In Kensington and Chelsea we all know we're always going to get a Conservative because
that's just the way it is here.
How do you feel about the election coming up?
I'm a Labour man, myself, like, but you know I've lost faith in it.
Have you ever voted?
No.
Why don't you vote?
Because it doesn't make a difference if we do.
Views of the election there from Kensington in London and the other Kensington here in Liverpool.
We all know the basic drill: "They're all the same, they've got nothing to say to us."
You'd be forgiven for not noticing it but underneath all the disillusionment with party
politics and those cliches about hard working families, there are real choices on offer
at this election, which will effect the country in very different ways.
It all depends on which Britain you're in.
The proportion of local people here on out of work benefits is 30 percent.
The job centre, if I'm honest, looks a bit like a prison.
There isn't a job centre anywhere near Kensington High Street. That's probably because here,
in the Campden Council Ward, the figure is 2.9 percent.
The average salary is £69,000.
Here, if you're lucky enough to be in work, it's £25,000.
Here, the rate of child poverty is under 5 percent.
Here, it's 45.8 percent.
This is Kensington Palace Gardens, often said to be the most expensive street in Britain,
where number seven was recently valued at £43,276,141.
£20
For twenty houses?
For twenty houses. A pound a house.
Kensington in London is home to some pretty big media voices. The London Evening Standard
and the Daily Mail.
Here, they've got Liverpool Community Radio.
Hello and welcome to Kenny Island Disks, my name is Steve Faragher.
Kensington was somewhere people aspired to live in. It was good housing, it was close
to the city centre, er, and then the eighties came along, basically.
Unemployment, drugs, although drugs isn't as bad as it was in this area. What we have
got is, sort of, the post-smack era. We're getting beggars back again in Kensington because
people are being sanctioned.
How does the fact that the election's coming reflect itself here? People talk about it
or not talk about it?
OK, let's, let's talk about the election in Kensington. No one's mentioning it because
it doesn't... doesn't touch on their lives in any remote way.
The cuts do.
The cuts do, yeah, but they don't think they can do anything about the cuts by who they
vote for. They're at the bottom anyway, they have an expression in Liverpool that they
call the bones of your arse. If you're on the bones of your arse, you've got nowhere
else to go.
Hi, have you got the leaflet for that property in Verona? The one with the asking price of
ten million, seven hundred thousand I think.
Cheers, I'll have two.
How has the area changed in those 20 years?
Erm, hmmm.
I used to live not that far away and it feels quite different now.
In what way does it feel different?
Er, all this building work being done, maybe the street life is a bit quieter.
Well, there are... You hear more languages. You hear less from American investment bankers
who've moved out.
An awful lot of money has been put into changing Kensington from what was the result of the
60s - large houses split up in small units back to large houses. It is really a reflection
of the success of London.
I remember my father, years ago, speaking about the sick man of Europe, which was Britain.
He would be quite surprised.
Behind what some people think of as Kensington's success, is London's status as an offshore
tax haven and the super rich and super quiet non-doms who are now in Ed Miliband's sites.
What was really a family neighbourhood isn't a family neighbourhood anymore.
Kensington Liverpool has the quiet and the silence of poverty and here you've got the
silence and absence of street life of extreme wealth.
Well, what's happened here, essentially, is that London's turned into Monaco.
Kensington and Liverpool might be about to lose one of its most important public services.
The local Sure Start Children's Centre has just been given a reprieve until 2017 when
the council says it will have to close unless more funding is found.
This is a precious thing for Kensington. I think if that was to be taken away, you know
you would take away, yeah, ripping the heart out of it really.
The staff are so dedicated here, they put you into the right direction to where you need
to be and it just changes your life so much.
Has it changed your life?
Definitely.
Tell me how it's changed your life.
I was sitting at home and saying: "Oh my God, just me in this world with child disabilities."
I was really isolated, really lonely and I came here and the children's centre has been
like a lifeline for me.
Makes people mix with each other to get to know each other. They come into the centre
and learn basic English.
Where are you from?
Portugal.
Portugal. And where are you from?
Cameroon.
OK, and you're from?
Malaysia.
And you're from?
Liverpool.
Ha ha ha ha!
Between now and 2017 what do you think you can do? What are you going to do?
Absolutely everything we can do to keep it open. Fundraise...
It's like the only thing that we have.
How many of you are going to vote?
All of us. All of us.
And who are you going to vote for?
Labour. Labour, yeah. Labour.
Do you want to say something?
No, no. I'll break up, you know.
Go on.
Well, it's difficult to talk about.
Because I think... I think, you know, words like austerity and inequality even, you know,
can become very, very cliched until you realise in practice what they actually mean. And when
you talk to parents of kids with what are called special and complex needs, who are
sort of saved by places like this and the children's life chances are improved. And
even if you want to look at this on the basis of financial arithmetic, further down the
line, you know, the government saves money and yet, in the most short-sighted, crass,
ignorant way imaginable, money's getting withdrawn from cities like Liverpool and places like
this are threatened with closure. And it's just the most awful, awful thing too see.
The Tories are promising at least three more years of austerity and £12 billion of further
benefit cuts. Labour, meanwhile, has come up with a couple of flagship policies of its
own that will hardest...
in Kensington London.
Right, we're off to meet someone at the heart of the Kensington and Chelsea rebellion against
Labour's plans for a mansion tax.
Number 4 would probably go on the market. Number 7 would pretty much for sure.
People would move out rather than pay it?
Number 9. Couldn't afford to pay. Couldn't afford to pay.
Number 9, number 32, that one, that one, that one, that one.
We bought it 50 years ago this month.
How much did you pay for it 50 years ago? Excuse me for asking.
Just over £12,000.
Good heavens!
It's now worth over three million pounds and John fears that means he'd have to pay around
£7,000 a year.
It actually won't bring in the Treasury any more money so it doesn't make any sense.
Why do you think it's being proposed?
I think it is the old fashioned politics of envy, I'm afraid. I mean, this wasn't for
rich people it was a very mixed area. Still, it's much less so now but that's another reason
I think this is an unfair tax. I mean, we've been caught up in something that's happened
to an area of London which was just a fluke.
Do you feel rich yourselves?
No, we're comfortably off. We have no complaints. We've never been keen on luxuries and spending
money on high-living or anything.
We only installed central heating in this house five years ago.
Do you feel any trepidation about piping up about this in the sense that you're sitting
on an asset which is worth a lot of money, you see, and I suppose someone saying "oh,
I've had my benefits stopped" or "I have to use a food bank," that's an easy thing to
throw at you, isn't it?
But it's not cash in the bank to pay a tax, which you weren't expecting, which you've budgeted
for your pension for the rest of your life to live in the home that you've lived in for
years. It's not worth anything unless you sell it or you die.
We never looked at it as an investment, we needed a house to raise a family.
Should the Labour Party win the election, do you think this will happen?
I'm afraid, genuinely afraid, it will happen.
Well, sometimes we have a sort of secret motto for these films, which is it's fucking complicated
and, er, the issue of the mansion tax from their perspective definitely is.
What it tells you really about modern politics is that, after years of fighting over the
so called "centre ground", both Labour and the Tories are now at pains to somehow reassure
their core support that they're the same parties they ever were.
The Tories are banging on about austerity and benefit cuts. Labour's pitch this time
is partly about clobbering the rich.
As an old Liverpudlian folk song put it: two tribes are going to war.
And in some places, a long way from here, it's already getting noisy.
"No ifs! No buts! No central government cuts!"
We're not backing off yet. Until they tell us that they're going to keep our Sure Start
Children's Centres open. Not for two years, indefinite.
We're going to fight until the end.
Have you been on demonstrations before?
No, it's the first one.
First one?
Very first one. Yeah, first one.
I think it will make other people stand up for the centres. You know, people that have
not attended today and seen how important it is to the people and how precious it is
to us.
Change people's minds, raise their consciousness.
I hope so. I hope they vote. Biggest one - vote.