London

In the context of the EU referendum, maybe it's time we asked: what's it for?

I've been to London often. My first visit was on a school trip over 50 years ago. As I  remember, I thought then it was big (it seemed to take hours to get from the far reaches of the London suburbs to Euston), smelly, noisy and the people seemed to regard visitors as a pain in the arse who got in the way of real Londoners on the tube. Nothing that's happened in the past 50 years has changed my view of the place: it's still somewhere that comes between me and places I really want to be - usually France. Well, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain - definitely somewhere that isn't London. If I can bypass London I do. In travel terms, it seems the plan of people like Boris Johnson, ex-mayor of London, is to make us all fly via London Heathrow.

The view we're sold is that London brings a lot of money to the UK so we should all be grateful. Except that I don't see the 'trickle-down' theory of finance working: the money that comes to London stays in London.

So it's bit rich to find that one of the main reasons we're given to remain in the EU and to leave the EU is London.

I think of London as a giant bloodsucker. Jobs (good jobs in trade, finance and banking) are kept there, when they could in the digital age quite easily be dispersed to other areas of the UK. That means people have to be brought in to do these jobs. People who would prefer to be elsewhere have to live in a city that is actually quite hostile to those who work there. These are often young people, and they leave communities in parts of the UK that really need their skills. There aren't nearly enough houses in the London area, so these young people rent or buy houses they can't afford and struggle to pay for them. They always seem to be planning to escape London as soon as they can. Of course, there are poor people in London. They are often people from minority groups, usually foreigners, sometimes unregistered and flying under the radar. The two groups only seem to meet as masters and servants.

This doesn't make for stable communities.

So what to do? Maybe first of all accept that the nature of the modern city may be changing: maybe we don't need to have gazillions of people gathered in one place to keep the city working. In the long term, maybe we need to rethink what the city is for.

Maybe we need to re-read Brave New World, a much more scary novel than 1984, in order to see what happens if we don't re-think how we live.