Summary
Published on election day 2024, this article warned that a Labour government would empower Mayor Khan to pursue three damaging agendas: importing Wales’s failed education model into London’s successful state schools, introducing Scottish-style rent controls that paradoxically drive rents up, and extending his mismanagement of TfL fares to suburban commuter railways.
Today the stakes for Londoners have never been higher: for our children, for our city’s renters, and for our rail commuters, a Labour government would be a disaster for London.
Although much has been made of Labour’s vindictive crusade against independent schools, most London pupils go to state schools and for those children the enormous progress under the Conservatives is now at risk.
No longer a byword for failure, London’s state schools stand among the most successful in the country thanks to 14 years of Conservative reforms. Reforms that Labour and their friends in the education blob opposed at every turn: the academy programme to rescue schools from council’s political meddling, a focus on phonics so children quickly learn to read fluently, and proven effective teaching methods such as direct instruction not the latest fashionable fads. Common sense reforms which the blob is now poised to smother.
Because education is devolved, we don’t need to guess how schools would do under Labour, we can look west to Wales. In December, the BBC reported the latest international school results: “Wales slumps to worst school test results” in the UK, and went on:
“Welsh scores were the lowest of all UK nations and the results gap has widened.”
This quote sums up the difference between Conservative-run England and Labour-run Wales:
Andreas Schleicher, who is in charge of Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) at the OECD said that the results gave policy makers in Wales:
"…food for thought about what to do differently. It’s not just that Wales is the lowest performing region in the UK but it’s also the one with the steepest decline."
He said England’s results had held up the best of all the UK nations.
“Wales ranks much lower,” he said. “Wales is more comparable to a country like Malta than top performing education systems.”
It would be a disaster to import Labour’s failed school experiments from Wales into London and the rest of England.
Meanwhile, London’s own local Labour disaster area, Mayor Khan, has just been elected to a third term and is gunning for even greater control of the city. Without the cash to buy him off, a Labour government would look to appease him with either control of rents or control of suburban railways – two power grabs he’s been pushing for over many years, rightly denied by the Conservatives.
Rent control is the classic socialist policy: it sounds good, because who wouldn’t want lower rent, but quickly turns sour. This time we can look north to Scotland where the SNP-Green government’s rent cap immediately tripped, fell, and slammed face-first in the law of unintended consequences. Zoopla have reported that rent inflation in Edinburgh and Glasgow was higher than in any other UK city, rising by 16 per cent and 14 per cent respectively between June 2022 and June 2023.
In the short term, rent controls have the surprising effect of making rents shoot up – by limiting their chance to increase rents, landlords will seek to raise them while they still can. This is what happened in Scotland.
To rent controllers, this looks like a loophole to slam shut. But that only locks in the second problem: the long term slide to Slum-ville. Artificially low rents mean no money for repairs and maintenance, so with each passing year dilapidation creeps in. By banning anything but the lowest price, rent controllers also ban anything but the lowest quality. This is not a vision of a thriving, successful London.
Scotland has quietly dropped its rent controls, but our Labour Mayor shows no signs of learning the lesson.
And finally, railways: Mayor Khan wants to expand his transport empire to the Home Counties. Under his rule, his priority for London transport has been a cut-price bargain basement service concealed by a smokescreen of populist press releases.
His so-called fares freezes only help tourists, visitors, and occasional travellers. And he helps himself, by appearing to support London commuters, but those commuters will have noticed no freeze to their fares. Yet even this limited freeze has a devastating impact on TfL finances – just this year’s so-called freeze has taken £123 million out of TfL’s investment fund, not just this year but for every future year. The cumulative impact of years of this populist policy is severe.
Londoners wondering why the Central Line or the Tram have become so unreliable or why TfL doesn’t invest more to upgrade the network and rolling stock should look to Labour’s populist so-called fares freeze. After years of investment and upgrades under both Mayor Livingstone and Mayor Johnson, I’m afraid Mayor Khan has been quietly liquidating their legacy. And of course, he blames the government for not giving him even more money.
Mayor Khan now wants to bring this chaotic mismanagement to London’s suburban commuter railways. In a move he calls Metroisation, he demands the government give him control of parts of the national rail network in the south east. Successive Conservative governments have seen through his ruse and stood firm, but would Labour?
On the ballot paper tomorrow is a chance to continue common sense education policies and a Conservative Government that mitigates the excesses of our Labour Mayor. Or we could wake up to a Labour government that reverses our progress in education and unleashes a wave of populist chaos on London’s rental market and its commuters. The stakes could not be higher.
Neil Garratt is the Leader of the Conservative Group on the London Assembly and the London Assembly member for Croydon and Sutton
First published in ConservativeHome, 4 July 2024.