Why I wrote my autobiography

For me, the exercise of writing an autobiography had an unexpected effect. It reinforced my reasons for standing for election and strengthened my resolve to join the fray in what will be the fight of my life.

You might expect putting your life so far down on paper would preoccupy you with the past. Yet, quite the opposite, the more I wrote this book the more I thought about the present and the future. Looking at the political developments and controversies I had been involved with sharpened my sense that the next big fight – the clash with Boris Johnson’s Tory party – was one no one in my position could avoid taking on.

A stronger and stronger question started to pose itself. How could someone who had seen through the struggles of the Fares Fair legal challenge, where the courts sought to overturn our radical fares policy, had been part of the London Labour Party’s great achievement to introduce the Freedom Pass, who had been thrown into the massive arguments over lesbian and gay equality or peace in Ireland, and who had been through so many campaigns against racism, war and injustice, simply walk away from a political fight when the city I love is going through such rough times?

London right now has one in ten of its population out of work, a rotten return to the worst days of the Tories. Fares are soaring. The population is being hit hard – fees, fares and VAT rising steeply, services under threat and the NHS under attack. Women are bearing the brunt and young people are in the firing line, with EMA cut and elitism firmly back on the agenda. London’s summer was scarred with violence and disorder. Crimes like burglary and knife crimes against young people are back up. Our job is to offer hope and solutions, to put ordinary people first. Optimism first requires an alternative. The scale of the challenge we face now equals and even outstrips the things I found myself documenting in my book.

A major motivation for me was my children. I had originally set out to write a book about the years from 2000 to 2008. That would have been a book heavy on the detail of my mayoral administration. As it unfolded it became something else – an autobiography. A life lived in politics is incredibly rich and I wanted to give my children the opportunity to understand what I did and why. In turn that motivation has drawn me back to the present challenge. Young people’s aspirations are being shattered. Youth unemployment has rocketed. The attack on fees and EMA has sent a brutal message to the generation that comes next. Young people should enter the adult world with higher expectations than their parents. Instead our society is lowering them.

Historical perspective underlines that the challenges facing London, Britain and the planet are all as big if not bigger than those that have gone before. Rebuilding our economy and dealing with climate change require Labour values of planning and co-operation based on Labour value of fairness.

Londoners need a mayor who understands all that and will put ordinary people first. But this mayor is cutting services while giving himself a pay rise and doubling the number of staff at City hall earning over £100,000. He doesn’t get it – he calls his £250,000 salary for his second job ‘chicken feed’, while hitting the majority with endless fare rises and cutting their police services.

I didn’t have to run. I’m doing it because I love London and I want to end the scandal of a mayor who either adds to the problem with higher fares and police cuts while defending the privileged or stands idly by. My kids are growing up in this city now – I don’t want them living in a city where the mayor does nothing for them and their generation.

I certainly didn’t expect that writing a book about my life so far would strengthen my resolve about the struggles of the present, but strangely it has – it has reinforced to me that there is plenty of unfinished business and we all have our responsibility to play our part.

‘You Can’t Say That’ is out next week.