Brian McDonald
Sadiq Khan, the Labor Party’s mayor of London, cruised to victory on Saturday, securing a record third consecutive term on the City Council, in yet another hugely disappointing day for the UK’s ruling Conservatives ahead of the upcoming general election.
Khan won just over a million votes, or almost 44% of the vote, more than 11 percentage points ahead of his main opponent, Susan Hall of the Conservative Party. It did particularly well in central London, but struggled in several outer boroughs.
There was frantic speculation on Friday that the result would be closer than previously thought, but Khan’s lead showed a shift from the Conservatives to Labor compared to the previous mayoral election in 2021.
Khan, who replaced Boris Johnson as mayor of London in 2016, has been an increasingly controversial figure in recent years.
Alastair Grant-AP
Although his supporters say he has multiple achievements to his name, such as expanding house building, free school meals for young children, keeping transport costs under control and generally supporting London’s minority groups, his Critics say he oversaw a rise in crime, was anti-car and needlessly allowed pro-Palestine marches to become a regular weekend occurrence.
“Sadiq Khan was absolutely the right candidate,” said Labor leader Keir Starmer. “He has two deadlines and I’m confident he has another deadline ahead of him.”
The current Labor mayors of Liverpool, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire were also re-elected on Saturday, while the party appears to have ousted the Conservative mayor in the West Midlands. A recount is underway there.
The latest successes come a day after Labor took control of councils across England, something it has not controlled for decades. The party was also successful in a special election for a seat in Parliament, which if translated into a general election would lead to one of the biggest defeats ever for the Conservatives.
Although the Conservatives suffered a defeat in the local elections, it appears that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will no longer face a rebellion within his ranks.
Sunak could breathe a sigh of relief when the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in northeast England was re-elected, albeit with a depressed vote share. Sunak had hoped Andy Street would hold on to the West Midlands but it appears he may have lost out.
One negative for the Labor Party was that its vote in heavily Muslim areas in England was depressed by opposition to the party leadership’s strongly pro-Israel stance on the war in Gaza.
Starmer admitted the party had problems with Muslim voters, but the results were generally positive for the man who is the favorite to become prime minister at the next general election.
Sunak has the power to decide the date of the next election and has indicated it will be in the second half of 2024. Starmer urged him not to wait.
“We are fed up with your division, your chaos, your failure,” he said Saturday. “If you leave your country in worse shape than when you found it 14 years later, you don’t deserve to be in government another moment.”
Thursday’s elections across much of England were important in their own right, with voters deciding who runs many aspects of their daily lives, such as garbage collection, road maintenance and local crime prevention. But with national elections approaching, they are being viewed through a national prism.
John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the results showed Sunak had not helped the Conservative brand following the damage accumulated by the actions of his predecessors, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
“In a sense that is the big conclusion,” he told BBC radio.
Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022, following Truss’s short tenure. She left office after 49 days, following a budget of unfunded tax cuts that roiled financial markets and sent borrowing costs for homeowners soaring.
His chaotic – and traumatic – leadership has compounded the Conservatives’ difficulties following the circus surrounding his predecessor Johnson, who was forced to resign after being tried for lying to Parliament about breaches of the coronavirus lockdown in his Downing Street offices.
By late Saturday afternoon, with most of the 2,661 seats up for grabs in local elections counted, the Conservatives had lost around half of the 1,000 seats they were defending, while Labor had won around 200, despite some apparently Gaza-related losses. .
Other parties, such as the centrist Liberal Democrats and the Greens, also made gains. Reform UK, which is trying to usurp the right-wing Tories, has also had some successes, notably in the special parliamentary election in Blackpool South, where it was less than 200 votes short of winning second place.
