Mayor

It was a performance worthy of an Oscar or maybe a Tony. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s address at his swearing in ceremony on New Year’s Day electrified the freezing crowd every bit as much as it shocked the Democratic establishment, and perhaps even the 50 percent of New Yorkers who didn’t vote for him. The newly-minted Mayor had the stage, but graciously acknowledged that the real star was socialism. “I was elected as a Democratic Socialist and I will govern as a Democratic Socialist.” He hailed an “era of big government,” vowed to govern “expansively and audaciously” and said he would “set an example for the world.

Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.

When Zohran Mamdani took the pulpit at Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church last Sunday, he had a golden opportunity. He could have spoken to the hopes of black New Yorkers, their resilience, their aspirations for safer neighborhoods, better schools and paths to prosperity. Instead, the first thing he brought up was police shootings. There is nothing wrong with addressing police shootings. They are tragedies that wound communities deeply. But it is telling that when Democrats step into black churches, their reflex is to start with pain. They do not speak to us as whole citizens with complex desires. They reduce us to our wounds, assuming that the surest way to earn our votes is to rehearse our traumas.This is what I call “pain politics,” and frankly, I am tired of it.

Who does a capital city belong to? In the case of London tonight, one answer could be ‘Labour’, now that Sadiq Khan has claimed victory, as the party performs disastrously elsewhere. And clearly Khan’s strong support among the left-wing, the middle class, EU nationals (who are permitted to vote for the mayoralty), and some of the largest ethnic minority communities, shows that his chippy ID politics goes down well among enough residents of the capital to keep the keys to City Hall securely in his pocket. https://twitter.com/MayorofLondon/status/1391154209698062336?

Sadiq Khan's decision to launch a commission looking into decriminalising cannabis is a perfect advert for his time as London mayor. It shows all too clearly that Khan values empty gesture politics over getting on with his day job. Don't get me wrong: legalising cannabis seems a smart idea. It is, after all, a waste of police time and effort stopping the trade of drugs which are widely used and cause comparatively limited harm. But is it any of Khan's business to focus on this issue? 'It’s time for fresh ideas to reduce the harms drugs and drug-related crimes cause to individuals, families and communities,' said Khan this week.

Shaun Bailey pulled off an amazing trick this week: he managed to unite Twitter. Left and right, Tory and Labour, Remainer and Brexiteer, all piled into a wondrously crass post by the Tory London mayoral candidate: ‘As a father and husband it breaks me to think that my wife and daughter have to live in fear in their own city. It doesn’t have to be this way. As Mayor, I‘ll ensure that we are working to deliver for the safety of women and girls in London.’ The message would have been in poor taste no matter what the timing. After all, why make crime in London about himself and his family?

When the London Mayoral election was delayed due to the pandemic, no one was particularly outraged: the prospect of Sadiq Khan’s re-election seemed secure and Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, was nowhere to be seen. But that might be changing. Internal polling by the Tory party, leaked to the Telegraph, suggests that Londoners have not been best pleased at the city’s recent fate – and Bailey is only seven points behind, at 35 to Khan’s 42 per cent. This is quite the difference from a March YouGov poll putting Bailey at a fairly hopeless 23 per cent. It’s not that Bailey has been much more visible – but it’s easy to see why Londoners might have reason to panic.