Who should get the keys to City Hall?
Words: Gentleman's Journal
When you behold London from within the great curving expanse of the glazed fencing mask that is City Hall, you see a world city very much on the march.
Barely a month passes without some new statement of architectural ambition going up: from the Shard to the Cheesegrater via the Walkie Talkie and, of course, the Gherkin, the landscape of London is fast being re-clothed in the aspirations of a new century. And that’s because it’s a city awash with cash.
With gross value added (GVA) measure of £400bn a year, if London were a country it would be around the 20th biggest economy in the world – larger than Poland, Belgium, Austria, Norway and the Philippines. And there’s no slowing down: London’s economy grew by massive 28.9 per cent from 2009 to 2014. By comparison, Manchester (the UK’s second largest city with a GVA of £53bn) managed 15 per cent.
And there are more Londoners than ever before. Its population of 8.6 million citizens is already a record, and predicted to swell to 11 million by 2050.
Which is why the outcome of the London mayoral election in May carries so much weight. Whoever wins the keys to City Hall has got to solve the city’s crushing housing crisis and do something about its creaking transport infrastructure. House prices in London soared by more than 30 per cent in some boroughs last year alone, while Londoners renting privately now spend nearly two thirds of their income on rent, compared with half in 2010. Londoners now make 1.3bn journeys through the Underground each year; this on a network that has had only one new line since the Second World War (the Jubilee Line, back in 1979). Unsurprisingly the frontrunner candidates – Labour’s Sadiq Khan and Tory Zac Goldsmith – have both issues at the top of their agendas.
(Image: Rex)
But much more than this, London also needs a big personality in City Hall to act as its global metropolitan representative – to be the man (as it will be, barring a shock outcome on May 6) world leaders get on the phone when they want to reach the British capital. (Forget the minister for London – pah!) Current incumbent Boris Johnson has furthered his career using his newfound global notoriety to very astute effect.
And this time round the jury is still very much out on which personality – and here too the question of who you are matters as much if not more than what you have to say – Londoners want to back. But as Pippa Crerar, City Hall editor of the London Evening Standard, points out, that’s only to be expected.
‘It’s going to be difficult for anybody to follow [former mayor] Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, who are both off the scale when it comes to charisma,’ Crerar says. ‘One of the defining things about this race is that it is less about personality – because we don’t have the big beasts of the past – and as a result it’s going to be more about policy.’
Nonetheless, both men have got good backstories. Sadiq (in the tradition of London mayoral politics, it’s first name terms) is the son of an immigrant London bus driver, and has served as Labour MP for Tooting in south London since 2005. He enjoys the distinction of having been Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, under Gordon Brown, and led Labour’s London campaign at the general election in 2015 – offering the party its one silver lining in an otherwise disastrous contest, swelling its ranks of London MPs to 45 out of the capital’s roster of 73. That was up from 38 in the 2010 election, when Labour fared rather better nationwide.
With that in mind, nearly a year on, London still looks like being Labour turf, too, with the polls putting Sadiq ahead. At the time of writing, according to YouGov, he’s on 32 per cent, with Zac on 25 per cent.
But don’t underestimate Zac. Though shy when measured against the political benchmark of self-aggrandisement, and yet to prove he can overcome the political burden of being worth an estimated £75m (according to The Sunday Times Rich List), the handsome Conservative MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston has carved out the profile of an independently minded figure. He’s got a strong environmental record and has been a vociferous opponent of proposals for a third runway at Heathrow. He also led attempts to introduce a recall act for British MPs. This ‘independent’ flavour to his candidacy limits the dangers of Tory contagion from national government in an election fought among the Labour-leaning boroughs of the capital.
Sadiq is not without his crosses to bear either when it comes to the national dimension. Don’t forget that he was one of the MPs who nominated hardline socialist Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership, which certainly begs questions of his judgement. For Peter Kellner, the well-respected president of pollster YouGov, the Corbyn factor could be decisive in May.
‘On this occasion issues matter less than personalities,’ he says, in contrast to Crerar. ‘Goldsmith’s challenge is to overcome the fact that London is now clearly a Labour city. I don’t think he can do it if it’s framed as “Labour vs Tory” or “Sadiq vs Goldsmith”. But if it is framed as “Corbyn vs…”, well, Corbyn vs anyone, then Goldsmith could win.’
And not for nothing has Goldsmith sought to beat Khan with the stick of his association with Labour’s unpopular party leader. Sadiq, meanwhile, has been privately telling anyone who will listen that he’s not Corbyn’s stooge in the Big Smoke and he’s been distancing himself from Corbyn’s policies, such as his minority position on the nuclear deterrent.
Back at the Standard, Crerar rates Sadiq for his energy, quiet charisma and his political acumen.
‘The contest is Sadiq’s to lose at the moment,’ she confirms. ‘Despite Tory attacks about him being part of a Jeremy Corbyn experiment, Sadiq is very much his own man.’ He’s also very business friendly, adds Crerar, who concludes: ‘The general assessment is actually that both the main candidates are fairly electable and now there’s not a massive amount of difference between them. Neither would do a disastrous job.’
Although that might sound like good news, the price might be an even lower turnout than in the 2012 mayoral election, when, despite the bolder personalities involved, barely 38 per cent of those entitled to vote bothered.
What could yet stimulate the electorate is the looming inevitability of the other big vote scheduled for June. The EU referendum might well provide a game-changer this time round. For with Sadiq decidedly pro-European and Zac of Eurosceptic outlook (his dad Sir James was the Referendum Party, don’t forget) the issue of Europe could prove pivotal in a mayoral election.
If you consider that more than 10 per cent of the capital’s population are non-British EU citizens (including 400,000 from France), Europe has the potential to be decisive. So, could the 2016 election end up being the one where it was the French banker, the Polish plumber and the Italian café owner ‘wot won it’?
This article was written by Alec Marsh and published in our Mar/Apr issue – subscribe here.
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