If they want to be Londoners – to be part of this thrilling, rich city – people have to rub along together despite fantastic inequality
Recently, the economist Jonathan Portes showed me a remarkable statistic. In Tower Hamlets, the London district with the worst child poverty in Britain, children at primary school whose first language is not English get slightly better scores for English than the national average. So do kids from foreign language-speaking homes across London. My theory is that those kids and their parents think London has a place for them – a semi-detached house in Chingford, perhaps. Put simply, they believe in the London dream.
