Labour: the party governing London, that hates London

Keir Starmer’s Labour party owes much of its election win to London, yet they show regular open contempt for London’s voters.

Let’s start with an electoral map of London, where Labour holds 59 out of 75 seats. You’d think some gratitude to Londoners would be due and listening to our genuine concerns would be in order.

Well you would be wrong. Let’s get a few things straight about today’s Labour party. Their electoral success in London is totally at odds with what the party now stands for, which is being neoliberal, authoritarian, transphobic white nationalists.

Many are saying that it is to appeal to potential Reform voters, but I say they are doing the dril tweet simply because under the current “Blue Labour“ regime, having purged anyone to the left of Ed “controls on immigration mugs” Miliband, that is who they are and they like it.

Ah the famous dril tweet, except Labour have the racism dial jammed to 11 and it is stuck there and they are no longer looking back at the audience, and certainly not their audience of actual voters in London.

Labour’s racism problem

Witness Keir Starmer’s rhetoric about immigration which was likened to Enoch Powell. The main difference being of course, is that Powell got fired. He has attacked the Tories from the right on immigration policy accusing them of having “open borders” and saying that it was a Britain has suffered “incalculable damage” during a “squalid chapter“ and that we are a “island of strangers“.

I would counter the “island of strangers“ routine with this little census statistic:

For an “Island of Strangers” that is an awful lot of inter-ethnic baby making going on, I mean maybe some of the parents were strangers but it still means a moment or three of inter-ethnic connection at the very least.

Now even if you were extremely charitable and limited his comments to immigration under the Tories the numbers include the Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes. Bit of an about turn to call these favoured migrants squalid and damaging.

And this is in particular an attack on London with over 40% of Londoners being born abroad, and many more of us being a generation or two removed from migration, and even more still having friends or family who are migrants. London is after all only 37% white British.

You can read my previous blog of the standard week in the life of someone in London that doesn’t just surround themselves with white people, and on that note, here’s a picture of an office in London that is totally unrepresentative of London:

You may well ask why it’s so white, and where the Black people in particular are. That’s because London’s Black women MPs such as Dawn Butler (Brent East), Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham & Brixton Hill) and Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) are considered too far left because they actually choose to represent their communities.

That leaves David Lammy (Tottenham) whose politics change with the blowing winds of what’s best for David Lammy’s career, and who is busy laundering Israel’s genocide in Gaza with mealy mouthed words and lack of action, much to the horror of his constituents who often refer to his Black socialist predecessor Bernie Grant as “spinning in his grave”.

During the last election there was an attempt to deselect Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington). It’s fair to say Labour leadership seem to have been taken aback about the support she received, as they seemed to consider her expendable leftist Corbyn ally fodder instead of showing her the respect Britain’s first Black woman MP should be afforded.

Fazia Shaheen, the respected inequality economist and a local candidate. was not so fortunate, being deselected for standing in Chingford and Wood Green for liking tweets critical of Israel. Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) - who has spoken about the horrendous misognyistic, islamophobic and racist abuse she has endured - is currently without the whip along with Zara Sultana after voting for an amendment to lift the two-child benefit cap against party lines.

See a pattern here? It’s no wonder the Forde report that investigated Racial discrimination and harassment in the Labour party had to make no less than 165 recommendations to decidedly muted responses from both the party itself and the national media, following a leaked group chat where Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler were abused and mixed Black MP Clive Lewis was called a ”c**t” with no repercussions.

Labour’s transphobia problem

Labour‘s approach to LGBTQ+ voters is similarly shocking. London is well known for being the area of the UK with the highest proportion of LGBTQ+ people, as huge numbers of people travel the well trodden path from small town to big city to be gay. Our population reaches as high as 13% in some areas, but as ever given data about self-reporting sexuality, this is likely to be a big undercount.

Labour have slavishly embraced the transphobia of the previous Tory administration, ending gender affirming care for trans youth following the Cass report which has been widely criticised for its ideological rather than evidence based approach. Wes Streeting, the health minister met trans youth who told him their positive experiences with puberty blockers - which are not banned for kids who aren‘t trans - and he decided to take away their healthcare anyway.

In light of the questionable and contested Supreme Court ruling in an action funded by the frankly obsessed J K Rowling, the Labour equalities minister Bridget Phillipson announced that trans people should use toilets according to their “biological sex” when trans people have been using toilets they feel comfortable using for decades.

In a shocking overreach by an unelected official, the chair of the EHRC, Kishwer Falkner has made similar statements, as though her job is to regulate the public rather than provide guidance to institutions. She also suggested trans men who present as masculine should not use women’s toilets either, but called for trans people to “advocate“ for third spaces as though equality of service provision is not literally her job. Falkner was appointed by Liz Truss for ideological reasons and then re-appointed by Labour.

Streeting consulted with no fewer than eight transphobic campaign groups including LGB Alliance, who purport to represent cisgender Lesbian Gay and Bisexual people when polling shows support for trans people among this group reaches as high as 96%. It is seen as the major political fight among London’s LGBTQ community because trans people‘s fight has always been the same fight as cisgender queer people.

Labour‘s London mayor problem

Sadiq Khan has been the Labour Mayor of London since 2016. Few would consider him a raving leftist but one decent policy he has enacted is the expansion of the Ultra Low Emmission zone, or ULEZ, which charges the oldest most polluting vehicles for entering London boroughs, encouraging drivers to make less polluting choices. The scheme is one of his biggest successes, with nitrogen dioxode levels down 27% despite increases in traffic.

You’d think Labour would embrace their popular London mayor and his policies but they narrowly lost the Uxbridge by-election in 2023 as the Tories campaigned on “Labour are going to charge you all for driving your car!” despite the fact it affected only 5% of vehicles. The Labour candidate announced he was against the expansion and Starmer said that Khan ”should reflect“ and that there was "something very wrong" when a Labour policy was on "each and every Tory leaflet" and called on the mayor to reflect on his policy of reducing pollution. Any plans to expand the scheme out of London have since been abandoned.

Sadiq Khan had also spoken about rejoining the EU - a policy the majority of Londoners support - and in support of trans Londoners. It’s clear that Starmer finds him a little bit embarrassing.

The silent “white”

In April Jonathan Hinder, a ”Blue Labour” MP who really should just join Reform said that “too many working-class people see Labour as the party of immigrants, minorities, those on benefits“. All these people are in fact voters, he excludes them from “working class” despite the fact that minorities are more likely to be working class. What Hinder means is ”white working class” the mythical voter in a pub in Stoke that Labour courts in the focus groups in their heads. Indeed Starmer is on record on saying the “most accurate focus group is the local pub” and we know who that excludes.

It doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea to insult migrants (8.3% population, London: 40%), ethnic minorities (17%, London 46%) and people on benefits” (51% of population including pensioners) but I will defer to the electoral geniuses at the Labour party on this point. You’d think Labour would learn from the experience of Jonathan Ashworth, who lost his seat during a Labour landslide election to independent Shockat Adam over his failure to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza and appearing on TV saying how Labour would deport people seeking asylum “back to Bangladesh” while standing in a city that as a whole is 43% South Asian.

Hinder’s Blue Labour group have now gone further, in a Trumpian move calling for an end to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion schemes (DEI) saying “We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.” This is in a country with well documented discrimination in hiring and the criminal justice system.

Rather than facing censure like say a Labour MP liking a tweet criticising Israel, these people are allowed to spew rhetoric that is a kick in the teeth for Londoners in particular. Focusing on a particular type of white British voter used to be called institutional racism.

I know a little about voters from Stoke on Trent, seeing as I was born and spent my early formative years there, I even have traces of the local accent. I recently visited for a funeral for an “uncle“ from Jamaica, and chatted to old Jamaican men in the multicultural community centre. Labour do not care about THOSE Stoke voters of course.

Where will it end for Labour?

As support for Labour plummets over issues such as winter fuel allowance and their appalling cuts to disability benefits, there is a lot of disquiet from usually loyal London Labour voters and not just those affected by these policy decisions, that this iteration of the Labour party is not for us.

As they hold another photo-call on a building site in Buckinghamshire, with precious few Black or Asian people in shot, or announce their latest round of transphobic policies, or are at odds with London‘s mayor it’s directly or indirectly a kick in the teeth for Londoners, particularly in East London where the second place party is not the Tories or Reform but the Greens.

With prospective Green leader Zack Polanski standing on a progressive platform of wealth redistribution, sanctions on Israel as well as measures against climate change, it would seem that more of Labour’s taken for granted progressive London voters will be looking towards the Greens or independents next time round or simply not bother to vote at all. Many will criticise this as a path to ”letting Nigel Farage into No.10” but when Labour‘s policies mimic Reform’s or even sit to the right of them, London’s voters may feel they have nothing to lose.