Two members of the troupe of Labourites with an eye or two on being London’s next mayor have inched a little closer to the starting line for the race to be their party’s 2016 candidate. Though stopping short of joining David Lammy and Christian Wolmar in coming right out and saying it, London MPs Margaret Hodge and Diane Abbott have lately let it be known why they think they’ve got what it takes to boss City Hall.
Hodge, who has previously been reticent in public about mayoral ambitions, sounds very keen indeed in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. “I’m not going to commit at this stage, but I am in campaigning mode,” she said. “It’s the most stunningly wonderful, huge new challenge. I also believe that, on many of the key issues facing Londoners, I could deliver.”
She points out that her popularity and renown are higher than they’ve ever been: her combative chairing of the Commons public accounts committee has brought her profile and praise, and her destruction of the then BNP leader Nick Griffin’s challenge in her Barking constituency at the 2010 general election at a time of deep personal loss was an inspiring highlight of Labour’s resilient performance in the capital. Hodge differentiates herself from other possible Labour mayoral candidates by pointing out that she has led a London borough - Islington, from 1982-92 - and argues that her house-building record from that time equips her to tackle the capital’s chronic present day housing affordability problems.
Her political career also includes a (sometimes difficult) time as a government minister under Tony Blair, though some might think it too late for her to take on another huge new task. Aged 70, Hodge is older than Ken Livingstone (of whom she’s not a fan, by the way), who some felt was too old to run for mayor back in 2012. On recent evidence, though, few would question her energy or political appetite. An important part of the job of London mayor is putting groups of disparate people together in a room and hammering out how to get things done. It isn’t hard to imagine a future Mayor Hodge being quite good at that.
Diane Abbott, 61, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, would be a candidate to the left of Hodge as conventionally defined and it is no surprise that a speech she made at the London School of Economics (LSE) last month addressed inequality in the capital. It was, so far as I’m aware, the fullest public exposition of policies a Mayor Abbott would pursue.
A former shadow health minister, she proposed the appointment of a London health commissioner to “drive an assault on health inequality” in the capital in partnership with the NHS and Public Health England, concentrating on improving access to GPs and tackling, in particular, mental ill-health, alcohol abuse and child obesity. With the last two of these in mind, Abbott wants the next mayor to work with boroughs to introduce minimum pricing levels for booze and fast food exclusion zones around schools. She’d also like to see the education maintenance allowance restored in London and she attacked what she called a “toxic anti-immigration culture” which, she claimed, Labour in Westminster has become complicit with but no London mayor should. “The mayor should not be a party glove puppet,” she remarked.
On housing, Abbott blamed non-dom investment for sending “ripples of gentrification” out from the centre of town, making it near impossible for middle income Londoners to buy in a dysfunctional market and obliging them to pay high private rents instead. She favours targeting non-doms with special rates of capital gains tax, tackling expensive letting agents, bringing in “some measure of rent control” or stabilisation and giving councils more freedom to borrow to build (the big wish of the boroughs that Michael Lyons’s housing review for Labour declined to grant). She said she believes the London yield from Labour’s proposed national mansion tax should be given to the mayor for building “genuinely affordable homes” and that London should be able to borrow to invest in the infrastructure it needs to promote growth.
Abbott’s political past leads some to feel she lacks the breadth of appeal and depth of vision required for the mayoralty. But her speech was a serious attempt at setting out some of the wide programme she’d need to develop if she does decide to pitch for City Hall. She would probably appeal to many London party members and the “tale of two cities” riff she deployed at LSE did Bill De Blasio no harm in New York. Watch the whole speech here.
Labour’s formal selection process will begin soon after next year’s general election and be over by the end of next July. The short time frame may encourage others contemplating the starting line to lay out some proto-mayoral propositions before too long. The debate about London post-Boris Johnson is already underway.
