On 5 May, elections will be held for the London mayor and Greater London Assembly. The principal candidates are multi-millionaire Zac Goldsmith MP for the Tories, and Sadiq Khan MP for Labour. We say that there is no case for participating in this election, least of all calling on the working class to support Khan. The Mayor of London serves to defend and advance the interests of big business and property developers in London and has nothing to do with democracy or progress. That much is evident from the political stance of both Goldsmith and Khan.
Eton-educated Goldsmith achieved notoriety when he voted in favour of a £30 cut in Employment Support Allowance earlier this year; he was subsequently ousted as patron of a disability charity in his constituency. In an act of racial profiling, his campaign has attempted to secure support from London’s Hindu and Sikh population by writing to voters with Indian-sounding names enthusiastically endorsing India’s reactionary Prime Minister Modi. The letter ignored Modi’s role in a 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujerat when he was Chief Minister of the state. Goldsmith’s campaign is highlighting Khan’s Muslim background, and by describing him as ‘radical and divisive’, claims that he has links with ‘extremists’.
However, the fact that Goldsmith is a wealthy reactionary does not turn his opponent into a progressive. Yet this is exactly what one-time radical Owen Jones tries to argue in a Guardian column on 31 March. Condemning Goldsmith’s campaign, Jones argues that Khan has ‘been running an upbeat, positive campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues such as the housing crisis and transport.’ He complains that he is ‘so depressed’ when he encounters ‘left-leaning people who refuse to vote for Khan because he’s insufficiently radical.’
So what of Khan? A former human rights lawyer, Khan has shown unbending determination to trim his views to advance his political interests. When he was Shadow Justice Secretary, he was consistently to the right of the ConDem coalition on penal policy.
- In August 2011, he congratulated the ruling class for its harsh treatment of anyone caught demonstrating against the police killing of Mark Duggan, saying: ‘I am encouraged by the speed at which people who have engaged in these disgraceful criminal acts are being brought to justice. The process from charge to trial and sentence must be as swift as possible. But this Tory-led Government must give assurances that there is the capacity in the prison estate for all those involved in violent disorder to receive the punishment they deserve.’
- Later in the same year, he reneged on his earlier promise not to ‘out-right the right on crime’ when Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke proposed to abolish the discredited indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPPs). IPPs were the cornerstone of the previous Labour government’s 2003 Criminal Justice Act. Khan begged Parliament to retain IPPs or ‘risk more crime, more victims and more dangerous offenders being released on the streets’.
- He also voted with the ConDem coalition to oppose the right to vote for prisoners: anything to appease the most reactionary sentiments.
Khan has made every effort to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. He describes proposals for a 60p top rate of income tax as ‘ridiculous’ and virulently opposes any withdrawal from NATO. He strongly supports Trident renewal.
And what of his mayoral campaign? On 1 April he boasted ‘I’ll be London’s most pro-business Mayor. Support from 100 business leaders in @Standardnews.’ To back this up, Khan’s manifesto states that he will ‘campaign to remain in a reformed EU…protecting London’s status as its financial capital’ – ensuring, in other words, that London continues to serve as a world centre for looting and plundering the rest of the world, central to the survival of British imperialism, as well as supporting the privileged conditions of the richest section of London’s population. The Evening Standard has revealed that his campaign has received £30,000 donations from property companies ultimately controlled from tax havens (13 April 2016).
Owen’s inference that Khan has a progressive housing policy is not substantiated by his manifesto. Although he talks of the need to build 50,000 houses a year – the same as Goldsmith – his commitment to make half of them for ‘genuinely affordable rent’ means nothing when he fails to define what he means by ‘genuinely affordable.’ He says he will support building homes for social rent – without any indication as to what proportion of his ‘genuinely affordable’ properties they will make up. Even with the wholesale fiddling of council home waiting lists that has taken place over the last three years, there are still 255,000 households desperately in need of social housing (down from 363,000 in 2013). He will support housing associations which he says are responsible for 40% of all London’s new homes, omitting to mention that their business models mean they no longer build homes for social rent. Khan’s manifesto uses the term ‘brownfield land’ to describe areas where new homes can be built. This is a concept developed by up-market estate agents Savills in a report to the Home Office to describe London council estates which are then to be targeted for ‘regeneration’ – that is, demolition and social cleansing on a massive scale (The Doomsday Book : ampping London’s housing crisis, FRFI 250).His ‘Homes for Londoners’, a policy derived from the Savills report, will include ‘councils, housing associations, developers, home-builders, investors, businesses, residents’ organisations’: but there is no doubt given the policy’s pedigree whose interests will come first – those of the developers, home-builders, investors and businesses, not those of London’s low paid workers and social housing tenants.
It is not that Khan is just insufficiently radical: he is a lackey of big business. He is also completely untrustworthy. In his effort to secure political support from London’s pro-Zionist middle-class Jewish population, he abandoned his previous support for the pro-Palestine boycott divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. He then went further, attacking Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to sing the National Anthem and his supposed links to ‘terror groups’, claiming Corbyn has been slow to tackle an alleged anti-Semitic incident in the Labour Party: ‘For me it’s disgraceful if there is an impression left that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It worries me, the impression left with the way the recent incident in the last few days has been dealt with by the leadership.’ This chameleon-like ability to change his political position has been essential to furthering his political career.
In delivering his endorsement of Khan’s ambitions, Owen Jones wants us to overlook Khan’s sordid record and the real content of his mayoral proposals. He is reduced to claiming that if people refuse to support Khan they ‘may as well be voting for a leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn.’ Khan’s defeat may or may not trigger a challenge to Corbyn’s leadership, but that is not relevant. What matters are the interests of the working class in this election, and Khan does not represent them. He is a reactionary in thrall to the most parasitic sections of the ruling class: off-shore developers, landlords, property developers, estate agents and the City of London. Socialists can have no truck with him. Boycott the election!
