Labour’s lead holds firm in the race to City Hall
Polling data suggests Sadiq Khan will return to SE1 with the largest vote share in London mayoral electoral history.
Source: Flickr
A recent opinion poll shows the Labour Party have tightened their grip on the capital as support for Sadiq Khan bolsters in his bid for re-election next May.
The poll, conducted by Redfield and Wilton earlier this month, indicates that in both the first and second round of voting, the current mayor has leads of over 20 per cent against his Conservative rival, Shaun Bailey.
According to the poll of 2,500 Londoners, Khan is expected to obtain 49 per cent of the vote in the first round. By comparison, just 26 per cent said that they would support Shaun Bailey's bid.
An additional 12 and 9 per cent declared that they intended to cast their vote for the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party respectively.
This would place Labour and the Conservatives in their fifth consecutive head-to-head battle for power in London. In that situation, the poll indicated that Khan would easily defeat Bailey with the backing of 61 per cent of voters to just 39 per cent.
If Khan wins this percentage of the vote next May, when Londoners go to the polls, the incumbent mayor will exceed the 58 per cent support given to Ken Livingstone in the second round of the city's first mayoral election in 2000.
The mayor's favourable polling comes despite some real problems in the capital since 2016. Crime rates have soared since 2016, City Hall has spent an additional 82 per cent of taxpayers' money on staffing costs, and Khan’s critics have accused him of mismanaging Transport for London. Nevertheless, Khan currently poses a net approval rating of 20 points with his constituents in the capital.
However, the poll also emphasised that public priorities have changed drastically since the outbreak of the pandemic earlier this year. Londoners’ concern for crime and transport has fallen to a priority for just one in 10 voters. Instead, voters are more concerned about economic growth, housing and the NHS.
The only Tory to win the race to City Hall was the current prime minister, Boris Johnson. Since Johnson's second victory in 2012, backing for the Conservatives in the capital, both in mayoral and general elections, has fallen drastically.
In 2016, Khan held off the challenge of the now peer and Minister of State for the Pacific and the Environment, Zac Goldsmith. However, this poll suggests that Bailey will be unable to emulate the levels of support given to the Tories four years ago, when the party received 43.2 per cent in the second ballot.
Just one year after the Brexit referendum, the electorate in the remain-backing capital removed five incumbent Conservative candidates. This leaves a majority of the Tories' support in outer London boroughs, like Havering, in pockets of the capital that voted to leave.
The Tories have struggled to reverse their declining support in the capital. This was symbolised when the party lost the once-safe seat of Putney to the Labour Party. However, Boris Johnson managed to recover Kensington and gain Carshalton and Wallington in the party’s successful general election campaign last December.
This was the first opinion poll conducted since the independent candidate, Rory Stewart, an ex-Conservative cabinet minister in Theresa May’s government, and the Liberal Democrat candidate, Siobhan Benita withdrew their candidacy papers from the election race.
The Liberal Democrats must subsequently select their candidate for London mayor. There has been recent speculation that Luisa Porritt, who was elected to the European Parliament representing London in 2019, is “considering” running on the party’s ticket.
Importantly, at the end of this month, the party is also set to choose a new leader. The former coalition cabinet minister, Sir Ed Davey of Kingston and Surbiton and former Imperial College London student, Layla Moran are the two front runners to replace Jo Swinson as party leader.
The withdrawal of Rory Stewart was expected to boost support for the Conservatives, however, since he departed from the race, Bailey has only been the beneficiary of a 2 per cent increase in support. This has personified the monumental changes to Britain's political landscape.
The Brexit years now appear to have changed the face of British politics beyond all recognition with the Labour Party in complete ascendancy in the capital, but the rest of England, especially the nation's provincial constituencies, are bathed in Tory blue.
But it is unfair to claim that Brexit alone has caused such a seismic switch. It merely exacerbated growing and existing tensions. The Conservatives have not been London’s largest party in a general election since John Major’s shock victory in 1992. Five years later, Blair romped to victory; since then the city has become progressively more and more scarlet..
Boris Johnson's successive victories in 2008 and 2012 can be seen as two exceptional wins for a political celebrity, who prioritised his more liberal and metropolitan policies while distancing himself from the less popular party machine.
Nonetheless, the sheer size of Khan's re-election victory predicted by the pollsters will come as welcome news both to the mayor and to the relatively recently appointed leader, Sir Keir Starmer.