Says Sadiq Khan, correctly
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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UK Politics
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Nothing but respect for my short king/mayor.
Yes, and that success largely comes at the cost of neglecting development in every town and city outside of commuting distance from London.
This kind of vague zero-sum thinking is part of the problem.
Want to explain how if you have £2bn to spend on infra, and you spend £2bn, you have money left to spend elsewhere?
Do you genuinely think the infra spending up north is comparable to London and the SE?
I do think the spending is 'comparable', which is not at all the same thing as 'equal'.
The UK's planning documents are all publicly available and show that you (and !samc@feddit.uk) are partly right: spending on infrastructure is not equal in cash terms; but would we want it to be?
If (hypothetically) you get a bigger return on investment when you invest in region A than region B, it'd be absurd to invest 'equally' in both, especially because those returns can be (and obviously are!) spent anywhere in the UK.The upshot of this is that investing in A might well lead to greater wealth for people in region B.
Plus, investment - spending - is only half the picture. What if the citizens of region A make a tax contribution that is greater than the relative share of investment they receive? I'm personally fine with that because I believe in redistribution, but it complicates the fairness argument. And then there are other considerations: it was expensive to build Crosssrail partly because the land is very expensive and (relatedly) Londoners need higher wages to make ends meet, so it (and all infrastructure) just did require relatively higher spending.
As the documents also show, vague waving at a supposedly deprived 'the north' is just grievance mongering. For example, Scotland and the North West are second and third to London in terms of overall investment, while the South East (clearly part of the London commuter belt!) is only just ahead of the North East in the bottom half of the table.
There are real disparities in all kinds of things in the UK, but making these kinds of baseless zero-sum arguments will get us nowhere.
Of course projects will have a bigger ROI if the infrastructure is effective and industry built up in the area meaning it'll effect more people. People won't eat in a restaurant with no windows, broken tables and dirty forks. By only investing in high ROI areas you increase risks of all the economy being hyper focussed in one area and admit you have no idea how to economically develop an area. You also cannot ignore decades of underinvestment and only focus on recent investments. The goal is to activate and connect other economic centres like Leeds and develop new ones. If you have places like Newcastle, Liverpool, Hull connected, you stem the brain drain and allow people to commute or even companies to invest because it won't take 10 years to get to London to work with other companies.
By your posting I can tell you've never spent much time up north or commuted by the rail network and as a result, you're focussed on the information that backs up your world view rather than developing an economic view that is holistic and brings everyone with it rather than further enriches the 12m people in Greater London. Also you discount that if the economy was better developed up north, less outgoings would be on welfare giving more opportunities for a more generous tax regime for companies and the benefits that could bring.
No everything is covered by narrow metrics like ROI, and we haven't even covered ethical considerations like the fact the government has a responsibility to all the electorate and everyone deserves to benefit from good infrastructure. The country got rich on good industry and that wealth ended up invested in the south as the economy moved from industry to services based.
I really would prefer it if you could get more than one post into a discussion before you start making baseless suppositions about what I think and why I think it.