Here is a question that is nowhere as parochial as it might sound: does it matter if Sadiq Khan is re-elected as London mayor next year? Not really, you might say in Newcastle; we’re more engaged in the drama over Labour’s dumping of popular metro mayor Jamie Driscoll. Yada yada, you might say in Manchester; we’ve got our own show, as Andy Burnham jousts with central government.
And yet it does matter. We are almost one week into the creation of that expanded ultra-low emission zone in London and yet the world still turns, the lights stayed on and the pubs are still serving beer. There has been some hardship for those who have struggled and will struggle to adapt, despite the scrappage scheme to offset expense. It’s no joke for poorer people who can’t just buy another car in an overheated secondhand market, and tradespeople who don’t have another £25,000 for a new compliant van (though they can claim tax relief on the charge).
But, for all the protests – the genuine and the maliciously curated; the “bogus war on the motorist” campaign that Khan called out in an article yesterday, even the shameful acts of Ulez equipment vandalism – the switch has been made, and one of two things will now happen. It will prove to be of benefit, which I think it will, and Sadiq Khan will be re-elected. Or the benefits will prove marginal and, roused by those who suffer from it or those who make hay to save their political skins (that will be you, Mr Sunak), Khan will lose the election and the mayoralty to Susan Hall, a Tory competitor so palpably weak that even hardened party warriors can only bear to glimpse her candidacy through shuttered fingers.
That’s democracy. Or at least that’s what it should be. Sometimes it’s a gamble: you take your position, you argue for it with reasons, facts and stats, you hope to convince enough people to make it viable as sustainable policy. You hope it works, all the while knowing that if you don’t convince enough people and if it clearly doesn’t work, the voters will come for you at election time. That’s the clarity and brutality of a system that asks intelligent people to put themselves forward for office: to be diligent, to seek advice, to take soundings and then to formulate policy positions for the wider benefit of society. And then, regardless of the electoral peril, to see them through. This is called leadership.
It is fundamental to our system, underpinned through fruitful centuries by Edmund Burke’s notion that, “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.
Leadership doesn’t mean your representative ignores you. Tony Blair would have done well to heed the warnings of millions who marched in London in 2003 to head off British participation in the ruinous war in Iraq. He won the election two years later, but his judgment was awry, and he lost the gamble. His majority tumbled, and with it, irretrievably to this day, his reputation.
So blind arrogance and cussedness is not leadership. But Khan merits re-election because by pressing ahead with Ulez – with the Tories, a Tory prime minister, and even a supine, misguided leadership in his own party throwing rocks in his path, and with the rightwing media whipping up a firestorm he has been obliged to walk through – he has shown leadership in an age when what we are routinely offered is followship. To be sure, Khan has polls and credible stats in his favour, but the polls are not decisive, even if the evidential basis is strong. Forging ahead with the Ulez expansion was based on his judgment. Not a crowd-pleasing whim or a wheeze dreamed up by a special adviser, but a fact-based, rational decision.
And let’s contrast that with our normal bill of fare. Suella Braverman yearns still to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, and she says it is “a humane and practical alternative for those who come here through dangerous, illegal and unnecessary routes”. But she has no facts to truly support that. She just thinks rightwing Tories and “red wall” voters who might be lost to Labour like the sound of it. It’s not, as she says, “humane”. In July, the court of appeal said Rwanda’s current asylum system was neither reliably fair or effective. Nor was it “practical”. An economic assessment suggests that sending vulnerable asylum seekers to Rwanda will cost £63,000 more in each case than it would cost to keep them here. It’s followship: a rejection of the notion of sound judgment, and the framing of policy to meet the basest instincts of the public square.
Let’s think quickly about her boss. Is he leading or following? Both. He aims to lead by following. We thought Boris Johnson chased every populist bus, but Rishi Sunak is worse, like a greyhound in expensive flip-flops. There are so many examples of him following and pandering, but my favourite was Sunak the leadership candidate telling Tory members not that austerity had been a disaster and needed an urgent fix, as the stats make clear, but that he was their guy because he was siphoning funds from poor areas – where the voters might vote Labour – to keep the faithful happy in Tunbridge Wells. Love me, vote for me. What was it Groucho Marx said? “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”
But followship runs across party lines. I recall asking a Labour official during the Brexit debate whether they thought it was a good thing, and if not, why they were so shy of saying so. The answer came back that, on the doorstep in Labour heartlands, people liked it. But if you know it’s wrong and won’t do them any good, why aren’t you making that case, I said. If they are your heartlands, aren’t you the people they are most likely to listen to? They are not prepared to listen, was the answer. Followship: an object lesson.
And so now we have Khan, whose mayoralty has never provided the glamour of his predecessors, but who has apparently found his mission in tackling pollution. And here, fighting for his Ulez, he has shown leadership in the Burkean sense.
The loss of the Uxbridge byelection was (rightly or wrongly) attributed to the Ulez expansion, which clearly scared the horses within Labour: Keir Starmer’s office was quick to condemn it. Khan himself has now rowed back on further plans for a zero-emission zone in central London from 2025. Andy Burnham has U-turned on a similar scheme in Manchester. Judgment sometimes counsels caution.
But we have got this far, and the London mayor has shown the mettle to make a seismic change that will save lives in the capital now, and may be the future for other polluted cities. It matters that the gamble pays off.
Hugh Muir is a Guardian columnist and executive editor, Opinion
