A Labour London mayor inevitable? Think again…

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/24/machine-politics-tory-london-mayor

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Like Bogart gazing at Bergman, Labour leaders stare into each other’s frightened eyes and sigh: “We’ll always have London.” After an election whose results look worse for the left the longer you study them, the capital still appears theirs: an island of safety in a raging blue sea.

No one should be surprised by Labour’s sole success. The mystery of the left prospering in one of the world’s great financial centres is no mystery at all. The complaints from the rest of Britain about London’s wealth and dominance miss the fact that the rich make bad neighbours. They force up prices. They make the everyday dream of living in an ordinary home impossible, not only for the young working class but for everyone, way into the upper-middle class.

According to KPMG, a first-time buyer in London needs a minimum income of £77,000 to get on the property ladder. By “getting on” they mean taking out an enormous mortgage on a glorified bedsit in a dismal suburb miles from the centre. The average London wage is £27,999. An MP makes £66,000. Property ownership is now for the wealthy and their children.

Labour promised a mansion tax, a house-building programme and rent controls because it knew it could appeal to young Londoners, who see the capital’s extraordinary disparities of wealth close up and must live with the miserable consequences. We tire of sneers about the “soft south” because London also contains Hackney, Islington, Edmonton and Tower Hamlets, boroughs that rank among the poorest in Britain. The inhabitants of London’s slums don’t, on the whole, vote Tory, any more than young people struggling to pay punitive rents. Meanwhile, three million Londoners are foreign-born. A Conservative party still haunted by Enoch Powell’s ghoulish presence cannot persuade enough of them to forget the history of racism and vote Tory, either.

Labour must think it can take victory in the London mayoral contest for granted. It is certainly behaving as if it does. The leading candidates are not independent politicians able to fight for their city, but the representatives of Labour factions who like nothing better than fighting each other. Both are wide open to attack and the London Labour party is not giving a moment’s thought to what will happen to them when they leave the cocoon of Labour politics and step on to the streets of a seething city. As in Scotland, the assumption of ownership, the sense of entitlement, the belief that the party can suit itself rather than the voters, has the potential to destroy.

The bookies’ favourite is Tessa Jowell, who, as a moderate Blairite, seems just what Labour needs after the Miliband disaster. Her supporters forget that Blairism pushed so many to the left because Blairism could be intolerable. For example, the nonconformist tradition Labour and the liberals inherited saw gambling as one of the worst forms of exploitation. The casino owner or bookie cheated his customers by literally fixing the odds. He enslaved them into an addiction that could ruin them and their families. (William Wilberforce and the early 19th-century evangelicals were so convinced of the similarities between gambling and slavery that they wanted to abolish the lottery after they had got rid of the Atlantic slave trade.)

As a true Blairite, Jowell rejected such “snobbish” attacks on the free market in rigged odds. She tore up the old controls and you can see the result around you: Sky and Talksport peppered with urgent appeals to give your money to the gambling conglomerates; bookies, stuffed with fixed-odds machines, clogging the high street. Writing anonymously, for fear of the sack, after the Jowell “reforms” came in, one betting shop manager said: “I cannot begin to describe the damage that I have seen inflicted on society in such a short space of time. As a shop manager, there is nothing that I can do to stop a problem gambler. I can only sit there and watch human beings turn into tortured, button-pressing zombies.” Truly can it be said that Tessa Jowell is the “bookies’ favourite”, in every meaning of that phrase. Do not think that the press will forget that. Do not imagine that they will restrain themselves from adding that her husband advised Silvio Berlusconi on how to manage his tax affairs so assiduously that he ended up in an Italian court.

Sadiq Khan, Jowell’s rival, is as easy a target for criticism. He is the candidate of Ed Miliband, Unite and Ken Livingstone – and he will be made to pay for each of those endorsements. Unite appears to be preparing telesales teams to urge its members to vote for Khan, thus inflaming the fears about its domination of the party.

Meanwhile, before he endorsed Khan, Ken Livingstone endorsed Lutfur Rahman, the corrupt mayor of Tower Hamlets after the courts had disqualified him from holding office. The conclusive evidence that Rahman sent public money to his client Bangladeshi voters, engaged in electoral fraud and exploited racial and religious prejudice to defeat Labour candidates in the East End of London did not bother Livingstone in the slightest. Why Livingstone is not recognised as one of the most unprincipled demagogues in Britain after this performance – why, indeed, Labour has not expelled him – is one of the wonders of the age.

Neither Khan nor Jowell is independent of their faction or their party. Neither has the capacity to build a broad appeal. Whatever their other faults, Diane Abbott from the left and David Lammy from the centre are at least free of the charge of being party stooges. But they appear to be outsiders. Perhaps Labour is right to be complacent. Perhaps London will vote as required, whatever candidate it runs. I wouldn’t count on it, though. Labour got 44% of the London vote at the general election. With transferred votes you need 51% to win a mayoral election and the lower turnout will work against the left.

Suppose that, instead of running a machine politician of their own, the Tories nominated Zac Goldsmith? He’s attractive, popular with the young and so detached from the Conservative leadership he is barely in the party. Goldsmith also has a hard-earned record of campaigning on green issues, which I can see being well received in a city choking on exhaust fumes.

Labour ought to be frightened of him. That they are not, that they are putting forward second-rate hacks, suggests the party has not yet learned the lesson of the 2015 general election: Labour can lose anytime, any place, anywhere – even in London.