At a business dinner last week I was asked if I regarded London as a global city. The answer seems obvious but the implications are not painless. It is harder to be a big fish in a gigantic pond. Last night’s inaugural opera awards, held in association with the Evening Standard, showed what international competition looks like. Pity the English tenors up against the winning German Jonas Kaufmann. I watched him performing Verdi and Wagner at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday and he was perfectly at ease with both composers and all nationalities. It is voice without borders.
London has become a receptacle for international wealth and talent. We watch it pour in and occasionally wonder if any of it rubs off. The Rich List is international, the housing market is international, art and sport are international. A Uruguayan striker bites a Serbian defender. What, in our house! Native Londoners (and there were never many of them) may feel like spectators but being a magnet for the world is the best possible outcome for the capital.
“The greater the pool of talent, the higher the standards” is a simple truism which is nevertheless hard to grasp. The determination of many companies to resist promoting women will eventually diminish them. The same applies to class and race.
A generation ago, there was safety in socio-economic clusters. But there was no progress. Only when you expanded the base did you see improvement. My husband was a beneficiary of an early wave of recruitment from state schools to Oxbridge. His college rapidly climbed the league table. Now the argument about state schools and private schools selection looks behind the curve. A Cambridge professor on Radio 4 at the weekend talked of the new necessity of introducing quotas on Chinese applicants. Their grades were so good and they worked so hard that they were in danger of walking off with all the university places.
Those who fear global competition see open borders as a threat. A much better solution is to raise our game and sharpen our sense of national strengths. At the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday the recorded voice asking the audience to turn off their mobile phones belonged to Sir Ian McKellen. Match that!
Medicine is international, yet we have the chance to lead the way in cancer research with the opening of the Francis Crick Institute. Sport is international but we outperform on cycling. And the more open we are to the populations of the world, the more likely we are to find another Mo Farah to call our own.
The curious thing is that London can absorb the world without losing character. The Queen is an even stronger asset on the world stage than on the national one. Shakespeare’s brand would make the big multinationals weep with envy. Danny Boyle understood instinctively in the Olympic opening ceremony that you can be proud and patriotic without being insular. Jonas Kaufmann is an honorary Londoner so far as I am concerned.
This star doesn’t know who she is
Reese Witherspoon reportedly used the phrase, “Do you know who I am?” when police stopped her on suspicion of disorderly conduct. It doesn’t make sense to me. The last thing she should want is recognition, which makes her alleged crime far worse. I guess that it was an existential cry: she wanted to be judged as a conscious being rather than an Oscar winning actress etc. If only the philosopher Harry Styles had been there to translate her meaning to the Atlanta police.
Did you guess whodunnit?
The point of Broadchurch is that it allowed us all to be detectives and by this morning I was still looking at the loose ends. So, was there no connection with Alec Hardy’s last case after all? Are two fathers with incestuous/paedophile impulses in one programme quite a high percentage? Are David Tennant and Olivia Colman going to stay together, with her broken heart and his dodgy one? Aren’t they now our favourite couple on television? And does the BBC regret losing Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television, who has now given us Downton Abbey and Broadchurch?
Housing — a local solution
London’s housing market is the result of the capital’s success but it excludes swathes of Londoners. Attempts to correct it only lead to unintended consequences. The Chancellor has been accused of fuelling the boom by trying to help first-time buyers.
How about another coexisting economic model? Last week I went to see an engaging bunch of people seeking to convert a former mental institution on Mile End Road called St Clements into community housing. The idea is simple: local people are offered homes, according to their means. Mortgages are based on the average income for the area. When you sell on, you cannot make a profit. This is a way of repaying the generosity shown to you.
Interestingly, the Prime Minister’s former policy adviser, Steve Hilton, is among those backing the co-operative enterprise. As he puts it, good ideas happen outside government. But they do need encouragement. Small society, where people take responsibility for and ownership of their own communities, is a better way of explaining big society.
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