Caring Capital

Is there no end to the importunities of think-tanks? Barely a day after Her Majesty's Government made the extent of its concern for the provinces car-crashingly clear by driving Nissan out of Sunderland along with a few expendable livelihoods, the Centre for London has suggested a campaign to show the carping yokels that we are all One Nation rah rah. The report suggests that regional civil servants should engage in mind-broadening job-swaps with actual government officials, and that London's national museums should send out their exhibits to whatever regional institutions may have survived the past decade's cultural slaughter. Since our approaching independence from Brussels is likely to impoverish the regions even further, thereby tempting the more energetic natives to vandalism and possible grand larceny, such ideas seem at best premature. In any case, patting the provincials on the head may prove less than effective at a time when most of London itself has followed the reality-based community into the ranks of traitordom against the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.