Introduction

We have titled the final chapter ‘Whose City? Communities versus Capital’ as that is at the heart of this book. We have shown how neoliberalism's corrosive impact on democratic society, its institutions, the lives of people, their communities, and politics in general, is a global phenomenon. It has encroached on many, if not all, aspects of our daily lives. It has produced a stupefied version of ‘goggles’ through which we view what is happening to us, and around us, with its destruction of the ‘social’ as normal, as ‘common sense’. We are still experiencing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis with excuses to burden the people of the Earth with more austerity and further inequality. These events, and many more within national boundaries, have produced catastrophes exacerbated by neoliberal greed and government negligence, with global income inequality substantially increasing (Deaton, 2021), so the rich get richer and more powerful. Meanwhile, the rest of us get poorer, with the growing numbers of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder now out of sight.

The neoliberal ‘takeover’ of London by corporate developers, global investors and the ‘super-rich’, with profits for shareholders paramount, irrespective of the impact on working-class communities who are deemed as mere collateral damage, is but one example of where this is happening and which forms the central argument of this book. Cities such as London, together with those across the UK and indeed the world, are evolving in the image of those with the power and the money to determine citizens’ futures.