![]() ![]() ![]() The rise of the populist UK Independence party, which does well across the country but not in London, is ultimately a reaction against everything the city embodies. There is a nebulous but insistent feeling that openness has curdled into nihilism, that London has become too hospitable to foreign (especially Russian) money, too tolerant of various strains of extremism, too indifferent to British citizens priced out of their own capital city. ![]() National restrictions on non-European immigration limit the capital’s access to globetrotting talent.Ī thicket of financial regulation is tying up the City. It is an unusual revolution that does not provoke a reactionary movement against it and, sure enough, there are incipient challenges to London’s openness. London is a global city that happens to be appended to Britain. New York is an American city with a global dimension. Its restaurants, its skyline, its football clubs, its way of earning a living – almost every aspect of London life has been shaken up by outsiders. By the turn of the millennium, it was the entrepôt of globalisation, teeming with migrants and profiting from international capital flows. Nowhere has pushed openness to such extremes as London in recent decades.Īt the turn of the 1980s, it was depopulating, hidebound and still nursing the bruises of post-imperial decline. In the epigrammatic style he has mastered, Tony Blair, former UK prime minister, says that the ideological axis in the modern world is not left versus right but “open versus closed”. ![]()
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