Sadiq Khan in London, Richard Parker in the West Midlands and Kim McGuinness in the North East were all elected on free school meals pledges. Greater Manchester Mayor has now joined Sadiq Khan in calling for Right to Buy to be suspended. Below Murad Qureshi crunches the numbers in London.

Who would have thought that when the Tories pushed through first-past-the-post voting for the mayoral contests, it would mean Sadiq Khan would romp home with an increased majority for a third term as Mayor of London?

Clearly not those who proposed and passed this change – but that’s actually what happened, as it forced many Lib Dem and Green voters to vote tactically rather than for their candidates when the choice was essentially only between Sadiq Khan or Susan Hall on the mayoral ballot. The latter made no overtures to them at all on their policy priorities with her anti-ULEZ position and indeed probably frightened many of them with her historical social media activities.

All the misguided excitement the day after the polls was based solely on the turnout figure of 40.5 per cent being 1.5 per cent lower than in 2021. Additionally, the Greater London Assembly constituency figures suggested that Outer London had turned out more than Inner London. Both low turnout and first-past-the-post raised the fear of a possible shock result – even though opinion polls suggested Sadiq and Labour were some 20 per cent ahead.

In the end Sadiq romped home, winning by 275,828 votes with a more than 10 per cent lead. Yet the polls were still10 percentage points out. It might be better to adopt the French system and not have any opinion polls two weeks before the actual vote itself, so they can’t have undue influence.

Let’s not forget the London Assembly

The results were remarkably stable at London’s City Hall with both the Mayor being re-elected and the make-up of the Assembly almost identical to the previous election. In spite of some little dramas around individual constituency results, the final outcome is just one less Tory Assembly Member (AM) – replaced with one Reform AM.

There are now eleven Labour AMs, three Greens, two Lib Dems, eight Tories and one Reform.  So critically Sadiq will still be able to still pass his annual budgets of fare freezes, free meals for schoolchildren and action on air pollution. Meanwhile the non-Labour AMs totalling 14 members can still hold control of all the Scrutiny Committees which work throughout the year.

The one change in the Labour make-up was the gain of West Central constituency covering City of Westminster, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham, bringing in Cllr James Small-Edwards for the first time. While we had a lower turnout than in 2021 in West Central by 4 per cent, the Reform vote helped lose the seat for the Tories. This, by implication, meant Labour lost one seat from the top-up list via the d’Hondt system, a sad fate l once suffered!

So it will be back to a Labour administration in London for the next four years. Hopefully a Labour government at the next General Election can work with the Sadiq to improve matters for Londoners after 14 bleak years.

Murad Qureshi was a member of the London Assembly from 2004 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2021.

Image: Sadiq Khan. Source: https://flickr.com/photos/chabadlubavitch/50704331368/in/photolist-UdWBz5-UuzwhD-Qypzy1-Vvz99B-UVptWb-23Kp6e3-24gz6cw-Zjkdrd-23KpeDu-2hPz6dP-QMZtqZ-VwhrWi-259mcg8-WxVTq6-NuExYa-23NrFs5-PB4kTB-PJQQxE-NB27zY-ZnaJgp-ZnaJDi-2hLDqry-ZnaJzk-ZnaJsX-ZnaJhM-ZnaJev-UGUh46-bnNvb3-UDZ8hN-NZQBWQ-VWqfTX-cLk2rs-QD3rZw-2g8MVqK-N6bMgC-N5SU6V-NApUq3-N6bs1o-2hLHeLr-ZnaJo8-2kfyXcN-2ebRAc5-2iocbeu-WKLMdo-2gzhCx6-2fY7SgD-NHup2D-21vssDN-GDLUtM-GDFdGH. Author: Chabad Lubavitch, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.