Sadiq Khan has launched an open appeal to Liberal Democrat and Green Party supporters to vote for him in the mayoral election on 2 May and help ensure that what he calls a “threat” to “liberal values” posed by his Conservative challenger Susan Hall does not succeed.
The Labour Mayor, who is seeking a historic third term at City Hall, is emphasising common ground he says he shares with the two smaller parties on flagship policy issues, together with the danger of defeat he claims has been created by the government’s imposition on mayoral contests of the First Past The Post voting system, which will deprive Londoners of the second preference vote they have been entitled to cast throughout the London mayoralty’s history until this year.
Khan’s “love letter” campaign will focus on his track record of taking measures to tackle pollution and climate change, his free school meals programme ensuring these are available to all state school primary school children, supporting the rights of minority groups, and his freezing of Transport for London public transport fares.
The Mayor is also claiming that potentially at least 900,000 voters could be turned away at ballot boxes if they can’t provide approved documentation under the newly-introduced Voter ID system, another Conservative change to the voting process contributing to what he says is “likely to be the closest contest we’ve ever seen since the London mayoralty was established”.
The sole mayoral contest opinion poll published so far this year suggest that Khan enjoys a huge lead over Hall, with 49 per cent of Londoners who had made their minds up saying they intended to vote for him compared with just 24 per cent opting for the Tory candidate.
However, during the last mayoral campaign, the Covid-delayed contest of 2021, a number of polls gave Khan similarly large leads early in the race while the actual result saw him best his Tory rival by less than five percentage points in first preference votes, and extend to his lead to a winning 10.4 points once second preferences, most of them from Green and Lib Dem voters, were added on.
The Green candidate finished third in 2021 with a 7.8 per cent vote share and the Lib Dem candidate fourth with 4.4 per cent.
Khan characterised this year’s election as “a two horse race” between him offering a vision of a “fairer, greener and safer London for everyone, or the hard-right Tory candidate who stands for cuts to London’s public services, inequality and division”.
The recent poll placed the Greens’ Zoë Garbett third with nine per cent and the Lib Dems’ Rob Blackie fourth with eight per cent. It also found 21 per cent of Londoners to be undecided about who to vote for.
Asked earlier this year by On London about the prospect of Khan asking their supporters to “lend” him their votes, Blackie retorted that “the chances of the Conservative winning are zero” and Garbett said “you don’t only take part in a race to win, you do it to share your ideas”.
Both Garbett and Blackie are also candidates for the London Assembly, placed fourth and second respectively on their parties’ Londonwide candidate lists which puts them in contention for winning seats in the proportional representation section of the Assembly elections.
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