After an election battle deemed racist and divisive, London has elected its first Muslim mayor. Sadiq Khan comfortably defeated Zac Goldsmith in what was otherwise a difficult night for Labour in Scottish, Welsh and English council elections.
Goldsmith’s campaign sent letters to voters that were apparently tailored to their ethnic group while white voters received more generic literature. In it, Goldsmith emphasised Khan’s supposed links to Muslim extremists and stressed the fact the Labour candidate shared a platform with Tooting imam Suliman Gani, who has been accused of supporting Islamic State.
This was despite the fact Gani had also attended an event with Goldsmith and backed Khan’s Conservative opponent in the General Election.
It was a campaign slammed by one senior London Tory as “outrageous” after the polls closed on Thursday night.
Andrew Boff, the former leader of the London Assembly’s Conservative group, said that he and many other Tories in the capital were “really troubled” by the Goldsmith tactic of painting Labour’s candidate as an extremist.
After the polls closed on Thursday, Boff told Newsnight that he had told his colleague that it was “a mistake” to attack Khan with such allegations as it undermined the party’s hard work in appealing to the Muslim community.
“I don’t think it was dog whistle, because you can’t hear a dog whistle. Everybody could hear this,” he said.
“It was effectively saying that people of conservative religious views are not to be trusted and you shouldn’t share a platform with them and that’s outrageous.”
“I was really troubled by one particular aspect [of the campaign] and that’s when he started equating people with conservative religious views with sympathising with terrorism. That sent a message out to many of the communities in London that’s very difficult to justify,” Boff added.
Boff’s views are shared by many London Tory activists contacted by The Huffington Post UK, who fear that Downing Street and Conservative Party HQ’s strategy has set them back years in the capital.
According to one expert, a campaign like this might have succeeded in London just eight years ago, but shifting demographics, including the influx of younger, more liberal people and the decline in the conservative white vote, have made the city much less receptive to it.
“London is not likely to respond positively to forms of politics that look xenophobic and racist,” Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at The University of Kent and expert in Britain’s radical right, tells HuffPost UK. He says the demographic changes in the capital were a key reason the Goldsmith campaign style had not worked.
“In 2004 and 2008, there was still an opportunity for the Conservatives to mobilise opposition to a Labour movement and mobilise a whiter vote, particular in the outer boroughs of London - areas where there was less diversity and where there were more socially conservative voters,” Goodwin says.
“I would argue that, fast forward almost 10 years, that those areas in turn have become less receptive to that style of politics. They’ve become more diverse, some groups have moved in and some have moved out and other groups have moved in.
“As a consequence, I just don’t think the same amount of electoral potential was there for the Conservative Party that was there in the earlier years,” Goodwin adds.
London may have a reputation as more left wing and socially liberal than the rest of the country, but white voters from poorer backgrounds are just as drawn to anti-immigration rhetoric as anywhere else, Goodwin says.
But many of these voters have moved from outer London to places like Essex, meaning the arrival of people from ethnic minorities in the capital has further diluted the political clout of the white working class people, he adds.
“We know white working class people in London who haven’t got a degree are just as likely to vote for Ukip as white working class people in other parts of the country,” Goodwin says. “The issue is those voters have become less influential, less decisive as the electorate has become ethnically and culturally diverse.”
Shazia Awan, a former Tory parliamentary candidate who recently came out against the party, accusing it of racism, tells HuffPost UK that she found the campaign was worse because it happened under David Cameron’s leadership, who sought move the Tories away from Theresa May’s famous description: “The nasty party”.
No comments:
Post a Comment