Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as ‘the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister’.
The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers to leave. Articles along the lines of Why I’m Buying a Big House in France with the Money I Earn Writing this Rubbish appear alongside news of desperate couples driven away by ‘rush-hour chaos’, ‘crumbling infrastructure’ or ‘soaring crime’.
There is, it’s perfectly true, an exodus from London and from Britain in general, but not necessarily for the bleak reasons the Standard or the Daily Mail suggest. Another plausible reason for the migration is that technology has simply made remoter parts of the country (or the world) far less crappy places to live than they were only a few years ago.
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