Digging into all those Mayoral Election stories so you don't have to
Drugs! Transport funding! Lecterns! We've got it all.
In just four weeks we all (well, around half of us probably) head off to the polls to vote for the London mayor. As much as we would like to write about the policies of Count Binface ( currently campaigning on the policies of “justice, lasers, Lovejoy and the return of Ceefax”), all the news is really about current bookies favourite, Sadiq Khan, so let’s get to the first of the two stories making the headlines this week…
Sadiq to review if there’s a possibility that decriminalising cannabis could potentially be a thing... maybe
As headline grabbing election pledges go, Sadiq’s latest isn’t the most confident we’ve ever seen. But then again you have to remember that the 2021 race is Khan’s to lose, plus he knows that all he has to do is mention the words ‘cannabis’ and ‘decriminalisation’ in the same sentence and the headline writers (or, if you’re Time Out, the guy who spends minutes designing the banner images) will do the rest for him. So let’s dig into what this latest announcement actually means.
In his Sadiq For London manifesto that was published yesterday, Khan says:
In the absence of any action at the national level, I will establish a London Drugs Commission comprising independent experts and leading figures from the fields of criminal justice, public health, politics, community relations and academia. The Commission will pull together the latest evidence on the effectiveness of our drugs laws, but with particular focus on cannabis. Looking at the evidence in the round, and from across the globe, the Commission will come forward with policy recommendations
It’s the next sentence that’s the clincher though: “In the absence of any powers as Mayor to change the law, I hope that the work of the Commission will provoke an overdue national debate.”
In other words, if his commission concludes that a change to the legal status of cannabis is a good idea, then Sadiq might consider giving a “mayoral boost” to a change to the law.
It’s a change that the leader of his party doesn’t support right now, and the Number 10 press office have been pretty swift to come out and say that the incumbent Mayor is “wasting his time” and that Boris Johnson has “absolutely no intention of legalising cannabis”, because “illicit drugs destroy lives, mkay kids” (we might have added that last bit).
So why has he included this in his manifesto? Most likely because he’s seen the poll that the Evening Standard ran back in 2019, which showed that sixty-three per cent of Londoners back the legalisation and regulation of cannabis.
Just before we leave this, we can’t help but notice the related links at the bottom of Time Out’s coverage of this story: a list of pizza delivery restaurants (obviously), but also a list of parks to “get fucked in”. Even if the Time Out subeditors are ok with the swearing there, we imagine they might want to clear up the ambiguity of the overall message a bit.
Khan and Johnson TfL beef rumbles on
Do you know how much the new Number 10 Briefing room cost to kit out? If you’re of reading age and conscious then you’re probably aware that it cost the taxpayer around £2.6m to turn the Downing Street studio into what one civil servant said resembled the location for “a shit civil wedding”.
Despite the millions spent making the room appear as though a number of Smurfs had been exploded inside it, Sadiq Khan had limited his criticism to the odd tweet… Until that is the Prime Minister stood proudly in front of one of his newly acquired Union Jack flags and laid into Khan, placing TfL’s funding the woes squarely at his door. Here’s what he said:
“It’s the current Labour Mayor of London who blew TfL's finances, which were left in remarkably good condition by the previous Mayor, even before the pandemic struck. We are working with TfL to see what we can do to resolve the problem.”
Khan wasn’t about to let that stand. He tweeted this on Monday:
Since then, Labour have backed up the London Mayor, accusing Johnson of “demeaning the office of Prime Minister” by using an official coronavirus briefing to criticise Khan, and then Alastair Campbell got in on the act, tweeting that the Cabinet Secretary “needs to remind @BorisJohnson that government platforms cannot be used for political attack.”
This is not a new argument between the current and previous Mayor. Back in October of 2020 the two were at it, with Johnson stating that TfL was “effectively bankrupt” before Covid hit the books, and Khan saying that was a pack of lies.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Well, it’s complicated.
Boris Johnson definitely did not leave TfL in a good place when he skipped out the Mayoral office in 2016. A TfL report produced at the time showed that it was £9.148bn in the red.
But you also can’t say that Covid is the “sole cause” of TfL’s woes. In 2019, months before coronavirus popped its head up, TfL published accounts that showed their debt had gone up to £11.175bn. Of course, the biggest cause of that debt was Crossrail, and the last we heard about that particular shitshow was that it was looking unlikely that the now £18.6bn budget would be enough to deliver it.
And this is all before we get to the subject of exploding bendy buses, government funding and fare freezes.
In short: No one comes out of this looking good, although you’re definitely on the back foot if you choose to launch your barbs from a £2.6m briefing room that resembles something the drama class knocked up for their stage adaptation of The West Wing.
And the rest
At the time of writing this the body found in a pond in Epping Forest has not been formally identified as Richard Okorogheye. We will, of course, be watching to see how this develops.
Senior figures at the accountancy firm EY have been reported to the police after they “held a surreptitious Christmas party”. According to the Times “More than 25 staff in EY’s international tax division are said to have gathered in Roast… for a dinner on December 11.” Apparently the dinner was structured across five tables, but there was “mingling” between tables, “and at one point restaurant staff had to intervene.” The Met was told about the party in February, “but no action appears to have been taken”.
Compare that to the Sun’s report of what went on in Brent Cross over the bank holiday: Petrolhead yobs show off doing doughnuts at crammed 500-strong undercover car meet on London’s streets screams their headline. This time, the Met took swift and decisive action: “A police van could then be seen escorting the cars out of the Tesco's car park.”
The Brixton Blog has been doing great work for over a decade now, and with the fortieth anniversary of the Brixton Uprising coming up they've been putting out some excellent coverage, including this article on the Sounds of the Brixton Uprising.
Back to that briefing room for a second. It turns out putting a huge blue screen behind the PM’s pew is not a very good idea…
Big thanks to Boris Johnson and the Tories for building a giant blue screen for their new briefing room, meaning it takes seconds to put anything behind them. For example Vigo the Carpathian.See you all on Wednesday.
