The working class aren't being squeezed out of London - but perhaps the middle are!  You apparently have to earn some double the UK national average wage, i.e. some £55,000, to afford to buy a house in London. Alternatively you can go for the rump piublic housing options that still remain in the capital. Then the State, i.e. taxpayer, subsidises your accommodation costs and it's less relevant that you are on below-living wage for London. Maybe there's a question of equity here when such tax-derived subsidies go to wealthy private landlords, but that's another question.

Anyway it's  most difficult to survive in London when you are neither wealthy enough to buy your own home nor poor enough to qualify for public assistance.


Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8NB
www.fooddeserts.org



-----Original Message-----
From: R Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Fri, 8 May 2015 10:58
Subject: Re: election

London didn't shift to the right as much as the rest of England - and UKIP did very poorly there! (And the working class is not being squeezed out of London)

The pollsters who designed the exit poll got it right

Possible reasons

1. 'Spiral of silence' - Conservative supporters more likely to 'lie' in polls

2. Many undecideds till very late and majority went to the right

3. Very late swings - as in 1992

4. The fear factor - especially Cameron's 'Vote Labour get the SNP'

More?

On 8 May 2015 at 10:42, Simon P J Batterbury <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Can any political geographers tell us why the UK pollsters got the election results so wrong?
 
I was at a big lecture by Mike Savage last night in Brussels on ‘class’ in Britain, and his multivariate reworking on the concept, which follows a massive BBC poll on class a couple of years ago, suggested opportunity and inheritance increasingly define class position defined in terms of ‘capitals’, and redefinitions of traditional Labour-voting working classes as well.
 
With wealth now so concentrated in London and its hinterland, some shifts to the right there may have been expected. But to the whole of England? The Belgian papers are calling it a victory for the conservateurs over the travaillistes but many working classes, increasingly non-white, actually vote Tory (at least where I grew up in suburban London)
 
Dr. Simon Batterbury
Visiting Reseach Fellow, | Brussels Centre for Urban Studies | Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. (community bike workshops in Europe, 10 March-15 June 2015  https://bikeworkshopsresearch.wordpress.com)
 
Associate Professor| School of Geography | 221 Bouverie St  (rm L2.33) | University of Melbourne, 3010 VIC, Australia.   +61 (0)3 8344 9319  simonpjb @ unimelb.edu.au | http://www.simonbatterbury.net
 
 



--
Professor RON JOHNSTON, FAcSS, FBA, OBE
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol BS8 1SS
+44(0)117 928 9116