BBC mayoral debate - Verdict
These five candidates have already debated each on numerous occasions and, for the journalists watching the pre-record with me in the press room who have followed this contest closely, it was all very familiar. They found it hard to pick up much that was new.
But it was the first mayoral hustings I’ve watched in this contest, and what struck me was me most was the absence of any obvious front runner. Reading the polls and the press coverage and you come away with the impression that Sadiq Khan is clearly ahead, and that Zac Goldsmith is going negative to compensate for a campaign that lacks definition. But watching Khan and Goldsmith debate, it didn’t seem so clear cut. Khan seemed to have the better grasp of detail but Goldsmith had more confidence than you might expect from someone who’s campaign is widely thought to be in trouble. Sian Berry and Caroline Pidgeon were fine, although at time they found it hard to differentiate themselves. Being Ukip, that wasn’t a problem for Peter Whittle. But this is clearly a contest between Khan and Goldsmith.
And the winner? Well, tonight it was probably Andrew Neil. If there was one person who stamped his authority on the proceedings most, it was him.
He also asked what may have been the most revealing question of the evening. And it was not addressed to any of the candidates. It was when Neil asked the audience if any of them believed that the candidates would be able to honour their promise to build 50,000 homes a year. (See 11.13pm.) Only about one hand went up, revealing a deep distrust in the ability of any of the candidates to make a difference on the issue that matters to youngish Londoners.
That is something that should worry them all.
That’s all from me.
Thanks for the comments.
I see that BTL Andrew Neil is getting some criticism for his aggressive questioning. Rachel Holdsworth from the Londonist website has an alternative point of view.
People on the #LondonMayor2016 hashtag complaining of Neil over-moderating. We hacks know the pat answers and are glad to see them pressed.
— Rachel Holdsworth (@rmholdsworth) April 18, 2016
And this is what the Tories are saying about Sadiq Khan’s plan to fund a fare freeze.
Khan's £1.9BN transport black hole = overcrowding, more delays, council tax hikes & fewer new homes #LondonMayor2016 pic.twitter.com/yPAm9SSGwV
— BackZac2016 Press (@BackZacPress) April 18, 2016
Here's what the £1.9bn black hole in Sadiq Khan's transport plans will mean for Londoners: #LondonMayor2016 pic.twitter.com/SsHyCbeOyi
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) April 18, 2016
London Labour are saying Zac Goldsmith’s refusal to rule out fare increases could lead to fares going up 17%, or the equivalent of £1,000.
.@BackZacPress #LondonMayor2016 pic.twitter.com/4CorVesnER
— London Labour (@LondonLabour) April 18, 2016
It’s clear @ZacGoldsmith is planning a £1,000 fares bombshell for Londoners. #LondonMayor2016 pic.twitter.com/Bd4YJMmUeC
— London Labour (@LondonLabour) April 18, 2016
Peter Whittle says there is shocking waste at TfL. He would scrap HS2. And we don’t need a garden bridge.
Caroline Pidgeon says some cleaners go into work and spend half the morning earning enough to fund their tickets. She would offer half prices fares for people travelling before 7.30am.
Neil says that would suit him. He gets up at 6am every morning.
And that’s it.
I will post a short verdict in a moment.
Sian Berry says neither of these plans are satisfactory.
She wants to flatten fares, she says.
Q: How much will that cost?
Around 10%
Q: So more than £600m. How would you fund it?
Berry says the congestion charge could contribute.
Goldsmith says Khan’s plan would take £1.9bn. He says that money can either go into investment, or into Khan’s plan.
Khan interrupts. We cannot afford that, he says. Fares are going up. Is that fair? Goldsmith does not engage, but just asks Khan: Have you finished?
Q: Would fares still rise under your mayoralty?
Goldsmith says he would “bear down” on costs.
Berry that is what Boris Johnson said. And fares went up. Neil says the same.
Neil asks repeatedly if fares will rise under Goldsmith. They could go up 3% a year, Neil says.
Goldsmith dodges the question, and says if you take £1.9bn out of the TfL budget, London will grind to a standstill.
Updated
Transport
Q: [From a student] How would candidates invest in transport and stop fares rising?
Sadiq Khan says TfL has a budget of about £12bn. But its budget is a bit flabby. There is scope for saving.
He says last year TfL spent £383m on consutlants nd agency staff. That figure has doubled in the last eight years.
There are separate engineering departments doing underground and overground, he says. Why not merge them?
There are 450 staff earning more than £100,000.
Q: So are you going to fire them?
Khan says he will make savings.
Q: So how many will you fire?
Khan says he will not spend money getting rid of them. The point is, he will tackle inefficiencies, he says.
He says the bill for agency staff has doubled.
He has a fully funded plan to freeze fares.
The BBC is now playing short video clips of the other seven candidates, including Respect’s George Galloway, who says London should not just be a city for those “dripping in gold”.
Q: London is not just the financial capital of Europe. It is the capital of Europe, the most important city. Can it stay like this if the UK is out of the EU?
Goldsmith says London is the most important city in the world. He says it has a great future whatever. But he thinks it will have a slightly better future if it is out of the EU.
Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, has been tweeting support for Zac Goldsmith during the debate.
zac's action plan for greater ldn will increase supply - by getting govt to release publicly owned land for 50k homes a yr #LondonMayor2016
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) April 18, 2016
Q: Peter Whittle, could we stay as the financial capital of Europe if we were out of the EU.
HSBC say so, says Whittle.
Q: Most of their business is in Asia, Neil says.
Whittle says EU migrants who are here would not have to go back, and Berry knows that.
Q: Caroline Pidgeon, what difference would it make?
Pidgeon says when she goes to A&E with her son, she is pleased there are EU citizens working in the NHS. The NHS would collapse without these workers, she says.
Why would a company base their HQ in London if they did not have access to the single market.
EU referendum
Q: What would London be like if we left the EU?
Sian Berry says we would be short of around 300,000 citizens, many of whom are here living with UK citizens.
Q: So why would they have to leave?
Berry says that is in question. She says she knows people getting dual citizenship, or an Irish passport.
Q: Zac Goldsmith, what is a Londoner?
Goldsmith says he wants to build on public land. And TfL says 30,000 homes could be built on their land, not 10,000, he tells Neil.
Q: But this is land owned by central government. Why would they sell it to you cheap?
Goldsmith says he cannot say the government would release this land. But he is a candidate well placed to get things off government.
Q: What have you ever done in your career to show you can get things off government?
Goldsmith says Ken Livingstone was an effective mayor; he got concessions from government. And so it Boris Johnson.
Neil says they both only managed to build around 20,000 homes a year.
Defining Londoners
Q: Policies like first dibs for Londoners [Sadiq Khan’s policy] sound promising, but impractical. How do you decide who is a Londoner.
Khan says he wants to make public land available for new homes. He says TfL owns land 16 times the size of Hyde Park. Some of that is surplus. On that land Khan would build affordable homes for Londoners, defined as people who have been renting in London for more than five years. They would get priority.
As for homes on private land, he says Hackney has a policy of making developers market homes in the borough for the first six months before they can be sold overseas.
Q: Transport for London own the equivalent of 16 Hyde Parks. How many would be suitable for housing.
Around 10%, says Khan.
Q: So it is only 1.6 Hyde Parks.
That’s a conservative estimate, says Khan.
Q: Okay, we’ll make it two Hyde Parks. It is not 16, is it?
Khan says other land is available too.
Q: TfL says there is room for only 10,000 homes on their land, over 10 years.
Khan says the mayor is selling off land in a firesale.
Q: How do you define a Londoner?
Some councils says you have to have been here two years, says Khan. Some say three, says Khan.
Q: Do you want to define Londoners like this?
Khan says it should be “first dibs for Londoners” with housing.
This is from the BBC’s Susan Mendonca.
Nasreen told me after we recorded tonight's' debate that she thought none of the candidates truly defined a Londoner for her#LondonMayor2016
— Susana Mendonça (@susana_mendonca) April 18, 2016
Q: How would you build 50,000 homes a year, Peter Whittle.
Whittle says Berry’s figures are unrealistic. She is in “Natalie Bennett territory”, he says.
He says the London popuation is growing at the rate of 1m a decade. That is why there is a housing problem.
Berry says there is a crisis of affordability, not numbers. There are homes being build all over London, she says.
Neil says all the candidates say they will build 50,000 homes a year.
Whittle says he doesn’t say that.
Okay, says Neil. The other four do. But previous mayors have only built around 20,000 a year. He asks the audience how many of them believe this is achievable.
Hardly anyone puts their hand up.
Caroline Pidgeon says she will build genuinely affordable council housing.
She will ask Londoners to keep paying the Olympic games premium to fund this.
Q: This would raise less than £60m.
It would raise £82m.
Q: But that would not be enough to build 50,000 homes.
Pidgeon says she would borrow.
Sian Berry says she rents her home. Rents are not affordable. As mayor she would demand the right to control rents.
She says she wants to bypass developers. And she wants to work with investors, but not ones who are offshore.
Q: So who would you work with?
People like me, says Berry. People are are renting.
Q: What is your definition, Sadiq Khan?
Khan says it is not what Goldsmith says it is, £450,000, the figure Goldsmith is “scared to mention”.
Goldsmith takes exception to this.
Sadiq, that is nonsense. We;ve already had this argument before and you backed down. Don’t do it again just because you’re on TV.
Goldsmith voted for a bill defining an affordable home as one worth up to £450,000, Khan says.
Khan says an affordable home is either one where you pay social rent, ie a council property; or a home where you pay one third of average earnings; or a shared ownership property, part-buy, part-rent.
He says he wants to build homes on TfL land in zones three to six. They would require a deposit of between £5,000 and £6,000, and monthly rent and mortgage of less than £1,000, he says.
We’ve modelled it and we can make it work, he says.
Housing
Q: I hear a lot about affordable housing. What is affordable?
Goldsmith says the word crisis is overused, but there is a genuine housing crisis.
He says he backs more housing on brownfield land.
Q: But what is your definition of affordable?
Goldsmith says he can tell you what an affordable housing policy is; it is allowing an ordinary London on an ordinary salary to be able to buy a home.
Q: What will you do, Peter Whittle?
Whittle says he has a problem with the full face covering.
Q: So would you ban it?
Whittle says he would ban it in some public spaces, like in courts.
He turns to Khan, and says he defended an Islamist who condemned gays. Whittle says, as a gay man, he takes an interest in this matter.
Khan says he is the only candidate to receive death threats as a result of backing gay marriage. He will not take lectures from Whittle.
Caroline Pidgeon says she is the only candidate who has spent the last eight years at City Hall holding the mayor to account.
She says people should not be harrassed in London because of what they wear.
We have to tackle hate crime, she says.
She says she will fund 3,000 additional police officers in London.
Q: It was not just being a lawyer. You appeared on a platform with Sulaiman Ghani nine times.
Khan says he regrets giving the appearance that he supported people like that.
I regret giving the impression I subscribe to their views. And I have been quite clear that I find their views abhorrent.
He says he suffered death threats when he backed gay marriage.
Q: And you have sided with some questionable people, Sadiq Khan?
Khan says he used to be a human rights lawyer. He acted for “some pretty unsavoury clients”.
He says his campaign has wide support. And he includes a joke.
My campaign has the support of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, those who aren’t members of an organised faith, old, young, rich, poor. We even have northerners supporting our campaign. There is space for everyone.
Q: Yvette Cooper has said your campaign has reached “a racist scream”.
Goldsmith says that is an outrageous thing to say. He says Khan distanced himself from Cooper’s comment at their last debate.
Q: But you have called Khan radical.
Goldsmith says he has not said that.
I have made it very, very that I have never suggested that Sadiq Khan is an extremist, in any way at all ... No one associated with my campaign team has called Sadiq Khan extreme.
Q: Your campaign has. Can you say Khan is not an extremist.
Goldsmith replies:
The point I have made, and Londoners have made, and the newspapers have made, on a regular basis over the last weeks and months, is that Sadiq Khan has given platforms, oxygen and even cover to people who are extremists. And I think that is dangerous. It is not a question of Sadiq Khan being an extremist. I don’t think anyone other than a few nutjobs on Twitter have suggested that. But the reality is there is a question of judgment there.
We have a massive battle on our hands, an ideological battle, a battle that right now we are probably losing, and it doesn’t help to give platforms or oxygen or cover to people to mean to do us harm.
Islamic dress and community cohesion
Q: People stare at my friends wearing Islamic dress. What will you do to stop this kind of unwanted attention?
Goldsmith says he does not mind what people wear. He thinks harmony and cohesion are very important.
Relatively speaking, London is a harmonious place, he says.
Q: It’s not you the questioner is worried about?
Goldsmith says hate crime has “gone through the roof”. The mayor has a role in challenging this. He would make stamping down on hate crime a priority.
Sian Berry says the risk of having another 7/7 has never been greater.
Q: So what would you do about it?
Get the police and communities on the same side, Berry says.
She says violent terrorists wants divided communities.
The mayor’s strongest weapon is leadership.
Q: That’s it, is it? What does it mean?
Berry says it means the mayor genuinely represents Londoners.
Zac Goldsmith says it is naïve to think London is not a target. Keeping London safe is an “awesome” responsibility. He will keep police numbers at the level they are, and
He says he will back the police in their bid to double the number of armed officers available.
He says he had a meeting recently with armed response officers. They were seeking reassurance that he would be on their said.
Neil says it would be odd if the mayor were not on their side.
Neil tells Khan the emergency services are always under review. This is just a gimmick, he suggests.
Khan says 7/7 raised the question of whether Port of London radios can work with the rest of the emergency services.
Q: So are the police not asking these questions.
Khan says he wants reassurance. He needs to know we will be safe.
London mayoral debate
Q: [From a retired GP] In the light of the recent terrorist attacks in Europe, how are you going to keep us safe?
Sadiq Khan say he remembers 7/7 vividly, worrying about his wife and family. The first thing he will do as mayor is have a review of emergency services, to make sure they are ready for an event like this. He believes in policing by consent, he says.
He also says we need to tackle extremists. He wants to help stop Muslims being radicalised.
The BBC estimates that around 500,000 people may be watching tonight’s debate.
The candidates campaigning to be London mayor have already taken part in countless debates across the capital but this evening they’ve got what might be one of the most important of all - a hustings chaired by Andrew Neil going out on BBC One London.
The five main candidates taking part are:
Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate
Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate
Caroline Pidgeon, the Lib Dem candidate
Sian Berry, the Green candidate
Peter Whittle, the Ukip candidate
The Conservative Boris Johnson won the last two mayoral elections, but Khan is currently favourite to win. A recent poll gave him an eight-point lead on first preference votes.
The debate is being broadcast at 10.45pm and I will be covering it in detail as it goes out, providing reaction and analysis.
But it was prerecorded earlier this evening and so I can post some of the top lines here.
- Goldsmith insisted that he and his campaign team were not calling Khan an extremist. Ever since Goldsmith started calling Khan “radical” on leaflets early in the campaign, in a move that was seen as a coded attempt to depict him as an extremist, race and extremism has been an inflammatory issue in the campaign. But tonight Goldsmith insisted that he had never tried to portray Khan as an extremist. He said:
I have made it very, very that I have never suggested that Sadiq Khan is an extremist, in any way at all.
He said the same thing applied to his campaign team.
No one associated with my campaign team has called Sadiq Khan extreme.
But he claimed that he was entitled to question Khan’s willingness to share a platform with extremists.
The point I have made, and Londoners have made, and the newspapers have made, on a regular basis over the last weeks and months, is that Sadiq Khan has given platforms, oxygen and even cover to people who are extremists. And I think that is dangerous. It is not a question of Sadiq Khan being an extremist. I don’t think anyone other than a few nutjobs on Twitter have suggested that. But the reality is there is a question of judgment there.
We have a massive battle on our hands, an ideological battle, a battle that right now we are probably losing, and it doesn’t help to give platforms or oxygen or cover to people to mean to do us harm.
- Goldsmith said Yvette Cooper’s claim last week that his campaign has been racist was “outrageous”. In an article for the Times Cooper, the former shadow home secretary, said:
Rather than try to persuade Londoners with a positive vision, the Goldsmith campaign is increasingly resorting to disgraceful, divisive tactics as the polls show the Tories falling further behind.
With each day, the smears and innuendoes get louder. It’s no longer just Zac Goldsmith’s own leaflets, briefings and clumsy attacks.
Now the Cabinet is joining in, trying different ways to link Sadiq to Islamist extremism based on no evidence at all.
When it doesn’t work, they just become ever more shrill.
We can’t let this go by – it’s time to call it out for what it really is before it gets worse. What started as a subtle dog-whistle is becoming a full blown racist scream.
Asked about this, Goldsmith said:
It is an outrageous thing to say by Yvette Cooper. My campaign has been overwhelmingly a positive [one].
He also said that Khan himself had distanced himself from Cooper’s claim.
- Khan said he regretted “giving the impression” that he supported extremists. Andrew Neil said Khan had appeared on platforms with the Islamist extremist Sulaiman Ghani nine times. Khan must have known what Ghani thought, Neil said. Khan said that as a human rights lawyer he had acted for “some pretty unsavoury clients”. And he had been involved in many campaigns, he said. Asked if he regretted appearing on platforms with people like Ghani, Khan replied:
I regret giving the impression I subscribe to their views. And I have been quite clear that I find their views abhorrent.
If you are just interested in the top news lines, it is probably safe to go to bed now.
But it was a particularly spiky and lively debate, and if you are interested in the mayoral contest, it is worth watching. Do stay up.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
