New York’s competitiveness with London is the cover story in New York magazine this week, a story that has been picked up in some of the London papers and even for a while yesterday by that reliable indicator of the Zeitgeist, the Drudge Report. Why, even the New York Times got into the action Monday with an article headlined “In Dueling Financial Studies, Fuel for New York London Rivalry.”

This all comes in the wake of the series of dispatches on London and New York that was issued in the Sun in September of 2006. The four-part series by our staff reporter Jill Gardiner got the conversation rolling, as did an editorial that accompanied the series. The articles are available at nysun.com/specials/ny-london.php. A link is also available from the Sun’s homepage at nysun.com.

The one noteworthy twist in the rivalry that has developed since then appears to be some bad blood between Mayor Bloomberg and the mayor of London, “Red” Ken Livingstone. According to a report in the Evening Standard picked up in the Daily News of New York, a leaked memo suggests that Mr. Bloomberg took Mr. Livingstone’s poor relations with London’s Jewish community in account in deciding that he didn’t have time to meet with the London mayor. As partisans of New York, we naturally think London doesn’t hold a candle to our fair city in many respects, not least of which is the classiness of our mayor.

Competition is healthy, and there are certainly some policy steps that New York can take, particularly in respect of tax cuts and civil legal reform, to keep our competitive edge. For now, though, we are mindful that the competition that matters most in the world isn’t between London and New York, but between cities and nations that operate on the pluralistic, free, capitalist, and democratic principles by which those two English-speaking cities run, and those who would subvert them and send the world back into the Dark Ages.