It’s obscene that the capital gets whatever it wants – more bridges, concert halls, railways – while the regions are starved of funding

London this month stamped its foot and got the government to give it £5m for a “study” – yes, for a study – into how it needed more concert halls to boost the ego of a conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, who wants a new £278m concert hall of his own. This is despite £111m spent between 2005 and 2007 turning the Royal Festival Hall into “the best in the world”.

Without the new hall, Rattle would throw a tantrum and then we’d be sorry. That is how you spend public money in London. Weep, Barnsley, weep.

Meanwhile, up the road, the actor Joanna Lumley wants a different bauble. She wants a garden bridge over the Thames at £100m and rising. Rumour has it that London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, and chancellor George Osborne were in a dinner party bidding war over who would give more, ending with each pledging £30m – of other people’s money. Lumley is lucky her bridge is not over the Tyne.

Meanwhile out in Stratford, east London, West Ham United football club want a new ground. Osborne says, name your price. He has duly spent in the region of £700m to refashion his Olympic “legacy” for West Ham’s private benefit. Eat your heart out, Aston Villa.

The truth is whatever London wants, it gets. The reason is that the purse-strings are held by Londoners. London businessmen want a third airport. They must have it, somewhere. Cyclists want a “superhighway”. They get it.

Crossrail’s staggering £15bn cost was so easily found that Crossrail 2 has decided to cost itself at £27bn. Should any other part of the kingdom ask for such sums it would be laughed out of court.

It is London not the provinces that is drunkenly dependent on public money. The latest figure for infrastructure spending on each Londoner is £5,500 a year, against Yorkshire’s £580 a head and the north-east’s £220. Not surprisingly, in the last three years London has grown three times faster than the north. Between 2010 and 2012 the capital added 216,000 more private sector jobs while Bradford, Blackpool and even Glasgow lost them. Vince Cable was right in calling London “a giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country”.