Weekly Survey: London Mayor candidates, working class MPs and housing

A month ago, Mark Ferguson took to the pages of the Evening Standard to warn against contenders for the London Mayor Labour nomination throwing their hats in the ring before 2015:

“By announcing their candidacy before May 2015, Labour hopefuls could spend months grandstanding, peeling away from party policy and ingratiating themselves with the London establishment. Or they could spend the next year campaigning for the next election that matters. Labour members will surely reward those who put party — and country — first.”

Despite this, David Lammy declared his intention to stand last Thursday. Conor Pope ran through the reasons why “it makes a lot of sense for the Tottenham MP to get going sooner rather than later”. Lammy, he points out, has less name recognition with regular voters than his potential rivals for the selection. If he is selected as Labour’s candidate, we would need him to be in the best possible position to win in 2016: surely improving his profile now helps with that?

Should the candidates all wait until after the general election to make clear their intentions? Or is it more honest to be open about it now?

Maya Goodfellow posed the question: can the Labour Party continue to use that name unless it does more to increase working class representation in Parliament? While the name of the party is unlikely to change soon, do you feel there is a concerning lack of working class voices in the the House of Commons? Or are values more important than background?

LabourList will be hosting a debate on working class MPs at Labour Party Conference: find out more here.

Labour are committed to building 200,000 homes a year by 2020. Is this ambitious enough to deal with the UK’s housing crisis? Or are the failures of successive governments to build more houses an indicator that setting such targets does not work?

LabourList will be hosting a debate on how we build the homes we need at Labour Party Conference: find out more here. See LabourList’s full conference schedule here.

Our weekly survey will be open until noon on Thursday. You can vote here.