From The Evening Standard:
The Conservatives lost four seats in London because the city is “turning into Paris” with poorer people being pushed out from the gentrifying centre, a senior Tory MP warned today. He saw four colleagues beaten in the city, Nick de Bois in Enfield North, Lee Scott in Ilford North, Angie Bray in Ealing Central and Acton and Mary Macleod in Brentford and Isleworth.
“The reason we lost Nick and we lost Ange and we lost Mary and we lost Lee is that London is turning into Paris,” he told the ConservativeHome website. "The centre is gentrifying and pushing poorer people out. There is a natural demographic challenge there.”
In case the contradictions inherent in that are not obvious, here's the electoral map of Greater London:
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11 comments:
Curiously, Londoners by and large voted for parties that pledged to increase taxation on high value housing...
London is a bit of a dump, where Paris is mostly rather beautiful. OTOH the towns around Paris are horrible, while the towns around London are quite nice.
(the worst bit of Paris is Pigalle, and that's about as ugly as most of London, while the rest of Paris reminds me of Kensington).
How are you defining Paris Stigler?
Paris is under bounded and the towns that surround it are the equivalent of Zone 3-4 London. You can't compare your selective appraisal of the towns in the home counties to the Petite Couronne of Paris.
Also in what way is most of London ugly/a bit of a dump?
Shows how London votes are split on ethnic grounds more like it.
http://www.theguardian.com/graphic/0,5812,1395103,00.html
White British = Conservative
BJ, there is a large overlap, but that is a secondary issue. Until they went over to the SNP, most Scottish people voted Labour, even though Scotland is 99% white. In fact, there are fewer coloured people Up North generally but more Labour MPs.
Re Paris. I quite liked Montlhery, but now the track's gone it's not so nice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodrome_de_Linas-Montlh%C3%A9ry
Mark/BJ,
More so than Con and LD, Labour have tried to court multiple constituencies - older, harder Labour in Scotland and some of the north, minorities and Guardian readers in metropolitan areas, and softer Labour elsewhere. They then screwed up the agreement with Scotland, and that's lost probably forever.
Labour are screwed, perhaps for a decade. They are going to have to shift quite far to the right to win England, but they'll risk going so far that all the northern heartlands will get pissed off and go elsewhere.
TS. This 'shifting to the right' meme, is, I think, flawed. Both Labour and Tory are forms of authoritarianism. Both need to move away from that to Liberty. Both are constitutionally incapable of doing so. Hence UKIP. But UKIP have slipped away from Liberty to home-owner-ism.
So where now?
There is no "drift to the right".
Basically, if a government doesn't completely mess up, it gets re-elected.
Voters have a fairly modest set of expectations - as long as house prices keep going up and the dustbins get emptied, the government is considered to have succeeded and it gets re-elected.
Things like 'economic growth' or 'deficits' are way beyond their field of vision.
Lola,
Bad wording on my part. What I meant in shorthand is that economic liberalism. They have to shift to smaller government and lower taxes.
Mark,
House prices and bins are part of it, but people also care about things like their kids education, healthcare and taxes in general (although weirdly fixated on things like petrol duty rather than NI and VAT). And we know that that's pretty much what elected people like Blair.
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