Latest polling from Freshwater Strategy for City A.M. might dampen Sadiq Khan’s hopes for a third term as Mayor. A whopping 56% of Londoners think the city is heading in the wrong direction, while three in five said Khan should not run again. Khan’t ignore that…
More Londoners were dissatisfied (39%) with Khan’s performance than satisfied (32%). Meanwhile, two fifths of Londoners would consider voting for the Greens’ Zack Polanski if he were to run for Mayor. Gulp…
Rachel Reeves had such a private bust-up with Sadiq Khan she actually booted him out of her office, according to the New Statesman. Ailbhe Rea reports:
“In private, she had heated, bitter disagreements with cabinet colleagues over squeezed budgets for their departments. “Get out of my office,” she told the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, as he tried to negotiate more funding for the capital, according to several people familiar with the incident. I’m told she cut short their scheduled meeting before the second half could begin.”
Khan is nonetheless walking away from this Budget with his prized Tourist Tax. Imagine if Reeves had caved even further…
Staff working for the Greater London Authority have instructed employees to spend a full 9-5 day receiving ‘climate literacy training.’ Is Khan organising this from New York…
They will “learn about the climate emergency and what you can do in your job to tackle it and help London achieve its net zero carbon by 2030 target.” This involves “writing three pledges on the day on how you will take climate action through your work at the GLA” and staff are instructed to “start having a think about this now.” Dystopian pledge-writing now included!
Staff are told “the course is very interactive and will contain lots of discussion and activities.” That’s how Khan is spending taxpayer pounds…
Read the full intranet post below:
Sadiq Khan has jetted off to Brazil this week to boast about how clever he is and complain about having “one hand tied behind [his] back” by a Labour government that hasn’t sufficiently backed his green agenda. To prove this point, he has flown around 5,750 miles to Rio de Janeiro, for a total round trip of 11,500 miles…
Ahead of the C40 World Mayors Summit, which Khan is set to co-chair this year, the Mayor of London said:
“I can’t understand how we’ve lost the art and ability to explain to people what we’re doing… [The public] can smell somebody who’s inauthentic. And I think you should be authentic. People respect somebody if you’re authentic. There are people who voted for me in the last mayoral election who may not agree with ULEZ but they respect the fact that I have got good intentions, but I also explained to them why we’re doing the ultra low emissions zone, the fact that in London we’ve got thousands of premature deaths…”
He went on to say the cabinet should be more enthusiastic about net zero and “it can’t just be the Ed Miliband show.“ For an entourage of five, the total greenhouse gas emissions pumped out for this trip will be around 27.7 tonnes…
A new report from the Centre for Policy Studies torches Sadiq Khan’s record on housebuilding in London. In 2024–25, just 4,170 homes were built across the capital – a pitiful 5% of his own 88,000-home target. Embarrassing…
Even worse, 80% of the homes completed last year were approved under Boris Johnson’s 2016 London Plan, while only 20% came from Khan’s 2021 blueprint. Despite the Mayor’s endless boasts about being committed to building a “better, fairer London for everyone,” it’s still Boris’ policies doing the heavy lifting on housing…
The report – “The City That Doesn’t Build” by Ben Hopkinson – blames a suffocating regulatory environment that’s driven costs so high that “even if the land is provided for free, developments in half of London are unviable.” Hopkinson also notes that despite London having the fewest homes per capita of any British region, it’s building at less than a quarter of the rate of the rest of England. Read the report in full below:
Continue reading “London Housebuilding Collapses Under Khan as Less Than 5% of Target Hit”
Keir Starmer has said he believes the ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ chant is antisemitic, putting him directly at odds with the Mayor of London. Who less than a week ago insisted “it was all about context”…
Asked by the Jewish Chronicle today whether he considered the chant antisemitic, however, Starmer said:
“Yes… I take a strong view on this, and we’ve dealt with cases in my own party where people have used that expression and we’ve taken action against them… I’m not just saying it to you here today. That is the history, that is the record that I have as leader of my party.”
Maybe worth having a conversation with Sadiq about all this…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”