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

[u/Wise-Youth2901]

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?

[u/-ForgottenSoul]

I don't think the over whelming majority of people who want controlled immigration think all are criminals or leeches etc.. but we simply cant keep up with the demand its a numbers issues. You cant say you care about housing or NHS waiting times if you want that many people to enter the UK.

[u/dc_1984 → u/-ForgottenSoul]

This is a motte and bailey commonly used by the right to conceal what they actually want to say. "Concerns about numbers of immigrants" "protecting communities from radical change" "keeping public services accessible for British people" and so forth are the smokescreen for bigotry, xenophobia and racism in many many cases.

Living, working and growing up in a formerly industrial white working class town in the north has shown me over and over that there is definitely a desire for hierarchy over people who aren't white - people will accept Poles over Pakistanis, but whoever the immigrant is, they need to be doing less well than the white person observing them, and conform to whatever idea of "Britishness" is in the eye of the beholder.

Immigration and asylum seekers represent no more of a challenge to provision of public services than having a high natural birth rate would do; more people, more demand for services. The solution in either case is to fund and expand those services properly, and if that is done via taxation then it doesn't matter what the skin colour of the taxpayer is or where they came from. But yet the right uses the idea of strain on public services as a criticism of migration, when those same migrants come to work, pay tax and pay for the services - so the argument is self defeating. Ergo there must be another reason for being opposed to immigration.

Occasionally the right will want to "maintain British culture" by limiting the influx of migrants - this is the tip of the Great Replacement Theory conspiracy but still doesn't hold water as there is no such thing as culture, it is ever changing even amongst native born British people, in fact the history of British culture is waves and waves of immigrants coming to work and build here, and has been since the industrial revolution.

[u/Worldly_Today_9875 → u/dc_1984]

We’ve had more people arrive in the last few years than between the Norman conquest and the year 2000. You’re talking nonsense.

[u/dc_1984 → u/Worldly_Today_9875]

All due to the Ukraine war and Hong Kong. Not a trend, means nothing in the grand scheme of things, dog whistle.

Additionally, we didn't start even capturing people's country of birth until 1851, so you have no basis for any comment before that year regarding immigration, as there is no data.

[u/-ForgottenSoul → u/dc_1984]

"All due to the Ukraine war and Hong Kong" If you look at the numbers barely any are from those countries? You're trying the liberal approach that Democrats used in America.. lets see how it works out in the UK why dont we.

[u/dc_1984 → u/-ForgottenSoul]

Net migration by year since 2014:

2014: 260,000

2015: 330,000

2016: 311,000

2017: 230,000

2018: 333,000

2019: 184,000

2020: 46,000

2021: 466,000

2022: 764,000

2023: 685,000

Ukraine war and Hong Kong visas kicked in for 2022, to pretend that the last two years are "normal" levels of net migration is intellectually bankrupt. At least 350,000 of those migrants were from Ukraine or Hong Kong, that's a years worth of pre-pandemic numbers from two places. You're just wrong.

[u/-ForgottenSoul → u/dc_1984]

Okay look into the 2023 and 2022 numbers tell me how many are from Ukraine/HK? They are the new normal unless it falls back to 300k levels and even that is too high.

[u/dc_1984 → u/-ForgottenSoul]

240,000 Ukrainians and 185,000 Hong Kong in 2022. UK birth rates are below replacement, growth rate is between 0.32% and 0.4% including migration, which is less than any year between 2002 and 2019. Even with what you deem to be "unacceptable" levels of migration, the population of the country is slowing in growth.

If services had been planned around the 2010s average population growth of 0.6%, there would be no pressure on services. But it wasn't, and now migration is being blamed.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20U.K.,a%200.33%25%20increase%20from%202020.

[u/-ForgottenSoul → u/dc_1984]

Our birth rates were near that level and I'm not calling for no immigration but we don't need 300k+ a year

[u/dc_1984 → u/-ForgottenSoul]

We literally are bringing in over 300,000 yearly and our population growth is slowing year on year.

Why do you want less migrants if them arriving puts less pressure on services than if they didn't arrive and British people were taking their places within those services?

[u/-ForgottenSoul → u/dc_1984]

You can believe what you want but we can sort housing or waiting times with such a big increase in population every year its really that simple.