London:

Britain’s Labour Party won mayoral polls in London and central England on Saturday, in crushing defeats for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s unpopular Conservatives ahead of a national election due later this year.

While Labour politician Sadiq Khan’s re-election as London mayor was widely expected, Labour also snatched a surprise, narrow victory in the central West Midlands region that is home to Britain’s second-largest city of Birmingham.

The wins are Labour’s latest in local elections to councils and mayoralties on Thursday and could fuel fresh calls for Sunak to step down.

Opinion polls predicted that Labour would win the next national election, propelling Keir Starmer to power and ending 14 years of Conservative government in Britain. Sunak has said he intends to call a vote in the second half of the year.

Conservative West Midlands Mayor Andy Street lost to his Labour opponent Richard Parker. Street’s 37.5% of the vote was eclipsed by 37.8% for Parker, a razor-thin margin translating to 1,508 votes.

Street, who has served as mayor since 2017, ran a campaign emphasising his personal record on investment while downplaying his Conservative affiliation. He publicly disputed Sunak’s decision to scrap the high-speed HS2 rail link from Birmingham to Manchester last year.

Parker had sought to link him to the unpopular national government. “I believe a Labour mayor working with a Labour government will help get Britain’s future back,” Parker said in a speech following the result.

Starmer said the result was beyond Labour’s expectations. “People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour,” he said in a statement.

Sunak had been counting on getting an electoral boost from recent announcements on defence spending and the progress of his divisive plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Khan’s victory in London, his third in a row, came despite some public anger over knife crime and the Ultra Low Emission Zone that charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee.

“It’s been a difficult few months, we faced a campaign of non-stop negativity,” Khan said in a speech after the results showed he had won 43.8% of the vote against 33% for the Conservatives’ candidate, Susan Hall.

“For the last eight years, London has been swimming against the tide of a Tory (Conservative) government and now with a Labour Party that’s ready to govern again under Keir Starmer, it’s time for Rishi Sunak to give the public a choice.”

Khan, 53, became the first Muslim mayor of the British capital in 2016.

Hall had made scrapping ULEZ a centrepiece of her campaign but the 69-year-old Donald Trump fan made a series of gaffes and faced accusations of racism after being found to have engaged with far-right content online.

In one bright spot for Conservatives, Ben Houchen won re-election as mayor of Tees Valley in northern England on Friday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Sadiq Khan makes a speech as he is re-elected for a record third time as Mayor of London, following the counting of votes, at City Hall in London, on May 4, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan won a record third term as London’s Mayor despite predictions that a low voter turnout of 40.5% in the May 2 election would harm him. With the last mayoral constituency declaring results late afternoon on Saturday, Mr Khan easily won, with a 43.8% vote share compared to his main opponent, the Conservative Party’s Susan Hall, who came in with 32.7% of the vote. Mr Khan had won nine of 14 constituencies and a vote margin of more than 276,000 votes.

In some instances,  the Conservatives did not see a vote swing towards them in their stronghold boroughs (Bexley and Bromley for example) while they lost others to Labour (West Central). On the other hand, in the inner borough of Southwark and Lambeth, there was a vote swing towards Labour.

Ms. Hall had campaigned to fight crime by increasing the number of police and moving to more localized policies. She had also promised to end Mr. Khan’s signature expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) for automobiles. Mr. Khan’s pledges included continuing free meals in primary schools, promises to freeze certain public transport fares, and more police personnel.  

In his victory speech, Mr. Khan promised to deliver a “fairer, safer and greener London”. He said his campaign had answered “fearmongering with facts”, a reference to right-wing threats against him. Ms. Hall was criticized for associating with controversial social media groups in which users had made Islamophobic comments against Mr Khan.

The results in London and across local bodies in England and Wales spelt continuing bad news for the Tories, who have on average, been polling behind Labour by some 20 points. Reports of an internal rebellion against Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak emerged after May 2 but had quietened down by Saturday morning. The Tories had one bit of good news in Tees Valley, where Ben Houchen was re-elected Mayor. As of this writing, results from the West Midlands (several elections) were awaited, with Tories hoping Conservative Andy Street would stay on as Mayor.

With 106 of 107 local councils in England declaring results, Labour had won a majority in 50 councils (an addition of eight), with the Conservatives winning a total of six (a loss of 10). The Liberal Democrats won 12 councils (a gain of two).  Labour Mayor Andy Burnham was re-elected in Greater Manchester. Labour also won in Liverpool, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.

“The honest truth is that this set of results is pretty much what we would have anticipated, given what the opinion polls have been telling us about the mood of the country,” polling expert John Curtice said during an interview with the BBC.

London:

Sadiq Khan, who was Saturday re-elected for a record third term as London mayor, rose from humble roots to spar with world leaders and bring consequential change to the British capital.

The 53-year-old Labour party politician — a former human rights lawyer brought up on a London public housing complex — comfortably defeated Conservative rival Susan Hall for a third stint at City Hall.

He now overtakes predecessor Boris Johnson as the longest-serving holder of the post, which notably has powers over the emergency services, transport and planning in the city of nearly nine million.

Victory continues a remarkable journey for the Pakistani immigrant bus driver’s son, who became the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital when initially elected in 2016.

As mayor, he has made a name for himself as a vocal critic of Brexit and successive Conservative prime ministers, including Johnson, as well as for a feud with former US president Donald Trump.

The pair became embroiled in an extraordinary war of words after Khan criticised Trump’s travel ban on people from certain Muslim countries.

Trump then accused Khan of doing a “very bad job on terrorism” and called him a “stone cold loser” and a “national disgrace”.

The mayor in turn allowed an infamous blimp of Trump dressed as a baby in a nappy to fly above protests in Parliament Square during his 2018 visit to Britain.

“He once called me a stone cold loser. Only one of us is a loser, and it’s not me,” Khan told AFP during his 2021 campaign.

Knife crime

But Khan’s own tenure has not been without its controversies, particularly over last year’s expansion of an Ultra-Low Emission Zone into the largest pollution-charging scheme in the world.

The daily toll on the most-polluting vehicles prompted a fierce backlash in outer boroughs of Greater London, with anger at the extra financial burden during a cost-of-living crisis.

Khan has also been criticised for failing to get to grips with high levels of knife crime and since last year, his handling of large weekly pro-Palestinian protests.

Born in London in 1970 to parents who had recently arrived from Pakistan, Khan was the fifth child out of seven brothers and one sister.

He grew up in public housing in Tooting, an ethnically mixed residential area in south London, and slept in a bunk-bed until he was 24.

His modest background plays well in a city that is proud of its diversity and loves a self-made success story.

Khan still regularly recalls how his father drove one of London’s famous red buses, and his mother was a seamstress.

He is a handy boxer, having learnt the sport to defend himself in the streets against those who hurled racist abuse at him, and two of his brothers are boxing coaches.

He initially wanted to become a dentist, but a teacher spotted his gift for verbal sparring and directed him towards law.

He gained a law degree from the University of North London and started out as a trainee lawyer in 1994 at the Christian Fisher legal firm, where he was eventually made a partner.

He specialised in human rights, and spent three years chairing the civil liberties campaign group Liberty.

He represented Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam movement, and Babar Ahmad, a mosque acquaintance who was jailed in the United States after admitting providing support to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Higher ambitions?

Khan joined Labour aged 15 when Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp.

He became a local councillor for Tooting in the Conservative-dominated Wandsworth local borough in 1994, and its member of parliament in 2005.

He still lives in the area with his lawyer wife Saadiya and their two teenage daughters.

Labour prime minister Gordon Brown made him communities minister in 2008 and he later served as transport minister, becoming the first Muslim minister to attend Cabinet meetings.

In parliament, he voted for gay marriage — which earned him death threats.

As mayor, he vowed to focus on providing affordable homes for Londoners and freezing transport fares, but — like many in power around the world — saw his agenda engulfed by the pandemic.

He is London’s third mayor after Labour’s Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) and Johnson (2008-2016), with widespread speculation he could eventually try to follow in his predecessor and become prime minister.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Indian-origin candidate for London Mayor Tarun Ghulati addresses a gathering in London.
| Photo Credit: PTI

As London goes to the polls on May 2 to elect a mayor, Delhi-born Tarun Ghulati is among the 14 candidates for voters to choose from. Mr. Ghulati, an investment banker and strategic advisor, is running as an independent to “encourage the free flow of ideas and policies without party ideology and bias”.

“People don’t know whether to heat or eat,” Mr Ghulati told The Hindu on the eve of the election, describing the cost of living crisis. He hopes to bring his finance background to create funds for London.

Also read | Crime and cost of living left, right and centre as London votes for a mayor

As part of his plan, Mr. Ghulati said he would want more “bobbies (police) on the beat” .

“But of the right kind,” he adds, meaning they should come from diverse backgrounds to understand the cultural nuances of the communities they police. Not unlike the Conservative candidate Susan Hall, he wants more localized policing, by increasing the number of police booths in the city.

Like other candidates, Mr. Ghulati’s formula for making housing more affordable in London includes rent-control laws in areas undergoing gentrification and changing land-use regulations. He also wants to reduce the amount of congestion charges paid by car drivers using London roads.

 “You don’t need politicians who blurred the vision for London and have failed London, “ Mr. Ghulati said, when asked if London was read for a foreign-born Mayor.

“I speak several languages and and understand the cultural sensitivity of people,” Mr. Ghulati said adding that his Indian upbringing taught him to believe in the notion of the world as one family, which he described as ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, a Sanskrit phrase also used by the Modi government in its foreign policy references.

Emphasizing that he was committed to all cultures and communities, Mr. Ghulati voiced his support for civilians in Gaza during his call with The Hindu, describing the bombarding of Gaza as “carnage and genocide”.

“I’ve been asking the leaders to go off to the Rafah crossing or Gaza and see the bodies and the mass graves, just as they went to Ukraine,” he said. The Israel-Palestine issue has become a point of tension in London, with near-weekly protests and counter-protests, as in many other world capitals.

“I want all Londoners to live in harmony,” Mr. Ghulati said. He also dismissed the opinion polls, which show incumbent Sadiq Khan well in the lead, followed by Ms. Hall and the candidates from the Lib Dem Party (Rob Blackie) and Green Party (Zoë Garbett).

The Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan, is seeking a third term as he runs against 12 other candidates for the Mayor of London. File photo

Voters in England and Wales are going to the polls on Thursday, May 2, to elect a number of local government officials, but the most-watched race is in London, where the incumbent mayor, the Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan, is seeking a third term as he runs against 12 other candidates.

The three other contenders dominating the air waves are Conservative candidate Susan Hall, Liberal Democrat (Lib Dem) Rob Blackie and the Green Party’s Zoë Garbett. Also running is independent candidate, Delhi-born Tarun Ghulati.

 Crime and safety have  been top of the list for voters as has the related topic of confidence in the Met (Metropolitan Police).  On Tuesday a sword-wielding man killed a 14 year old child and injured several other people in London, where blade related crimes are high relative to other cities. The cost of living, especially as it impacts housing and transport costs is another crucial manifesto issue for candidates.

Mr. Khan’s main pledge is free primary school meals. He introduced these at the start of the 2023 school year as an emergency measure to help parents with the cost of living crisis. He is now proposing making the scheme permanent. He has also pledged to increase policing and  is in competition with Ms. Hall over how many new police offers they will deploy.

The incumbent’s other priorities include affordable housing and transport – but with Londoners reeling from higher costs of living than when he assumed office, Mr. Khan has the added task of defending his record so far. A YouGov poll report released on Wednesday said 47% of potential voters planned to vote for Mr. Khan while 25% planned to vote for Ms Hall (1,192 adults surveyed between April 24-30). Nevertheless, respondents  were split on his record to date, with 41% approving and 46% saying he has done a bad job.

One of the messages of the Khan campaign has been that he will be able to achieve much more than in the last few years if there is a Labour Chancelor of the Exchequer and government following the U.K.’s general election later this year.

Ms. Hall, a London Assembly member,  has said that she will increase the number of police officers and  introduce Borough-based policing to tackle crime (i.e., more localised police forces). She has also said she will end the expanded Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) on day 1. The expanded zone, which imposes congestion charges on certain vehicles, was created by Mr. Khan in August last year. The mayor has defended the expansion of the zone and has linked it to better health and environmental outcomes for Londoners.

Ms. Hall has previously courted controversy for her comments on crime in the black community and for her social media style – where she ‘liked’ racist posts, including some involving Mr Khan, who is Muslim.

Reforming the Met is the main priority for the Lib Dem candidate, Mr Blackie, who was the victim of a violent mugging some years ago. “One night I was attacked while walking home from work. My neck was broken, and I was lucky to live,” he said on his campaign page.

Ms. Garbett, who reminds voters repeatedly that she is a home renter (and not owner), is focused on transport fare reform and rent control and regulation in the city.