How London Is Quietly Falling Victim to Its Own Bureaucracy and Mismanagement

People take part in the "Unite the Kingdom" rally in London on Saturday. Carl Court/Getty Images

I studied in London during the 1970s amidst the IRA bombings—a time when the government encouraged you to conserve water and do joint showering. It was a tough era and I remember walking almost daily from Queensway to Houghton Street to the London School of Economics in WC2 and back as the underground received bomb threats. London has gone through many challenges from bombing during World War II plus before and after. Through it all, London survived and thrived. Yet now I fear that London has truly fallen—and this time it was not due to an external enemy like Hitler or the IRA, but from within.

I was sitting at George, a club at Mount Street and enjoying a light lunch with Angela Forrester, a senior banker in the City and Keith Lavell, a prominent lawyer with a top global law firm. Complaints about the mismanagement of London did not stop during our meal. I was having a cold Caesar salad, Angela a pasta and Keith a cod. Angela was explaining how the Treasury and government policy has caused all the global investors and business leaders that lived in London to depart to Monaco, the Gulf and Italy. She added as she was scooping her last spoonful of pasta that after the war in the gulf, Monaco and especially Milan were now the favorites for global business leaders.

Keith was criticizing Britain’s tax system, its exit from the EU, the high VAT and the unscrupulous bureaucracy. As Keith put his knife and fork together signaling he had finished eating, he added that it was ridiculous that a UK citizen would, after paying tax all their life properly, have their heirs confronted by a 40 percent death tax. This practice had families sell assets to pay this unwarranted tax. I asked Keith, having finished my salad, about the fact that a UK resident with no UK income having their assets in a bonded warehouse in London would have their heirs confronted by the death tax. How did that make sense?

Keith raised both his arms in the air explaining that irrationality is reigning and bringing the UK to its knees with the economy tanking. Angela interrupted, saying she did not understand why VAT reimbursement has been cancelled for visitors and tourists causing them to buy elsewhere. She added all of Europe reimburses VAT to foreigners as they exit from the EU and sadly London, who has the biggest number of tourists, does not do that, causing shops to close as buyers now buy from Paris, Rome, etc. Any visitor to London sees multiple shops closed and with “for lease” signs on major London streets such as Regent’s Street, Oxford Street and Jermyn Street.

As we all got our plates removed, I asked, “What is the logic of the city of London having long term road closures for works that maximum would take a week, roads being narrowed with pavements being widened causing horrible traffic constriction?” “Moreover,” I added “the uncomprehending fact of the “coning” of London.” “Coning?” asked Angela with a puzzled look on her face as she pushed her blonde hair backwards. “Yes,” I added. “You have these traffic cones everywhere, dividing tunnels and highways, and choking transport even when there is no work being done.” I explained this phenomenon is destructive in so many ways, including but not limited to significant unnecessary delays and frustrations.

Angela agreed, explaining that several individuals missed their flights due to such traffic jams going to Heathrow, Stansted, Luton and Gatwick. We all ordered coffee, two espressos for Angela and I whilst Keith ordered an americano. Looking out the large window at George, rain started coming down in bucketfuls and people were rushing into shops. The good news, as I returned to the conversation between Keith and Angela, was that such downpours lasted a brief period.

As the coffee arrived, Keith brought up the trains. He had just returned from a business trip to Osaka and could not stop comparing the two systems. “In Japan,” he said, “if a train is four minutes late, the conductor issues a written apology. Here, we’ve normalized delays of forty minutes as if it’s weather.” He said the average commuter into Waterloo or Victoria now builds in a buffer of twenty to thirty minutes just to account for “signal failures” that seem to occur with suspicious regularity.

Angela agreed, adding that she had missed a connecting flight at Heathrow last month because her domestic train from Manchester was cancelled without notice, and there had been no staff at the counter to explain why. That led naturally into the topic of flights. Angela said she now avoids British carriers when she has any onward connection that matters, because delays out of Heathrow and Gatwick have become so routine that colleagues in Frankfurt and Zurich joke about it openly in meetings.

As both Angela and Keith were exchanging poor experiences at London airports and flights, my mind soared to the earlier days when London was a leading and dominant city across the world. I remember how when London city spoke, everyone listened, and how the audience arrived at the great London theaters in suits and cocktail dresses and not in flip flops and shorts as they do now. How the audience respected the actors and made no noise, how London was the voice of creativity, discipline and diplomacy in the EU. I expected the UK to lead the EU rather than the chaotic Brexit vote and complexity of policies that followed and still occurs.

Before I returned to focus on the conversation at the table, my last thought was of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990), John Major (1990-1997) and Tony Blair (1997-2007), all Prime Ministers with serious tenures and stability plus success regardless of some failed decisions. Since then, 10 Downing Street has become a revolving door, rivaling a period in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s when Prime Ministers rotated every two to three years with no policy nor success.

Angela pushed back gently, saying she did not want the lunch to end on such a grim note. She said London still has the ingredients—the institutions, the talent, the history—and that what’s missing is simply the vision, execution and discipline to use them. I wanted to believe her. But walking out of George onto Mount Street, past a line of traffic cones sealing off a stretch of pavement where no workman had been seen in weeks, I found myself thinking about the other two times this city was meant to fall. In the Blitz, the enemy was visible, and so was the courage. During the IRA years, we walked to school past bomb threats because the alternative was letting fear win. Both times, London knew exactly what it was fighting and fought back.

This time there is no enemy to rally against, no siren to signal that the danger is here. Just a huge blindness—a tax system that punishes success, a bureaucracy that closes shops instead of opening them, a transport network that cannot keep a schedule, a government that changes its mind every two years. London did not fall to an invasion. It is falling to its own inability to get out of its own way. Keith caught up with me at the corner, still muttering about the cones. “You know what the difference is,” he said, “That a recognized enemy can be defeated. I’m not sure we recognize that “coning” is an enemy.” I didn’t have an answer for him. I still don’t. But I know this: a city that survived Hitler and survived the IRA should not be brought to its knees by roadworks that never finish, trains that never arrive, and a Treasury that cannot tell the difference between taxing wealth and driving it away. London has fallen before, in ways far more literal. What’s different now is that no one is quite sure who to blame, and no one in charge seems especially in a hurry to fix it.

About the author: M. Shafik Gabr is a renowned leader in international business, innovation, investment and one of the world’s premier collectors of Orientalist art, and an accomplished philanthropist.