- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 4 2000 02.04 BST
It's right to move entrenched, privileged people out of their anachronistic London palaces, but the royals, frankly, are neither here nor there. It's Mo who should move - and Tony and Gordon and the rest of them. The real anachronism is the Palace of Westminster. Moving out of London would be the greatest single contribution to the regeneration of Britain our largely impotent politicians could make.
All the other major English-speaking countries have their political capitals well away from their biggest cities. And no other substantial European country is as centralised as this one: even France has its hottest and sexiest region at the far end of the country. Britain, however, just has London. In almost any field of endeavour, it is necessary to go there to reach the peak of your profession, excepting only academe and football. No institution knows this cruel reality better than the Manchester Guardian.
The consequence has been an overwhelming tilt of population and resources toward the south-east. This was bad enough 25 years ago. Since then the north's traditional industries have declined or collapsed while the south-east's have grown ever more powerful; Europe has become more important to us, the open seas less; and the Channel tunnel has made things even worse. There is no foreseeable way to reverse this trend. Not merely is the infrastructure unable to cope, there is no way politicians can make it cope.
Yet they don't have to add to the problems themselves. Congressmen and their hangers-on don't commute to downtown Manhattan; our political industry could move out of London, taking the civil servants, the embassies, the lobbyists and much of the media with them. Property prices would become more realistic; the roads and railways would become a little less clogged. London would remain the financial, artistic and almost-everything-else capital, and would fulfil those functions far more efficiently. It would still be one of the world's great cities - indeed it would be a greater one because it would work better.
And so would parliament. Get the MPs out of their pretty but outmoded slum and give them facilities fit for serious legislators rather than whipped curs, and maybe they would behave accordingly. They would lead better, more enjoyable lives. They would be more in touch with how non-metropolitan people live and by golly this government would benefit from that.
Of course, there would be short-term inconvenience, because London would still have a role to play. But modern communications solve problems that would have been intractable even five years ago. There would be costs too. But they would be dwarfed by the long-term savings, and we ought to have learned enough about how NOT to plan a new parliament to make it possible to aim for architectural excellence without grandiloquence in the new capital. I would expect our prudent chancellor to be tigerish about cost over-runs.
Doubtless some people would bemoan the loss of tradition. But maybe London could stay as capital of England, with a new capital of Britain as a whole. And Westminster could still do the flummery - the State Opening, Budget Day, that kind of stuff - while serious business is conducted elsewhere.
But where elsewhere? For pure geographical dead- centredness, the new capital probably ought to be built somewhere near the beautiful North Riding town of Hawes, which might be good news for the makers of Wensleydale cheese. Since this is William Hague's constituency, it might emphasise the bipartisan nature of the project.
However, the people of Hawes are really too phlegmatic and decent to have to put up with politicians. And there is the unfortunate matter of the town's name which, when spoken rather than written, might cause unfortunate misunderstandings as far as MPs are concerned.
There are, however, plenty of alternative sites. York has historical resonance, feasible transport links and - as long as you keep away from the centre - a fair amount of lebensraum. I would be willing to listen to representations from Ripon, Wakefield, Lancaster and Chester. The best site of all might be near Crewe, though that might make people think I'm joking, and this is deadly serious. A move would be good for the new capital and its whole region; good for London; and good for Britain.
I envisage the Blairs living in a nice Georgian manor of the sort advertised in Country Life, for a fraction of the price of their comparative hovel in Downing Street. Why not?
