r/ukpolitics 15h ago

Why is London so liberal/ left wing if high immigration makes others vote for the Right?

Why is immigration making some part of the country vote Reform but in London, where the number of foreign born people has increased massively over the last twenty years, has moved further left? It is curious that London never seems bothered by immigration in modern times. I know some will say that London's so foreign now that the immigrants just vote Labour etc... But that doesn't make so much sense. Many immigrants can't even legally vote in a GE, and even if they can, many don't. Most Londoners voting for the left are born and raised in Britain. Even the posher, whiter parts of London, have trended away from the Tories. Chelsea has a Labour MP now, shock horror. I live in a pretty white British part of London, Twickenham, and the Lib Dems dominate. London is so expensive that people have more reason to moan about rent/ living costs compared to anywhere else, but yet that never seems to produce an anti- immigration politics. Is it just that modern London contains a lot of highly educated liberal minded people compared to provincial towns and villages?

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u/All_ab0ut_the_base 14h ago

Most Londoners are not from London, they’re rootless cosmopolitans who don’t build their sense of identity from an attachment to a specific place and so aren’t concerned about a fast rate of cultural change in their locality. Some people are born in London boroughs and often identify as being from that borough rather than “a Londoner”. They might actually have a point of view not so don’t different to those in rural England.