Sadiq khan

Sadiq Khan has just been announced as Labour’s London mayoral candidate. At an event at the Royal Festival Hall, the MP for Tooting was announced as the surprising winner by 59 per cent. Turnout in the primary was 77 per cent. Tessa Jowell was the bookies’ favourite and the frontrunner throughout this contest, but Khan may have benefited from the tens of thousands of new members who have joined Labour to back Jeremy Corbyn for leader. The result wasn’t even close — Jowell came second with 41 per cent. Khan’s camp were confident throughout the contest that the new members would be unlikely to back Blairite Jowell and it appears they are

One of the striking things about the contest in Labour for the mayoral candidacy is how many of the candidates are keen to admonish private taxi firm Uber. Sadiq Khan has described it as a ‘problem’ and said he is ‘on the side of the back cab driver’, Tessa Jowell is ‘enormously concerned’ and doesn’t have an Uber account, while David Lammy wants to ‘protect the institution that is the black cab’ and wishes there had been a confrontation between the Mayor and Uber as there had been in Paris. But perhaps these candidates should take heed of what has happened to another mayor who confronted Uber. Bill De Blasio

Quelle surprise, Jeremy Corbyn has come out against a third runway at Heathrow. The Labour leadership favourite has indicated in an interview with the FT that under him, the party would not support expansion at Heathrow: ‘I think the third runway is a problem for noise pollution and so on across west London…I also think there is an under-usage of the other airports around London. I’d vote against it in this parliament.’ Assuming that the bookies and pollsters are correct and Corbyn is elected leader on September 12, this would represent a U-turn from the party’s current stance. Following the release the Airports Commission’s report in July, Labour’s shadow transport

As the MP for Tooting, Sadiq Khan represents a constituency that is home to the largest Chicken Cottage in Europe. Not that he seemed proud of this fact at last night’s Evening Standard Labour mayoral hustings. While the candidates debated how to deal with the spread of high street gambling shops since Labour brought in the Gambling Act, Khan turned his attention to another guilty pleasure: fried chicken. ‘We’ve got too many chicken shops in our town centres. We’ve got too many pawn brokers in our town centres. We’ve got too many gambling shops in our town centres. Elect me to be the London Mayor and we’ll sort all those

The clock struck noon and it was if the past 32 years had never happened. Veteran Left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn had, with seconds to spare, got the necessary 35 nominations to win his place on the Labour leadership ballot. And with that news, it became clear that the Labour party has not just failed to learn the lessons of last month’s election failure; they are still too busy ignoring the lessons of 1983. In that year, one of the party’s most traumatic defeats in its history, the British people voted en masse to reject Michael Foot and his socialist manifesto – famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Today,

It is surely only a matter of time before someone with a mischievous glint in their eye invites the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, Helen Goodman, to open a fête in a place with which she is entirely unfamiliar, e.g. Bishop Auckland. Helen recently turned up as guest of honour at a fête in a village in the constituency she has represented for nine years. She delivered a moving eulogy to Ingleton, praising its beautiful waterfalls and deep, labyrinthine caves. The villagers listened with a dawning hilarity. Mrs Goodman had confused the village she represents with one of the same name some 70 miles away in the Yorkshire Dales. There

In the past few weeks, Sadiq Khan has made a couple of interventions that show how hopelessly confused the Labour Party is on issues of race and diversity – and Ukip looms large in the background. First up, a couple of weeks ago, Khan made a Labour’s pitch ethnic minority votes in a speech to Operation Black Vote. He said: ‘The fact is that if you are black or Asian in Britain today: you are significantly more likely to be unemployed. You will earn less and you will live a shorter life than your white neighbours.’ Invoking Policy Exchange’s recent ‘Portrait of Modern Britain’ report, he added: ‘Entire racial groups are significantly

After a formidable campaign run by Shadow London Minister Sadiq Khan, Labour took four out of eight Euro seats. Redbridge, Croydon, Merton, Harrow – none typically thought of as Labour boroughs – turned from blue to red. This should be the real story of the 2014 local and European elections. But the most surprising result in London came when Labour convincingly took control of Hammersmith and Fulham. A council variously described as Cameron’s ‘favourite’ or ‘flagship’, it had enthusiastically piloted some of the most high profile and radical Tory policies. The victory belongs to Stephen Cowan, the new Labour leader of Hammersmith and Fulham, and his team of candidates and activists,

The open primary to choose the 2016 Labour candidate for London Mayor is a dot on horizon; but speculation is underway. Mr Steerpike has been reading the form. Tessa Jowell, the former Olympics minister and outgoing MP for Dulwich, had a busy festive period: turning on the waterworks and displaying signs of Tourettes in this Guardian interview. Here is what she said in response to a question about those pressmen who say that her estrangement from her husband David Mills during his run-in with the Italian courts was manufactured: ‘Frankly, you know, those arseholes are so fucking rancid that I just hope every morning they wake up and think: ‘I’m

Two months ago I walked into the railway station at Biarritz. Without thinking I headed to the ticket machine on the concourse, pressed the small Union Jack on the touchscreen, and thirty seconds later had my ticket in my hand. Very simple and stress free, which is unsurprising as modern ticket machines are beacons of sanity for the international traveller. I remember the palaver at the Polish Railways ticket counter at Wrocław in 2006, when I was saved by a local in the queue behind me who could translate ‘could I have a single to Poznan for the early morning train tomorrow, and do I have to buy a supplementary

Such is the audacity of extreme Islamists that we now have the remarkable situation where a Muslim member of parliament, Sadiq Khan, is being told by the police to review his security arrangements after having his life threatened. Khan provoked the rage of radicals earlier this month after voting in favour of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. On his website, Khan explained: I firmly believe in marriage. Marriage is an important statement of love and long term commitment, and has long been the main way that the state recognises and shows support for loving relationships.  I believe that couples who love each other and want to make that long-term

The details of Labour’s mansion tax proposal remain, to put it politely, sketchy. Here’s the exchange between Andrew Neil and Sadiq Khan on the Sunday Politics on how Labour would work out which homes are worth more than two million pounds: AN: Do you rule out a re-evaluation of all properties? SK: There are a number of options to look into. AN: Do you rule out a re-evaluation? SK: If it meant those hardworking people having to pay more council tax then obviously it would be something we wouldn’t want to do, but there a number of ways of doing this, Andrew, for example, you could have a one pence

The Legal Aid Bill limps back to the Commons this afternoon, having had a rough ride through the upper chamber where the Lords inflicted 11 defeats on the government. And it looks like its next stint in the lower chamber might not be much smoother. As Paul Waugh reports, a group of MPs have tabled a new amendment to the Bill (actually, an amendment to an amendment tabled by the government on Friday) to continue to provide legal aid advice (but not representation) for reviews and appeals of benefit cases. What’s significant is that the amendment is signed by seven Lib Dem MPs, including party president Tim Farron, and four

Andy Coulson was right to worry about the coalition’s law and order policies: Labour is trying to outflank the government from the right. Sadiq Khan and Yvette Cooper have cut assured figures at fringe events at this year’s conference, sensing that the government’s cuts to the law and order budget will imperil one of Labour’s positive legacies: substantially reducing reported crime (by 43 per cent according to Sadiq Khan) between 1997 and 2010. A strange atmosphere pervades the law and order fringe: the name ‘Tony Blair’ is spoken of with something approaching respect and it is met with scattered applause. Blair’s memory is profane to this incarnation of the Labour