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Meet the Muslim, 2nd generation Pakistani-British politician set to lead London

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Sadiq Khan, a Labour MP and the son of Pakistani immigrants, leads polls to become London's next mayor. (Facebook)
Sadiq Khan, a Labour MP and the son of Pakistani immigrants, leads polls to become London’s next mayor. (Facebook)

When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party’s leadership last September, party stalwarts in London also voted to choose a candidate to contest London’s mayoral election, one of many regional elections taking place on May 5.england_640United Kingdom Flag Icon

Corbyn’s elevation marked the moment when Labour’s rank-and-file members ripped down the curtain on New Labour, ending the party’s two-decade move to the center that kept it in power for three consecutive terms under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

But it was perhaps the internal contest to lead Labour into London’s mayoral contest that struck the most damning blow.

The initial frontrunner, Tessa Jowell, pushed London’s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics as a minister in the Blair government. When London, in fact, won the Olympics, she became the government’s minister for the Olympics as well. Jowell, a ‘Blairite’ long associated with the centrist incrementalism of New Labour, seemed like the perfect fit for one of the world’s financial capitals.

Instead, Labour voters turned to Sadiq Khan, a 45-year-old rising star of Labour’s ‘soft left’ flank. The son of Pakistani immigrants (his mother was a seamstress, his father a bus driver), it’s hard to conceive of a sharper contrast against his opponent, Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire.

Goldsmith’s father, James Goldsmith, won notoriety in the 1990s for his ‘Referendum Party,’ a eurosceptic forerunner of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). His son, just 41 years old, wasn’t an implausible candidate for London’s Tories. Like Cameron, Goldsmith is a moderate on social issues, and he is a former writer who spent nearly a decade as the editor of The Ecologist. But he has struggled to contest the image of a wealthy plutocrat out of touch with struggles of everyday Londoners. In April, he struggled to answer several ‘pop quiz’ questions in an interview about the city.

Moreover, Goldsmith’s campaign has been tainted by what even some Conservative critics have called Islamaphobic scare tactics. Those attacks have made Goldsmith seem not only demagogic but also desperate.

If polls are correct, Khan will easily defeat Goldsmith on Thursday. Continue reading Meet the Muslim, 2nd generation Pakistani-British politician set to lead London →

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Boris Johnson: the real mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics

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Hilarious. This is why Boris Johnson won the mayoral election of London initially in 2008 as a Conservative and was reelected in May 2012, despite a strong Labour wind, defeating former London mayor Ken Livingstone by a 3% margin.

Also, forget the goofy one-eyed blobs, Boris is the true mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics.  From the minute we saw him waving the Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, with his jacket opened, signalling London’s much looser approach to the Games (compared to the tightly synchronized Beijing Games), you just knew there would be no other way:

He’s rarely on-message (although he can show discipline when he wants).

He’s a bit of a goofy Etonian toff, floppy hair and all, but he’s probably the UK’s most popular politician today, with the possible exception of Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond.

As I’ve noted, he may one day be a British prime minister, as he certainly has more personality than the entire front bench of the current Tory (well, Coalition) government combined.  It’s thought that David Cameron, then just newly enshrined as the new Tory leader, sent Boris off to run for London mayor to get him out of his hair as he plotted the Tories’ own return to Westminster.  But given the current trajectory of Cameron’s government (with many blaming George Osborne’s* austerity policies as the main cause of the UK’s double-dip recession), it is not unthinkable that Boris may well lead the Tories in the next general election cycle or two.

Certainly, the exposure from hosting the 2012 Games will do him no harm (especially given that businessman Mitt Romney transformed his leadership of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City into a stint as Massachusetts governor and into the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2012).

H/T to Andrew Sullivan, who calls Boris the “un-Romney”.

* George Osborne serves as chancellor of the exchequer — essentially, the UK’s finance minister.

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Johnson defeats Livingstone for mayor of London

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Incumbent London mayor Boris Johnson has defeated former london mayor Ken Livingstone in Thursday’s election.

After leading first preference votes 44% to Livingstone’s 40%, Johnson defeated Livingstone on the count of second preference votes by a margin of 51.5% to 48.5%.

It is a striking win for Johnson and one of the few bright spots for a Conservative Party that lost nearly 800 council seats in Thursday’s local elections, which have already set tongues wagging about a potentially bright future for Johnson in national politics if he tires of London politics — a possibility that even Livingstone noted in his graceful concession speech Friday night.

 

 

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Womp, womp.

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Even on a day when Labour has done amazingly well in local elections across the United Kingdom, Labour leader Ed Miliband can’t seem to get a break, having been hit with an egg in Southampton while otherwise on a bit of a victory tour.

It’s still been a better 24 hours for Miliband than for Conservative prime minister David Cameron, who’s now apologized to his party for the dismal local election result — for what it’s worth (not much), if translated into a general election vote, Labour would have won with 39% to just 31% for the Tories (but ask William Hague how his 1999 win in local elections turned out for his Tories in the 2001 general election).

Labour has taken over 700 council seats from the Tories and from their governing coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, who have had an even worse election than the Tories.  Labour has also shined in Wales and in Scotland, which is somewhat of a damper for the nationalist parties as well.

In London, Labour is winning 42% of the vote to just 33% for the Tories, and even the race for mayor is closer than expected — incumbent Boris Johnson is still leading Labour candidate and former mayor Ken Livingstone.