Lockdown London becomes less diverse. Sort of.
The population of London has declined by 700,000 over the course of the lockdowns. Bad news for neoliberals and Treasury officials who need to borrow against GDP. Good news for the native Brits but also for BAME race hucksters.
There seem to be no official figures on it, but the assumption is that the two main components in that reduction are middle-class natives who have moved to quieter and safer towns, and East European migrant workers who have returned home (not only from the UK - there has been an exodus from Holland too, and probably the rest of Western Europe). Population rises across Eastern Europe attest to that fact. Bogdan and Yana will have to find something else to do, although both of them doubtless have been given the right to remain here under the Brexit deal, and will hustle back if the cab business and the nail-bar open again.
Long-term, London’s economic future depends on whether the middle-class exodus is permanent, ie, whether home-working is now a fixture and the office is expensive and superfluous. If the middle-class does not return to office work it won’t need leafy, gentrified streets on which to live, and if it doesn’t need those it won’t partake of the city’s cultural and gastronomic pleasures. The city itself will morph by degrees into a cross between Kinshasa and Chittagong, which will drive the multiculti-minded pols totally nuts. Queue bussing policies, rural public sector housing policies, and endless ministerial anxiety over the “racist” British countryside.
Meanwhile, yesterday the Telegraph ran a photo essay on London in the 1960s. Was it really better than today, they asked?
