For mayor of london, citizen khan is hard to beat | thearticle

How does Sadiq Khan’s record stack up? It’s no revelation that his first term has in many ways been disappointing to those who should be close friends and allies. Technocrats might hone in

on more than three years delay and almost £4 billion cost overruns to Crossrail, fruits of a culture of management over-optimism and downplaying of risks in which the Mayor is implicated.

Then there’s an underwhelming picture on housing: falling far short of his manifesto target for completions, while pledges to build housing at scale on Transport for London (TfL) land and

establish a city-wide lettings agency were unfulfilled. For Left-wingers, it might be the absence of anything to compare to the standard Ken Livingstone set in his first term. While Ken

could boast the emblematic Congestion Charge, a massive expansion of the bus network and a reduction in fares, Khan has the Hopper bus fare, which though popular hasn’t managed to stem the

decline in bus use, and the pending Ultra-Low Emission Zone expansion, which may be seen to divide communities. Khan’s Trump and Brexit postures and backing for progressive causes can’t

compare to Livingstone’s bold pioneering of civil partnerships in Britain, through the Partnerships Register he set up off his own bat in 2001. Khan’s quickness to blame government, for

instance by accusing ministers of forcing London “to work with one hand tied behind our back” by excluding the Greater London Authority Group from tranches of emergency Covid funding, could

be seen as unnecessarily antagonistic — or not brave enough. Could Khan call the Government’s bluff over threatened impositions on motorists and TfL they’d never go through with? Or, as with

Andy Burnham’s stand over Tier 3 restrictions for Manchester, land them with a Pyrrhic victory? But Khan’s big poll lead, undented by his hesitancy in the pandemic, and narrowing only

fractionally to 19 points at the end of the campaign, must lead us to reflect on what Londoners really want in these uncertain times. Along with vision, Ken Livingstone brought rancour —

needling ideological enemies with projects like the “oil for brooms” deal with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. This was very different from Khan’s carefully calibrated positioning on issues that

appeal to the mass of socially liberal, outward-looking Londoners. In a fantastically complex city, might it not strike many people as unreasonable to attribute shortcomings in areas such as

crime to the Mayor alone? (Polling suggests so.) Khan not only enjoys a commanding lead over his Conservative rival — he is comfortably ahead across most demographics: white and minority

voters, ABC1s and DEs, inner and outer London. To rebarbative critics Khan might be the “Muslim Mayor”. To millions of Londoners of diverse heritage, he embodies a much broader migrant

story. Better than radical verve, Khan’s relatability and ordinariness, fortified by streetwise grit, may be no small part in his success. Khan may be fortunate in his main opponent — the

socially conservative youth worker Shaun Bailey, who came with a lopsided policy emphasis on crime and social cohesion. Criticisms have been made of the Bailey campaign’s provocative

tactics, including campaign literature made to look like a tax demand, and baseless claims, for instance over Khan’s alleged intention to bring in an “outer London tax” on drivers. This is

not a measure favoured by the Mayor, and the policy idea it refers to would be charged on non-Londoners driving in, not the other way round. The campaign has been a bruising experience for

Bailey, who has been a mayoral candidate for more than two-and-a-half years, with embarrassing press reports about his team being stripped to a minimum because Conservative HQ had lost

confidence. However, none of this was a foregone conclusion. If senior Conservatives feared Bailey was a poor fit for London, they had an opportunity to do something about it, particularly

after the year-long postponement of the elections. Some Tories wonder how a female candidate might have fared. Bailey, sincere, forthright and clearly a grafter, could yet have success as a

parliamentary candidate in another, more socially conservative part of the country. Bailey told the London _Evening Standard_ in March that the Prime Minister had come out to support him on

four occasions, and twice on online calls, so the problem is not personal ambivalence on the part of London’s previous Conservative Mayor. Rather it seems to be a general attitude problem

about London — an alarming about-turn from the worldview of Mayor Boris, which included backing an amnesty for illegal migrants, to the Johnson Government endorsing policies that are seen as

unashamedly hostile to the capital, like abolition of VAT-free shopping for tourists or scrapping London Weighting for the universities’ teaching grant. Commentators bumptiously await the

Hartlepool result as a sign of how far British politics has realigned. It may be more telling to watch how much Bailey loses by instead. Beyond the Khan-Bailey duel, neither the Lib Dem

candidate Luisa Porritt nor her Green counterpart Sian Berry has broken through to challenge Bailey for second place, despite a raft of imaginative policy-thinking and Berry’s increasing

assurance as party co-leader. In last year’s abortive campaign before the first lockdown, Rory Stewart’s Independent bid had the excitement of an insurgency against a Westminster Government

he clearly loathed and a City Hall operation he thought second-rate. But Stewart owed his public profile to having been a Tory MP, minister and leadership candidate — and Londoners could be

forgiven for puzzlement at the third Old Etonian candidate in a row. This time round, there is a fun and frantic field of minor party and independent candidates. Some of them — Laurence Fox

and Brian Rose, for instance — are seemingly more driven by building their own profiles than the betterment of London. Just one candidate this year, Valerie Brown of The Burning Pink Party,

is running on a platform to abolish the mayoralty. The big unknown hanging over this election is whether the Government will move to take power and responsibilities away from the Mayor, to

intervene more in running London directly — or even to reduce the position to a figurehead. Perhaps that’s the greatest reason of all, subconsciously, why Londoners are gravitating around

their Citizen Khan. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more

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