Owen Hatherley: “I really hoped that with Grenfell the ‘metropolitan elite’ debate would just die” The British writer and critic discusses his new book Red Metropolis and the future of the urban left. To Londoners confronted with the vivid geography of the 2019 general election result, Labour’s defeat may have seemed to contain a personal rebuke. The Conservatives, commentators agreed, were gifted an 80-seat majority because Labour had “lost touch” with its “traditional heartlands” in the post-industrial Midlands and the North. Its electorally irrelevant landslide in London, on the other hand – where Labour gained its only seat, Putney – was delivered by a Europhilic “metropolitan elite”, whose progressive voting habits were a kind of “cultural luxury”.