Tom Tugendhat: evaluation

Transcript context

…— on CNN? It’s one of the greatest TV episodes of all time, and it’s fully natural. Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand? Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that. Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities. As a question of governance, how does London becoming so large, so wealthy, so successful, mesh with the relatively weak federalism of the UK? One might think if you have a city that critical, you need a lot of federalism to build up the intermediary bodies governing it. Does something there need to be changed, or is it optimal as is?…

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