CITY AND SUBURBAN
Charge and counter-charge Ken puts a spoke in the wheel of Gavyn Arthur's coach
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Lord Mayor Gavyn Arthur has to keep his golden coach in the Museum of London. If it ever appears on the streets of the City, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, will charge him a fiver. The two mayors are putting spokes in each other's wheels, and last week it was Lord Mayor Arthur's turn. Addressing a banquet of international bankers in Guildhall, he told them that London's transport would disgrace a third world capital. They agreed, noisily. Transport for London is in Mayor Livingstone's bailiwick, and next week he brings in his congestion charge, a daily toll on anybody driving to or through the City. Only the dwindling band of smart-Alecs and Alexes gunning their Porsches to Canary Wharf at daybreak can still hope to be exempt. Others are asked to believe that Capita's cameras and computers can match up 250,000 different number-plates and payments every day, and may opt to take their chance. On the Tube, two of the City's arteries are blocked while London Underground works out how to stop the engines falling off its trains. Other lines have to take the strain and busy stations are being closed because of overcrowding. Will the Mayor choose to relieve this congestion by charging more? The Lord Mayor knows, and so do the international bankers, that they come to work here from choice and not from compulsion. Times are hard for them, even without Mayor Livingstone making it harder, but I cannot think that his heart is in their cause. He would be happier to see right-minded (or, rather, left-minded) protestologists and placeholders pedalling their mountain bikes along the City's grass-grown streets.
The ghost train
THERE is a bottomless pit in the City where Moor House used to be, and a poster on the hoarding that surrounds it: 'Crossrail Line 1. Advance work for Moorgate ticket hall'. The illustration makes it look like a ballroom. That will be the day, I reflect. The rail link that would run from east to west across London, and do more to relieve its congestion than anything else could, has been receding for a dozen years and slipped back again only the other day. It would get the international bankers to their flights at Heathrow, cutting out 20 or 30 stops on their journey by Tube. (My railway cone spondent, I.K. Gricer, recommends them to put first-class stamps on themselves and take the Post Office's underground railway to Paddington.) I predict that the new Moor House will have a large unidentified hole in its basement. Its tenants will tell stories of the ghost trains — that is, if they have not given up and moved to a financial centre with second world transport. The Corporation of London is looking at ways in which landlords and engineers could build Crossrail themselves.
Do it yourself
DOUBTERS among the City fathers say that self-help would give the Treasury another excuse not to put up the money, but the Treasury will always find one. Thanks to its policies, the only rail link being built across London (until the roof fell in last week) will carry the Eurostars from Gravesend to St Pancras without, of course, stopping at Moorgate. It could scarcely earn its place at the top of the wish list, but at a cost of £3 billion it is supposed to be self-financing, thanks to a Treasury fiction. I urge Lord Mayor Arthur to take the initiative, harnessing the City's skills in finance and innovation. He should make Mayor Livingstone an offer for the Waterloo and City Line. This starter-kit of a train set (two tracks, two stations, one at each end) is out of action again while the engines are checked. It needs an owner who cares for it. The Lord Mayor could rename it the Golden Coach Line. Crossrail would come next.
Hu He? It's him
IN the ten years since the Bank of England started publishing its Inflation Report, the price has come down by a third and the charts of many colours have multiplied exponentially. This just goes to show, as the Bank does not quite say, what a good job it has done since the Treasury relinquished its palsied grasp on inflation and left the job to the experts. Here and there in the economy, it still persists. The report contains no coloured chart of inflation in the public sector, but I would put it at 4 per cent and would guess that it is rising. Inflation, as we were taught, is a disease of money and the Chancellor is happily preparing to spend more and more of it — but then, he and his favoured sector face no competition. The rest of the economy has plenty. We are now importing services as well as goods from the Far East, and my candidate for the next Nobel Prize for economics is Hu He, the supplier in China who keeps prices down. This award would disappoint any possible contenders in the Bank of England, but that's competition for you.
Flat out
OFFERS I can refuse (1): buying to let. Even before Cherie Blair bet £500,000 on a pair of flats in Bristol, sight unseen, I did not share her adviser's belief that this was a sure way to make money. This week Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, ran up a storm signal. Borrowed money had flooded into buy-to-let schemes, he said: 'Rents have fallen in London for five successive quarters. Some borrowers are finding that rental incomes are not covering the cost of servicing the mortgage.* That would leave them to pin their faith on everrising prices — but if prices fell, they might not be able to pay their mortgages back. London prices are weakening. No doubt we shall be told that Bristol is quite different, but I would not bet on it.
In the picture
OFFERS I can refuse (2): Arwen Banning, BA, is back. Only last month (as you may recall) he was writing to me from Ashley Jenkins, art dealers and publishers, telling me that I could hope for a return of 10.4 per cent from prints to hang on office walls. When I inquired, the 10.4 per cent return had dried up, but he now invites me to invest in pictures by promising artists from Ashley Jenkins's stock. `Short, mediumterm profits are becoming the standard,' Mr Banning says. I get the picture.
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