London: Labour City (with contradictions)
I voted Labour in London on May 6th (in Tottenham) and was pleased to see that Labour retained control in City Hall with Sadiq Khan re-elected as Mayor.
He had a slightly reduced majority against his hard right Tory opponent Shaun Bailey but still ended up with well over 50% of the vote once second preferences were counted.
Sadiq Khan is hardly my kind of Labour politician but wider points prevail. He is a Muslim re-elected in one of the world’s great cities against a tide of Islamophobia and he was the Labour candidate on a night when, perhaps partly thanks to Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour did less well than it really should have after a year of Johnson & the pandemic.
But as Khan himself pointed out a Tory Mayor in London is possible. Boris Johnson’s Mayoralty still has investigations hanging over it but if we think back further before Ken Livingstone headed up the GLC its leader was Horace Cutler. Cutler was a Tory with an interesting beard known widely as ‘Barnum’.
We can accept though that in general London is a Labour city and becoming more so. In fact Owen Hatherley in the New Left Review article quoted below quotes from a survey which found that if only over 70s were allowed to vote few places would be Labour but they included South Wales, Manchester and inner city London.
There are contradictions. A key one is that London is also a City of the rich and the centre not only of British capitalism but also (even post-Brexit)of much wider capitalist operations and profit making. Labour at City Hall hardly touches the periphery of this, although it might be argued it doesn’t have much power to do so.
All that said an understanding that London is fundamentally Labour, a world City where the working class and working class politics is key to an understanding of reality that you won’t find much discussed in the media. Neither unfortunately is it much understood by sections of the left who when they look at the Capital see the City of London and not the Labour City.
The December 2019 general election marked the fourth time in four years that London has veered from most of the rest of the country in a national vote, supporting Corbyn’s Labour in face of a Conservative landslide. In the 2015 election, the Tories lost hundreds of thousands of votes and important seats in the capital. In the 2016 EU referendum, London joined Scotland as the most monolithically pro-Remain part of the uk. In most of England, the 2017 election saw strong votes for both Labour and the Tories, but in London the May government was routed, with even Kensington falling to Labour, and several of the South-East’s commuter and ‘overspill towns’ registering sharp leftward swings, as if London’s politics were seeping outwards.
Owen Hatherley New Left Review 2/122 March/April 2020
Even London became and remained a Labour stronghold after 1923, when it elected 20 per cent of the national total of Labour MPs, or twice its percentage of the British population.
Eric Hobsbawm Labour in the Great City New Left Review 1/166 Nov/Dec 1987
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