London’s Part-Time Mayor

It’s been a tough year for many Londoners. One in ten in the capital are unemployed, crime is up and the rising cost of living is squeezing family budgets. There is a quiet crisis going on behind the front doors of our city people are struggling with higher food and energy bills and worried about their jobs and the futures of their children and grandchildren. The Tories economic strategy is clearly failing London.

There is an alternative. Throughout the year Labour has set out a series of positive measures from Ken’s plan cut fares for London bus, train and tube users to Labour’s plan for jobs and growth. Now more than ever London needs a full-time Mayor who will put in place ambitious new policies to make our capital fairer, safer and more prosperous for all of us. Yet while thousands of Londoners are losing their jobs, the Conservative Mayor of London has been busy taking on outside employment – effectively relegating the Mayoralty to a part-time job.

It started weeks after he was elected with his weekly Telegraph column which he pays him £250,000 a year – a figure he dismissed as ’chickenfeed’. Now we discover he has found time to write a book. As a London MP working on average a 60 hour week I’m lucky if I get time to read a book, let alone finding the time to write one.  And it’s not just the outside employment that is leading the growing sense London has a Mayor who’s not committed to the job of representing ordinary Londoners. Earlier this year an analysis of his public diary showed he had held more meetings with bankers than meetings with the police or public meetings with Londoners.When it comes to commitment to London, there is a huge gulf between Ken and Boris Johnson.

While Boris Johnson aggressively defends his right to take on lucrative extra work, calling those who question his commitment ‘deceitful’ one of Ken’s earliest commitments was to promise to only take one salary, not to accept a pay rise and to freeze the salaries of his senior appointees for four years if elected next year.

London is facing big challenges in the future which demand leadership from a full-time Mayor. Londoners will take a dim view of Boris Johnson if he thinks he can treat City Hall merely as convenient office space in which to add hundreds of thousands of pounds to his £143,000 Mayoral salary. Londoners will have a clear choice next year – a Mayor who is committed to London and will always put Londoners first or a Mayor who is in it for himself.