I launched my Labour selection campaign for the London Assembly on the basic premise that London is not working for Londoners. This should be clear – we only need to look at the ever-increasing number of food banks that appear alongside the City’s corporate banks to see that our metropolis is failing its people. Many have been quick to forget this following Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 general election. There has been a rush to re-establish the North/South divide so as to suggest that a greedy and wealthy London is responsible for the ills of the rest of the country, rather than ten years of Tory government and decades of de-industrialisation. 

The real London, as most Londoners experience it, isn’t greedy or wealthy. It is exploited and over-stretched. Its people are shafted by the wealthy and left to suffer with a housing and environmental crisis which is literally killing us. Labour does need to reconnect with its working-class communities, and this reconnection has to happen within London as well. Yes, we are a Labour city and now one of Labour’s safest heartlands. But, as we saw with the last election, political support today is often shallow – we risk that our supporters could be tempted away from us if we fail to deliver the radical change that is so desperately needed. 

Few people know much about the London Assembly or what it does. I am not stating this to attack any current members or to disparage the work of the Assembly, but it is simply a fact that many people, including those regularly involved in the Labour Party across our city, have asked me what the Assembly does. The Assembly’s role in scrutinising the Mayor is important, but we need something more than that – Assembly Members who can be ambassadors for London. That doesn’t just mean cutting ribbons or attending fundraisers. It means being prepared to make strong policy arguments, even if the Assembly is not yet equipped to legislate on many issues.

So, I tell people that I am standing to be an ambassador for those Londoners who are pissed off with the crap deal that we currently receive in our city. I’m also standing to ensure that if I go into City Hall, we all do. One Assembly Member is not going to reverse the trend in London – it will take the entire left in London to achieve real change. That means working together to build policy demands in key areas and to challenge central government to offer new powers to the Mayor and the Assembly. A lot of blame for the failures of the Tories has been landed at the door of Sadiq Khan, but the truth is that government has failed to offer City Hall the powers it needs to represent Londoners. That said, we have to do a lot more than just tinker around the edges. The London Assembly currently doesn’t have the powers it really needs, but that does not mean that a full throttled campaign should not be launched to claw those powers from central government.

The enormous extent of London’s housing crisis means that we can’t afford not to. It’s not just an issue of bricks and mortar, it is a health and wellbeing issue that permeates the lives of nearly all Londoners. It has been blatantly obvious for far too long that our city does not have enough housing that is genuinely affordable for people to live in. We must assert that housing is a human right. We need to embark on a large-scale retrofitting of London’s damp, draughty houses. As well as creating sustainable and healthy homes, such a programme would create thousands of well-paid, unionised jobs across the city. If demolition is necessary, proposed regeneration should require that all options to refurbish have been explored. When it comes to the new homes that we badly need to build, there should be a serious move to engage with local architects to build homes that work for communities rather than developers. 

Central to this is the continuous involvement of communities across London. Consultation is hard work but it must be open and extensive. There is, of course, an urgent nature to London’s housing problem, but the urgency should be about building homes that work for Londoners. We must also abandon the farcical ‘affordable housing’ slogan, given that any home outside of social housing is simply unaffordable for the majority of Londoners. We know that we need city-wide rent controls – but as yet, the Mayor and the Assembly do not have the powers to introduce them. A central part of any set of demands to the government must be the devolution of these powers to City Hall so that it can legislate to control skyrocketing rents across London and introduce mandatory licensing for landlords.

Another major part of improving the health and wellbeing of Londoners is tackling the environmental crisis. The Mayor’s plan to introduce a Green New Deal is incredibly welcome in this regard. Sadiq Khan’s pledge to make London carbon neutral by 2030 is a bold and ambitious one which should be celebrated. It makes no sense, however, to combine that pledge with support for a third runway at Heathrow airport (which Sadiq Khan opposes) or the construction of a new road tunnel at Silvertown. Both will surely exacerbate rather than solve the climate crisis in our city. With an estimated 10,000 Londoners dying every year owing to air pollution, we have to be bold enough to say no to environmentally damaging projects. We also need to ensure that no new schools or hospitals are built in pollution hot spots. Our children and our ill should not be forced to be educated or treated in areas that are dangerous to them. I am also a passionate believer in the fact that Londoners should have direct access to green spaces and that we should invest more in ensuring that these spaces are open and utilised by the widest public.

These are just two policy areas where radical change is badly needed. But it is needed, now, in every part of London’s planning, whether it be the economy, transport, housing or the environment. Though it all may seem a distant possibility within the context of Conservative rule, led by a man who made his name as the Mayor of our city, it is still a possibility. I wouldn’t be putting myself forward for this selection if I did not believe that a different London is possible. But as with all things, it will take the hard graft of communities coming together to demand change and recognition, and refusing to accept their exploitation and suffering at the hands of a financial monopoly. We can build a movement inside and outside of City Hall that is capable of reflecting the brilliantly diverse city that we call home. Only then will London be truly ‘open’.

Clarification: This article has been amended to reflect Sadiq Khan’s opposition to a third runway at Heathrow airport.