London: a global city viewed with mistrust by the electorate

Kamal Rahman's clients are Russians, Middle Easterners and Brazilians - and they are all fixated on a UK general election that may determine their future.

Ms Rahman is a London-based immigration lawyer for high net worth clients. In the past two months, she says, many have put on hold plans to relocate to the UK as they await the result of a contest in which wealthy foreigners have been branded tax dodgers and given the distinct impression they are no longer welcome.

"A lot of my clients are saying: 'Why do they not want rich people here?'" Ms Rahman said. "They find it incomprehensible."

Ever since the "big bang" deregulation of Britain's financial markets enacted by Margaret Thatcher in 1986, the UK has followed a liberalising trajectory that was accompanied by a public enthusiasm for wealth more commonly associated with the US.

During that time, London grew into a global financial centre that has become the favoured residence of the world's super rich. By a wide margin, it now boasts more billionaires per head than any city in the world. But this election has raised the question of whether British attitudes towards wealth and the wealthy are now shifting.

The campaign has aired popular frustration over inequality and affordable housing, the bashing of bankers and growing resentment towards a London that other Brits regard as a distant haven of rapacious hedge funds. The common thread seems to be a suspicion that what is good for the rich may not be so good for everyone else.

"There is no doubt the political rhetoric has changed - above all from the Labour leadership," said Ben Rogers, director of the Centre for London think-tank.

Ms Rahman also pointed to "a major, major shift", noting the popular fury over multi-million-pound Knightsbridge mansions supposedly left empty by their foreign owners.

A recent survey by the London School of Economics found that 62 per cent of British people believe inequality has reached unsustainable levels, and 74 per cent believe the rich should pay more taxes. The study's author, Bart Cammaerts, concludes that the political landscape is changing towards what he termed "a renewed politics of redistribution".

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While the "non-dom" issue has long been a campaign favourite, Labour went further this time by committing to its abolition in its manifesto. Mr Miliband this week said it would be a red line in future negotiations with other parties to form a government.

Labour has also proposed a "mansion tax" on properties worth more than £2m; the takings would go to propping up a fraying National Health Service. Other promises, such as a cap on consumer energy prices, seem almost French in their disdain for the free market.

"There is a huge choice between whether the country is run for the most rich and most powerful or a Labour government that puts working people first," Mr Miliband said this week, playing up the themes that have dominated his campaign.

Those sentiments do not quite rise to the threat Denis Healey, the former Labour chancellor, reportedly made in the 1970s to "squeeze the rich until the pips squeak". Yet they mark a decisive break from the New Labour-era of Tony Blair, in which then-trade secretary Peter Mandelson remarked in 1998 that the party was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".

Labour's support has been confined to about a third of the electorate, leading Mr Rogers to conclude that "they have not quite managed to translate it into wide popular support". The ruling Conservatives, led by prime minister David Cameron, are faring no better in the polls - even though they have presided over a recovery in which the economy has now grown about 4 per cent since the financial crisis and outperformed much of Europe.

<>Yolande Barnes, the director of world research at Savills, the property consultancy, believes London is experiencing the same stirrings as other global cities - be it a New York that passed power from a billionaire mayor to a populist, or a Hong Kong that put up barriers to wealthy mainland Chinese, or Parisians fleeing top-bracket tax increases under a new Socialist president.

"It's something we've noted across all the big cities we study," she said. "A lot of them are talking about problems of inequality and how it's panning out in the housing market."

Savills estimates that the mansion tax could reduce the London housing market's growth by 7 per cent over five years. But there may be other costs, too. "What our studies do not measure is the impact on sentiment," Ms Barnes said. "That is exactly what people are asking: what message does this give?"

While Londoners fret over property prices, those outside the capital worry about London itself. They resent its wealth, its growing dominance of the national economy and an ethnic diversity that prompt many to regard it as foreign.

"They are different worlds," said Julian Ferrier, co-owner of a property company in Ramsbottom, a small village in Lancashire in the north of England. "There's what goes on inside the M25 [the ring road around the capital] and what goes on outside. And dare I say, ours is a bit grittier."

That grit has proved fertile soil for the rightwing and anti-immigration UK Independence party - particularly in seaside towns such as Margate and Clayton that have long felt neglected.

"It's not just that people are on low income, it's that people have been left behind," said Will Hutton, an Oxford economist and author of a recent book about inequality, Them and Us: Changing Britain - Why We Need a Fair Society.

Mr Hutton accepted that Labour's proposals were redistributive but questioned their motivation. "What's driven [Labour's proposals] is not so much moral outrage about the rich being rich but the need for revenue," he said.

For all the misgivings about wealth that this election campaign has brought to the surface, pragmatic British voters still seem to appreciate its importance. "If London does not do well, we all suffer," Mr Ferrier observed. "And that's one of the things that people don't get their heads around."

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