The idea that London is the polar opposite of the rest of Britain in almost every way has taken a firm grip on Westminster. It’s perhaps a species of overcorrection. In the months leading up to the Brexit referendum, Westminster’s forecasters tended to suffer from a London bias — they did not notice the way the rest of the UK was leaning. Now SW1 suffers from the opposite prejudice: the idea the “metropolitan bubble” (London) has almost nothing to do with “the real world” (everything else).
From the Government, there is the strange idea that London’s fortunes and the fortunes of everyone else are in direct competition (they are, of course, linked). In this month’s local elections, politicos mused that Labour doing well in the capital was a bad omen for its general prospects (it’s not).
But London is more similar to the rest of the UK than Westminster thinks. In fact, in one particularly encouraging respect the two are only getting more alike. For the past few years, one of London’s very best qualities — its openness to diversity — has been quietly taken on by the rest of the country.
A new report from the think tank British Future finds that three-quarters of Britons now feel a multi-ethnic society is part of the UK’s culture. A decade ago more than half said diversity undermined it. Why the change? Well it perhaps has something to do with another big pattern that shows up in every census: the rest of Britain is starting to look a lot more like London too. It is getting more diverse. Ethnic minority groups that may have started out in the capital move to the suburbs after a generation or two, and from there they disperse further and further.
In 2001, 80 per cent of black Africans lived in London. A decade later just 58 per cent did. The integration doesn’t stop at becoming neighbours. Mixed couples are now more common in Britain than almost anywhere else.
Join the dots and you can come up with an even more encouraging thesis: the more diverse a place gets, the more tolerant it becomes. And the more people get to know those of different ethnicities to their own, the more they like them. That might be why students are among the most tolerant — university exposes them to different groups. A 2014 study found prejudiced people become less so the longer they lived in mixed areas.
Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, says there are two kinds of places where this rule doesn’t hold. Places where the increase in diversity happened suddenly, like Boston in Lincolnshire, and places where there is “visibility without contact — a city a few 15 miles away is getting more diverse but no-one in your village”. In these cases, the change can cause friction.
But even in places that initially bristle at newcomers, the feeling disappears with new generations who have grown up with diversity as the norm.
In a way, this is slightly unflattering to Londoners — our famed openness is a simple consequence of our diversity, rather than any special quality in our characters. But it’s reassuring too. The rest of the UK will gradually get more like London. And that’s a good thing.
In other news...
Civil servants and aides are apoplectic after the latest and final round of partygate fines, in which Boris Johnson — whose premiership set the tone for the parties, and who allowed them to happen — has got off almost scot-free. Meanwhile, they have been left carrying the can. The Met doled out fines to people for attending the same parties Johnson was at, while the PM escaped further sanctions. It’s a rule that somehow always bears repeating: conduct your career anywhere near Johnson and bad things will happen to it.
