Ian McMillan: A pocket guide to the price of being in London

And yet it’s not the same if I’m walking the boulevards of Barnsley; I’ll stroll from the Bus Station with some change in my purse and a couple of notes in my pocket and by the time I get to where I’m going I’ll find that I’ve more or less got the same amount of collateral I had when I started, even though I’ve stopped for a cuppa and maybe a croissant and I’ve popped into a charity shop and bought a paperback.

Somehow money, like elastic, stretches further in the North. I’ve not tested the North/South elastic idea, by the way.

Of course they’ve acknowledged this in London for years and that’s why they have the Weighting Allowance, which means that they pay them a bit more because they know the cost of living is higher down there. I have to admit that when I first heard the phrase I thought it was the London Eyting Allowance because the food is so much more expensive but that was just my Barnsley ear filtering everything so it sounds like it was uttered on the streets of Tarn.

We hear a lot about the reality of the North/South divide and I think the expensiveness of the capital exemplifies it more than most other things. The Yorkshire cry of “How much?” can often be heard from flat-capped visitors, even before they’ve moved far from the platform they got off the train on.

So, here’s my economic solution for the North/South divide. It’ll mean that the top end of the country will soon catch up with the south and indeed it might soon overtake it. You’ve heard of Devaluation, well I’m proposing a Yorkshire version of that: Eeevaluation, named after the syllable that often precedes the cry of “How much?” and turns it into “Eee: how much?” It’s simple: once you get south of, say Chesterfield, the pound in your pocket will buy you more in London. It’ll not be a pound as we know it, though: it’ll be a Northern Quid. It’ll look more or less the same, but of course it’ll be made of brass.

Let me explain: you can get an espresso for 95p in a café in Sheffield that I go in, but I’ve paid (through gritted teeth, and purely for the purposes of research) £2.20 for one in London. Under my new scheme, I’d go into that extortionate place and when they tried to charge me that vast amount I’d simply give them my Northern Quid and I’d end up with 5p change. Five London p, as well, which would buy me a large terraced house in certain small post-industrial villages. Our money would be worth both less and more and it would mean that you wouldn’t have to save up for a trip to London, you could just treat it as a normal day out in, say, Mexborough. I suppose the problems might begin at the border, which would have to be set early on, after much discussion for people in places like Crewe and Derby which aren’t really in the north although for the purposes of this they’d like to be.

People coming from the south would have to change all their money once they crossed the border because then we’d have a level fiscal playing field. People going to the south would just use their Northern Quids because that would give us an advantage.

Suddenly we could buy things that would normally be expensive for just a fraction of the cost and then when we got back home we could buy things that just cost the normal Northern price. I can’t see any disadvantage to this scheme at all, and I wish I’d thought of it years ago.

Of course people from the south would see it as a definite disadvantage. They’d stamp their feet. They’d throw their bowler hats and furled brollies to the floor in frustration. I realise I’m caricaturing them here, but hey ho.

They’d be cross because for years they’ve been used to us finding the South so expensive that we scuttle back north as fast as we can, and now it’ll be like those former Soviet Republics after the fall of the USSR. London will be the cheapest place in the world, but only if you’re from the North.

Eeevaluation! It’s a winner. You 
can’t tell I failed my economics O-level, can you?