John Harris: London has become a citadel, sealed off from the rest of Britain

This John Harris article from earlier in the week is worth a read:

What is Nigel Farage's entire act if not a huge raspberry blown at the values and privileges of the more elevated parts of the capital, and most loudly heard from counties such as Sussex, Kent, Norfolk, Hampshire and Lincolnshire? 

Plenty of numbers suggest that people there are right to be angry. In Ukip's heartland of the east of England, for instance, people talk endlessly about the state of the roads and railways and how difficult it is to get around. At the last count annual transport spending there was put at £30 per head; in London it was £2,600. 

Think about all this and you begin to arrive at a political theory of everything. In Peter Oborne's prescient book The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), he nailed the cliques that have taken over the three main political parties as follows: 

"Their outlook is often metropolitan and London-based. They perceive life through the eyes of an affluent member of London's middle and upper-middle classes. This converts them into a separate, privileged elite, isolated from the aspirations and problems of provincial, rural and suburban Britain." 

Quite so, and if its insane cost of living makes London a closed shop to all but the most privileged, this will only get worse.