I’m sure all of the Pollyannistas will be so happy over this excellent news:

A group of wealthy City lawyers and merchant bankers
are "super-gentrifying" the Islington neighbourhood where Tony Blair
used to live in ways that undermine many of New Labour’s most cherished
assumptions, a report said yesterday.

The
"super-gentrifiers" imposing their mark on the neighbourhood of
Barnsbury derive their incomes from the huge salaries and bonuses made
on global markets.

This largely Oxbridge-educated
elite chooses to live in single-family terrace houses, rather than the
mid-rise apartment blocks in Chelsea and Notting Hill where traditional
bankers and stockbrokers tend to live, say the researchers.

They work long hours, socialise only among
themselves, send their children to private schools and may have
stronger ties to people living in New York’s Brooklyn Heights than with
some of their neighbours, according to the paper presented at the Royal
Geographical Society’s annual conference.

The way
these "super-gentrifiers" have built an exclusive community with little
respect for the cultural and historical character of the area they have
colonised undermines some of New Labour’s most cherished beliefs about
the value of creating "mixed communities", say the authors.

You see, as Polly tells us, it’s inequality that kills. As those slightly less fevered point out (like Richard Layard) it’s those people we actualy compare ourselves to, the levels of inequality there, that matter. As he also points out, we compare ourselves to the people within our own experience. We don’t worry very much about David Beckham, but do about the people in our own social set.

Which means that this form of Balkanization is only to be applauded. The rich are living in a separate society so that the baleful influence of their wealth does not become apparent to the envious eyes of those poorer. This reduces if not eliminates the murderous effect of such inequality and so, by Polly’s metric, more poor babies will survive.

I’m sure she’ll be so happy with this development.