The bottom line in London I think is just that no one really has a clear idea of why we need to get rid of Boris. The guy has not managed to piss many people off, and seems to have been doing broadly the right things. Effectively, he's just followed in Ken's footsteps. It's clear enough to me, for more or less ideological reasons, that it would be better to get Ken back, but the masses are not fed up with BoJo. That's not enough to ensure he stays in, but not enough to get him out either. Boris has managed to avoid becoming associated closely with Cameron, no mean feat considering the two were in the same year at the same school together, then the same university, that Boris was a Tory MP, and that the two are 8th cousins, both with royal blood, etc. Doubtless, that Boris hasn't yet become a pariah, and that there's a vaguely dodgy ambience around Livingstone these days, has everything today with a pliant media who prefer the former over the latter.
To push a bit further, I have a feeling that Boris resonates better with Londoners than Ken does. Ken is a Londoner through-and-through, but that is in itself not what most people who live in London are. Most people in central London are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants – as is Boris, but not Ken (Boris is part Turkish, part Jew, married to a half-Indian woman – Ken's old man came down from Scotland, which isn't really the same), who as a working class British native of London is in a demographic represented now mainly in some working class outer London suburbs, but a group that is a relatively small minority in most of the capital, outnumbered by immigrant communities and white British people from outside London who've moved to the city for work. In the outer suburbs, Ken performs poorly because he's not a Tory: the outer suburbs are right-wing, and people prefer Boris to Ken, who is part of a relatively urban lefty elite not liked out there. So Ken's constituency ends up being the white working class (i.e. tube drivers, maybe firemen, some factory workers) and urban lefties, losing the massive ethnic inner city and suburban commuter populations to Boris.
To push a bit further, I have a feeling that Boris resonates better with Londoners than Ken does. Ken is a Londoner through-and-through, but that is in itself not what most people who live in London are. Most people in central London are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants – as is Boris, but not Ken (Boris is part Turkish, part Jew, married to a half-Indian woman – Ken's old man came down from Scotland, which isn't really the same), who as a working class British native of London is in a demographic represented now mainly in some working class outer London suburbs, but a group that is a relatively small minority in most of the capital, outnumbered by immigrant communities and white British people from outside London who've moved to the city for work. In the outer suburbs, Ken performs poorly because he's not a Tory: the outer suburbs are right-wing, and people prefer Boris to Ken, who is part of a relatively urban lefty elite not liked out there. So Ken's constituency ends up being the white working class (i.e. tube drivers, maybe firemen, some factory workers) and urban lefties, losing the massive ethnic inner city and suburban commuter populations to Boris.
No comments:
Post a Comment