.
Britain’s Regional Divide Did Not Begin with Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher is often presented as either the saviour of the British economy or the person who destroyed it.
Neither interpretation is sufficient.
Britain’s industrial difficulties began long before Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979. Manufacturing employment had been declining since the 1960s as technology reduced demand for labour, production moved overseas and British firms lost ground to competitors in Germany, Japan and the United States. The Office for National Statistics documents a long-term shift from manufacturing towards services that predates the Thatcher government.
Britain also entered the 1970s with deep structural weaknesses.
Some industries were operating with outdated machinery. Management was frequently short-termist. Investment was weak. Industrial relations were combative. Governments repeatedly tried to protect declining firms without resolving their underlying problems.
London, meanwhile, had been Britain’s political and financial centre for centuries. Parliament, the Treasury, the Bank of England, major newspapers, corporate headquarters and national institutions were already concentrated there.
The country was never economically flat.
What changed after 1979 was the speed and character of the transition.
Thatcher’s government did not begin deindustrialisation, but it accepted industrial contraction as part of a wider economic restructuring. It placed inflation control above the preservation of employment in vulnerable sectors and believed that capital and labour would eventually move towards more productive uses.
Some businesses did become more competitive. Productivity improved in surviving firms. New industries emerged.
But adjustment was not geographically neutral.
When factories closed in London, workers existed within a large and diverse labour market containing finance, government, media, retail, education and professional services. When a mine, steelworks, shipyard or engineering plant closed in a specialised town, the surrounding economy could lose its central reason for existing.
The market did not smoothly move replacement industries into every affected community.
In many places, it barely moved them there at all.
1979: Inflation, Monetarism and the Industrial Shock
Thatcher inherited a genuine economic crisis.
Britain had suffered repeated currency problems, weak productivity, industrial conflict and severe inflation. The global oil shocks of 1973–74 and 1979 pushed up energy and transport costs across advanced economies, but Britain’s inflation problem was especially persistent. A Bank of England study notes that British inflation rose above 25% in 1975, while later Bank research describes another unusually large surge following the second oil shock.
Workers demanded higher wages to protect their living standards. Businesses then raised prices to cover wage and energy costs. Governments attempted to sustain employment and demand, adding further pressure.
Thatcher’s advisers believed previous governments had treated inflation as an unfortunate side effect when it should have been treated as the central threat.
The new government therefore pursued monetarism: restricting the growth of money and credit, reducing public borrowing and using high interest rates to squeeze inflation out of the economy.
The medicine was brutal.
Interest rates rose sharply. Sterling strengthened, partly because high rates attracted capital and partly because North Sea oil improved confidence in the currency. A stronger pound made imported goods cheaper, helping to restrain inflation, but it also made British exports more expensive abroad.
Manufacturers were hit from both sides.
Their borrowing costs rose just as foreign customers found their products less competitive. Companies already suffering from weak investment and poor productivity suddenly faced a severe recession under some of the tightest monetary conditions in modern British history.
The government did not retreat. Its 1981 Budget tightened fiscal policy during the downturn, provoking a famous letter from 364 economists who warned that the approach would deepen the recession and damage Britain’s social and political stability. The existence and substance of that warning were later recorded in Parliamentary debate.
The argument has never been fully settled.
Supporters of the government point out that inflation fell, economic recovery followed and many surviving companies became more productive. Britain’s labour market and industrial relations were transformed. The country became better positioned to exploit the expansion of global services and information technology.
Critics respond that the speed of the adjustment destroyed viable firms alongside uncompetitive ones, created mass unemployment and imposed its greatest costs on communities with the fewest alternatives.
Both can be true.
Inflation was brought under control.
The geography of Britain was also permanently changed.
Deindustrialisation Destroyed Regional Economic Ecosystems
A factory is not merely a building in which people manufacture products.
It is part of an ecosystem.
A large industrial employer purchases components, transport, machinery, maintenance, cleaning, energy and professional services. It trains apprentices. It supports shops and pubs. Its wages pay mortgages and council taxes. Its workers sustain sports clubs, unions, charities and local institutions.
When the employer disappears, the damage travels far beyond the people named in the redundancy announcement.
The decline after 1979 was enormous. According to the Resolution Foundation’s study of the economic legacy of Thatcherism, manufacturing employment had already been falling before Thatcher came to power but then declined by 39% between 1979 and 1993.
Some of this reflected an unavoidable international transformation. Manufacturing productivity was rising, meaning factories could produce more with fewer workers. Lower-cost producers were entering world markets. Heavy industry was shrinking across many advanced economies.
Britain’s experience was nevertheless unusually concentrated and disruptive.
Communities in the North of England, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales had been built around coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles, automobiles and heavy engineering. These sectors were not spread evenly across the country. Their decline therefore created localised shocks of exceptional intensity.
The jobs that eventually replaced them were not always equivalent.
Industrial work could be dangerous, exhausting and insecure, and nostalgia should not erase the strikes, pollution and poor working conditions associated with parts of the old economy. Yet many manufacturing jobs also offered predictable wages, occupational identity, recognised qualifications, pensions and a path into stable adulthood for people without university degrees.
The replacement was often retail, warehousing, care work, hospitality, call centres or insecure subcontracting.
These jobs were real and socially necessary. But they frequently paid less, offered weaker bargaining power and generated fewer specialised supply chains around them.
The disappearance of employment also changed behaviour across generations.
Some workers moved. Others left the labour force. Young people who obtained degrees frequently departed for London, the South East or a handful of successful regional centres. Local populations aged. Business formation weakened. Property demand stagnated.
Economic damage became demographic damage.
Over time, demographic damage became political anger.
The Big Bang Built a New Economy Around London
While industrial Britain was contracting, a new Britain was emerging.
Its capital was London.
Financial liberalisation did not occur in one moment. Exchange controls were removed in 1979, allowing money to move more freely across borders. Banking had already been changing through competition, technology and internationalisation.
The decisive symbolic moment came on 27 October 1986, when a package of reforms known as the Big Bang transformed the London Stock Exchange.
Fixed commissions were abolished. Distinctions between brokers and dealers weakened. Foreign firms gained greater access. Electronic trading began replacing the traditional open-outcry system.
The Bank of England’s history of the British banking system describes the wider deregulation, technological change and international expansion that reshaped finance during this period.
London was ideally placed to benefit.
It sat between Asian and American time zones. It used the world’s dominant commercial language. It had established legal institutions, deep capital markets and centuries of financial expertise. It also offered access to lawyers, accountants, consultants, insurers, advertisers and government officials within a small geographical area.
Foreign banks poured into the City. British financial firms expanded. Around them grew an entire economy of corporate services.
London’s strength was no longer simply that it administered Britain.
It became a platform through which global capital moved.
This generated enormous value. Financial and professional services created exports, tax revenue, investment and highly paid employment. London regained a central position in the world economy even as Britain’s industrial importance declined.
But the new model was far more geographically concentrated than the old one.
A steelworks could anchor an economy in South Yorkshire. A shipyard could support employment on the Clyde. A car plant could sustain towns in the Midlands.
Global finance depended on dense networks of expertise, reputation, regulation and personal contact that were already concentrated in London. Its success strengthened the advantages of the place that had been strongest to begin with.
Britain had found a powerful new economic engine.
It had not found a way to install copies of that engine around the country.
Why Services Did Not Replace Industrial Prosperity Everywhere
“Services” is an extremely broad category.
It includes an investment banker structuring an international acquisition, a software engineer building financial infrastructure, a supermarket cashier, a social-care worker and a delivery driver.
All provide services. Their productivity, wages and relationship to the wider economy are completely different.
This distinction helps explain why Britain’s transition did not produce equal prosperity.
London captured a disproportionate share of highly productive, internationally traded services: finance, law, consulting, technology, advertising, higher education, media and corporate management. These activities could serve customers around the world and support high salaries.
Many former industrial regions expanded through services too, but their growth was more heavily concentrated in activities serving local populations.
A restaurant in Blackpool can create employment and improve local life. It cannot easily sell millions of pounds of meals to customers in New York, Singapore and Frankfurt. Its growth is constrained by the purchasing power of people nearby.
A London law firm, by contrast, can earn revenue from a transaction involving companies on several continents.
This is the difference between local services and tradable services.
The transition also demanded qualifications, networks and mobility that displaced workers did not necessarily possess.
A miner in South Wales could not become a securities trader merely because finance was expanding. A steelworker in Sheffield could not instantly relocate a family to London, obtain a professional credential and enter a labour market built around elite institutions.
Economic theories often assume that workers move towards opportunity and capital moves towards underused labour.
In practice, people have families, homes, identities and financial constraints. Companies prefer places with existing customers, skilled workers, infrastructure and suppliers.
Success attracts the ingredients of further success.
Decline repels them.
That is why a national shift from manufacturing to services produced very different outcomes in different places. Britain did not simply change what it made. It changed where its most valuable activities occurred and who could participate in them.
The Divide Survived the Boom Years
Thatcher left office in 1990, but the economic geography created during the 1980s endured.
John Major did not reverse the financial reforms. Tony Blair’s governments accepted most of the market economy they inherited while attempting to soften its social consequences through public spending, tax credits, regeneration programmes and investment in health and education.
Some cities experienced genuine revival.
Manchester rebuilt its centre, expanded its universities, developed cultural industries and attracted professional employment. Leeds grew through finance and business services. Birmingham regenerated parts of its city centre. Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow and Cardiff developed new cultural and service economies.
These changes mattered. Britain outside London did not simply continue declining in a straight line.
Yet regeneration rarely eliminated the underlying productivity gap.
Too many programmes focused on visible redevelopment without rebuilding the economic systems required for sustained private investment. A renovated waterfront or shopping district could improve a city while leaving weak transport, low skills, poor health and limited business research capacity untouched.
The financial crisis of 2008 then struck the growth model at its centre.
Britain responded with bank rescues, monetary stimulus and, after 2010, a prolonged period of fiscal restraint. Local authorities lost significant capacity. Capital projects were delayed. Public services faced increasing pressure.
Brexit later introduced new barriers to trade and investment into an economy already struggling with productivity and regional inequality. Brexit did not create the divide, but it added another challenge to places dependent on manufacturing supply chains and European markets. I have examined those effects separately in Was Brexit Worth It? The Economic Evidence So Far.
Successive governments announced regional strategies, northern powerhouses, industrial plans and levelling-up agendas.
The names changed more quickly than the geography.
Right to Buy Changed the Geography of Housing
In 1980, Thatcher’s government introduced one of its most popular and consequential policies: Right to Buy.
The principle was politically powerful. Council tenants who had paid rent for years would be allowed to purchase their homes at substantial discounts. Families who might never have accumulated property could become owners.
For many buyers, the policy was transformative.
It provided security, independence and an asset that could later be passed to children. Home ownership expanded, and the Conservatives created a new constituency of property-owning voters.
The problem was not simply that council homes were sold.
It was that they were not replaced on anything close to the same scale, especially in places where land and housing demand later became extremely expensive.
Official statistics show that more than 2.03 million social homes were sold through Right to Buy schemes between April 1980 and March 2025.
A house did not physically disappear when it entered private ownership. Someone still lived in it.
What disappeared was the public authority’s ability to allocate that home at a social rent to another household in the future.
Over time, some former council properties were resold into the private market. Others entered the private rental sector, where local authorities sometimes paid market rents to house families in homes that had once belonged to the public.
The policy therefore redistributed housing opportunity across generations.
One tenant received a discounted route into ownership. A later household encountered a smaller social-housing stock, a longer waiting list and a more expensive private market.
This mattered everywhere, but it became especially consequential in London and other high-demand cities where access to housing increasingly determined access to work.
London’s Housing Market Blocks Access to London’s Opportunities
In theory, regional inequality should encourage migration.
If wages and opportunities are better in London, workers should move there. Employers in struggling regions should then face less labour competition, wages should adjust and economic differences should begin to narrow.
Housing disrupts that mechanism.
London wages are high because its workers are productive and because employers compete for specialised skills. But much of the wage advantage is absorbed by rent, mortgages, transport and childcare.
A worker can earn more in London and still have less space, less security and little ability to save.
This creates a barrier around Britain’s most productive labour market.
People who already own London property benefit from rising land values. Highly paid professionals can absorb the costs. Families with inherited wealth can help younger relatives with deposits.
Workers on ordinary incomes face a different calculation.
Moving may increase their salary without meaningfully improving their life. Some jobs cannot justify the rent. Others become viable only through overcrowding, long commutes or continued family support.
Housing scarcity therefore turns geographical inequality into something self-reinforcing. Britain concentrates opportunity in London, then makes it prohibitively expensive for many citizens to access that opportunity.
International buyers and global wealth add demand at the upper end of the market, but they are not the complete explanation. London’s housing problems also reflect restrictive planning, insufficient construction, valuable land, cheap credit, tax incentives and decades of treating rising property prices as economic success.
The broader political system behind these pressures is explored in Why Housing is So Expensive.
London’s housing crisis also demonstrates why the city should not be described as universally rich.
The capital contains enormous private wealth alongside poverty, temporary accommodation, rough sleeping and overcrowding. The people who clean its offices, operate its transport, care for its elderly and staff its restaurants do not experience London in the same way as those who own its most valuable assets.
London’s economy is rich.
Many Londoners remain financially trapped inside it.
Transport Investment Reinforced the Divide
A city is economically larger than its municipal boundary.
Its true size is determined by how many people can reach its jobs, businesses, universities and services within a reasonable period.
Good transport allows a company to recruit from a wider workforce. Workers can consider more jobs. Specialist firms can serve more customers. Universities can collaborate with more businesses.
Economists call these agglomeration effects: the productivity gains created when people and organisations can connect efficiently.
London possesses an enormous integrated labour market. The Underground, suburban railways, buses and national connections allow millions of workers and businesses to operate as part of one economic system.
Britain’s other cities often function differently.
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and the towns between them contain millions of people, but slow and unreliable connections prevent them from behaving like one integrated metropolitan economy. Birmingham sits at the centre of the country, yet journeys across the West Midlands can remain difficult. Local buses are fragmented. Rail services between northern cities can be slower and less dependable than routes into London.
Investment patterns have reinforced the difference.
An IPPR North analysis calculated that London received £1,183 per person in transport spending over the period it examined, compared with £486 across the North, £430 in the North East and £355 in the East Midlands. It estimated that matching London’s per-person rate since 2009–10 would have produced approximately £140 billion more investment in northern transport.
Such comparisons require care. London’s transport system carries commuters and visitors from across Britain, and maintaining an old, heavily used network is expensive.
But the wider economic point remains.
Britain repeatedly invests in response to demand where productivity is already high, while asking weaker regions to demonstrate demand before receiving the infrastructure that might create it.
Success justifies investment.
A lack of investment helps explain continued weakness.
Research and Capital Follow Existing Success
Innovation also has a geography.
Research thrives where universities, laboratories, skilled workers, investors, suppliers and large companies can interact. Once such a cluster develops, it attracts more talent and capital.
Britain has world-class research institutions across the country, from Manchester and Edinburgh to Warwick, Sheffield, Glasgow, Bristol and Newcastle.
Even so, research and development remain heavily concentrated.
A House of Commons Library briefing reports that 56% of all UK research and development spending performed in 2023 occurred in London, the South East and East of England. The Midlands accounted for 12%, while the North of England accounted for 15%.
Not all this money is distributed directly by government. Businesses fund most British R&D, and many choose established clusters for rational reasons.
That is precisely why public policy matters.
When the state places laboratories, procurement, infrastructure and research institutions in already successful regions, it can amplify the same market forces that produced the imbalance.
A research grant supports scientists directly. It also helps sustain technicians, specialist manufacturers, software firms, landlords, cafés and professional services. Successful research attracts private investment. Private investment attracts more skilled workers.
The effect compounds.
Regions that lack these networks are then told they do not possess the commercial ecosystem required to justify further investment.
Again, existing strength becomes the argument for strengthening it further.
Why Britain’s Other Big Cities Underperform
The most revealing feature of Britain’s regional divide is not simply that London is unusually productive.
It is that several of Britain’s other large cities are less productive than their size suggests they should be.
Large cities normally generate economic advantages. They allow workers to specialise, businesses to find customers and employers, universities to exchange knowledge with industry and infrastructure to serve dense populations.
Britain’s non-London cities do not consistently capture these advantages.
The Harvard research on UK regional economic inequality identifies the underperformance of major cities outside London as a central cause of the national productivity divide.
Part of the problem is transport. Labour markets are often fragmented by slow journeys and poor connections.
Part is skills. London attracts graduates from across Britain and abroad, while weaker regions frequently educate talented people who then leave.
Part is capital. Investors are more comfortable placing money where other investors, successful companies and specialist advisers already exist.
Part is governance. Britain’s political system remains highly centralised, with local leaders exercising limited control over taxation, transport, training and long-term investment compared with counterparts in many European countries.
Part is planning. City centres may be surrounded by low-density development, disconnected housing markets or degraded land that is expensive to reuse.
Part is policy instability. Regional programmes are repeatedly renamed, reorganised or cancelled when governments and ministers change.
These factors interact.
A city without reliable transport struggles to create a large labour market. A small effective labour market attracts fewer specialist employers. Fewer specialist employers encourage graduates to leave. The loss of skills deters investment. Weak investment limits tax revenue and confidence.
This is why building a successful regional economy requires more than moving a government office or funding a single project.
It requires institutions capable of sustaining a direction for decades.
London’s strength was not created by one railway, one university or one deregulation package. It emerged from centuries of accumulated political power, infrastructure, human capital, finance and global connection.
Britain’s other cities cannot be expected to close the gap through occasional grants distributed from Whitehall.
London Is Not Simply Stealing Britain’s Wealth
It is tempting to turn this story into a morality play.
London is rich. The rest of Britain is struggling. Therefore, London must be consuming resources that rightfully belong elsewhere.
The reality is more complicated.
London generates substantial exports and tax revenue. It brings international capital into Britain. Its universities educate students from around the world. Its legal system supports global commerce. Its cultural industries extend British influence far beyond the country’s size.
Weakening London would not automatically strengthen Leeds, Glasgow or Newcastle.
A bank that leaves the City may move to New York, Paris, Frankfurt or Singapore rather than Manchester. A technology founder priced out of London may relocate abroad rather than establish a company in Blackpool.
Nor does every pound spent in London benefit only Londoners. National institutions, rail termini and cultural attractions serve people from across the country.
The problem is not London’s existence or even its dominance.
The problem is dependence.
Britain has allowed too much of its high-productivity economy, institutional authority and investment capacity to collect in one part of the country. It then treats London’s performance as proof that the national economic model is functioning.
London has become both Britain’s greatest economic asset and a mask covering the weakness underneath.
The goal should not be to make London poorer.
It should be to make other British cities more productive.
What Rebalancing Britain Would Actually Require
Britain has spent decades searching for a regional policy that produces visible results without threatening existing interests, costing too much money or requiring institutions to surrender power.
No such policy exists.
Rebalancing requires long-term choices whose benefits may not become clear within one parliament.
Transport is an obvious starting point, but the objective should not simply be faster trains to London. The greater need is stronger connectivity within and between regional city economies: Manchester to Leeds, Leeds to Sheffield, Liverpool to Manchester, Birmingham to Coventry and the wider networks surrounding them.
A worker should be able to reach more employers without moving home. A company should be able to recruit across a wider area. A university laboratory should be connected to manufacturers capable of commercialising its discoveries.
Housing must grow alongside those transport networks. Creating new jobs without building homes simply moves London’s affordability problem elsewhere.
Regional institutions also need greater control.
Local leaders cannot be held responsible for growth while remaining dependent on short-term grants designed in Whitehall. Cities need stable authority over transport, planning, training and parts of taxation, combined with serious accountability for results.
Research investment should build durable clusters rather than scatter symbolic projects around electoral maps. That means selecting areas with genuine institutional strengths—advanced manufacturing, life sciences, clean energy, materials, computing or creative industries—and supporting them consistently.
Skills policy must connect schools, colleges, universities and employers. Britain cannot rebuild regional industry while treating vocational education as a lesser route for people who did not attend university.
Industrial policy also needs patience.
Governments cannot announce a strategic sector, subsidise it briefly, change ministers and then replace the programme before companies have made long-term investments. Businesses plan factories, research centres and supply chains over decades.
Rebalancing will therefore involve trade-offs.
Some investment will initially produce lower returns than another project in London. Some regional initiatives will fail. Local institutions will make mistakes. Money will occasionally be wasted.
But refusing to invest also has a cost.
Britain already pays it through weaker productivity, lower wages, poor health, overloaded services and growing political resentment.
The country’s wider stagnation is examined in Why Britain is Hard to Fix. Regional inequality is one part of that larger system, but it is also a force that makes every other national problem harder to solve.
Britain’s Problem Is Not London’s Success but Everyone Else’s Weakness
Britain’s regional divide is often described as though London and the rest of the country are sitting at opposite ends of a seesaw.
One rises only because the other falls.
That is the wrong model.
London’s success does not require Manchester to underperform. Financial exports do not require weak transport in Yorkshire. World-class universities in the capital do not require low research investment in the Midlands. Expensive property in Westminster does not require declining high streets in coastal towns.
These are political and institutional choices, not economic laws.
The crisis of the 1970s required change. Britain could not indefinitely preserve every factory, mine and industrial practice that had grown uncompetitive.
But the country moved from one economic model to another without building a credible bridge for many of the places left behind.
Industrial employment contracted. Finance and professional services expanded. London captured the greatest rewards. Housing made access to those rewards increasingly expensive. Transport and research investment reinforced existing strengths. Centralised government left regional cities waiting for permission and funding.
The outcome is a country that remains wealthy, influential and capable, yet feels diminished across large parts of its own territory.
Britain is not a failed state. Its industrial past was not an uncomplicated golden age, and London is not a parasite attached to the national economy.
But no country can depend indefinitely on one region to supply a disproportionate share of its productivity, investment, tax revenue and confidence.
Britain does not need to drag London down to the national average.
It needs to stop accepting a national average that so many of its cities fall below.
London has shown that Britain can still create a globally significant economic centre.
The unfinished task is to prove that prosperity can exist beyond a few square miles along the Thames.
Last Updated on July 14, 2026 by Aseem Gupta