Foreign Policy Mag: London ShouldSecede From Britain

"Parochial Countrymen"

6.30.2016

By far, the most head-scratching response to the Brexit vote comes from Foreign Policy Magazine, which recently suggested in an op-ed that United Kingdom's leftist Londoners should vote to secede from Britain.

Writer Parag Khanna argues that Londoners have every right to want to divorce themselves from their "parochial countrymen" in the Midlands, because they don't contribute anything to the country, unlike the great Londoners.

Many Brits voted for Brexit as a resentful protest against the political and economic elites who reside in London, but the contribution those elites make to the well-being of Great Britain is immense. Eighty percent of jobs created in the U.K. since the financial crisis have been in London, which is growing by 1 million people per decade. More than half of British university students head for London upon graduation. London’s gross value added per capita to the U.K. economy is more than $150,000 per year.

Translation: the working class should bow down to the wishes of their elitist overlords, because they don't pull their weight. These arguments are usually the type leftists accuse conservatives of saying, but since the working class decided to bite the leftist hand that feeds them, no such charity will be afforded, it seems.

While Khanna concedes that London could never morph into a bustling city-state like Singapore, Monaco, or Bahrain given its close ties to the country, Khanna argues there are other mechanisms in place that could make London mimic a city-state.

Secession needn’t be London’s goal. There is a wide spectrum of federalist arrangements available to the city, on a continuum ranging from unity to devolution to autonomy to outright independence. London has plenty of room to maneuver to assert more control over its own policies short of building a moat around the city.

Under the rubric of “Big Society,” Westminster has provided paltry infrastructure loans to cities such as Manchester and Sheffield to develop their own urban regeneration plans. But these are loans, not grants or investments; they must be paid back. As a capital, London has been treating the rest of the country like the International Monetary Fund treats client states, lending to them but seeking to minimize its own skin in the game. No wonder the pro-Brexit regions wanted to slap London in the face.

Ultimately Khanna concludes that no such thing will happen, because "London still wants to rule over a country" while putting "as little a burden as possible on its own prosperity." But hey, the left can still dream, can't they?