Sadiq khan

Boris Johnson’s war with black cab drivers stepped up a notch today. His monthly Mayor’s Question Time session was abruptly shut down after cabbies packed out the public gallery of London City Hall to protest about what they see as Transport for London’s unfair regulations for Uber. As the video above shows, Johnson’s description of the cabbies as ‘Luddites’ did not go down well at all and the London Assembly's deputy chair decided it should end. Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association, has told the Evening Standard Boris's ‘Luddite’ was to blame, saying it was not ‘the smartest of moves but it escalated out of all proportion’.

Turnout in the Labour leadership contest is going to be one of the key factors in deciding who wins. The result of the London Mayoral contest suggests that the tens of thousands who've joined the party as members or registered supporters have, as expected, flocked in an anti-establishment direction — which has clearly benefited Sadiq Khan and points towards a Corbyn victory. Rumours are circulating that the turnout in the leadership is varying significantly between the various parts of the electorate.

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 picked a fight with Uber in New York earlier this year, and lost.

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.

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 three things out.' However Khan may find it hard to win with his current stance on poultry: https://twitter.com/JoshFeldberg/status/629280916746162176 https://twitter.

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, no one in the Labour party – well, at least no one remotely sane – thinks Jeremy Corbyn will win the party leadership.

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 are no caves or waterfalls in Ingleton, Co Durham.

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 poorer, have lower educational achievements and worse life chances than their [white] neighbours’.

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, whose campaign outperformed the local Tories.

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 ashamed of the job I do.