Zac Goldsmith mayoral pitch takes shape with help from influential friends
|
Version 0 of 2. Did he, perchance, know what was coming? On Monday, two days before chancellor George Osborne produced his spending review, Conservative mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith wrote prominently in the London Evening Standard of discussions he’d been having with senior police officers, Boris Johnson, home secretary Theresa May and the chancellor himself about the need to protect that amorphous law and order construct “the front line”. Transport and housing, he rightly pointed out, are vital issues for Londoners too. Moreover, they are linked. “One unlocks the other,” he correctly wrote. “Crossrail 2 alone could facilitate 200,000 new homes by better connecting outer and inner London.” That is why, he concluded, “it is essential that TfL’s investment programmes are not curtailed.” Goldsmith pointed out, not for the first time, that Transport for London (TfL) and other public bodies own large quantities of brownfield land on which new homes should be built and he re-stated his now-familiar ambition to “regenerate” borough-owned housing estates built in the post-war decades. More money should be spent on this, he declared. You will never believe what happened on Wednesday. Not only did Osborne announce there would be no cuts to the police budget after all, he also increased TfL’s investment funding from a previously-announced £10bn to £11bn until 2019/20 and pledged to “regenerate more run-down estates.” He also said that some of money raised from a new, 3% higher stamp duty rate to be levied from next April on purchasers of buy-to-let properties and second homes will be invested in “local communities in London” and elsewhere “which are being priced out of home ownership”. And he revealed an enhanced government scheme with the same goal in mind: “London help to buy” will enable people who can raise a deposit of 5% of the price of a newly-built home to get an interest-free loan worth “up to 40%” of its value. “My honourable friend the member for Richmond Park has been campaigning on affordable home ownership in London,” Osborne said. “Today, we back him all the way.” Yes! He was backing Zac! Within hours, Goldsmith was hailing the splendid deal that he and fellow London Tories had hammered out with the chancellor, fulfilling the very hopes he had expressed in his Standard article. You’ve got to hand it to Goldsmith. He is preposterously privileged but not too posh to push his shoulder against an open door - there is, of course, no way Osborne wasn’t going to deliver what he had asked for in the Tory-friendly London newspaper. But you’ve got to acknowledge, too, that the headline point Goldsmith made in his Standard piece is true: “To deliver for London, its mayor must work with the government.” It is a truth upon which much of his mayoral campaign platform looks set to be built. As Goldsmith underlined, the capital’s mayors depend heavily on cash from central government to get things done: only 7% of the taxes raised in the city are retained by its own layers of government, whose representatives must lobby, much like ministers, over the size of the portion of what it exports it gets back. His foreground case is that he has the independent spirit and negotiating will to extract what London needs. The supplementary message is that he, a Conservative, is more likely to get it from a Conservative government scheduled to be in power throughout the next mayoral term than a Labour mayor in the form of Sadiq Khan. It is a case that Khan will need to counter. Osborne has helped Goldsmith to make doing so a bigger challenge. Khan has dubbed the mayoral contest a “referendum” on Tory housing policy. If so, Goldsmith will hope that Osborne has just bought him a bunch of votes from the “priced out”. Critics say that the chancellor’s measures changes are of completely the wrong sort and, in any case, don’t add up to much. But the higher the prices of houses in the capital rise, the greater the longing to own one becomes: scores of would-be buyers are still crowding in to dowdy terraces in Plaistow. Goldsmith can now proclaim that he’s talked Osborne into improving their chances of scrambling on to first rung of “the ladder.” He also told his Standard readers that he is “working to secure” a guarantee from the government that “at least two low-cost homes” are built in London for every council house sold to pay for the extended right-to-buy provisions of the Housing [and Planning] Bill. That endeavour too is likely to bear fruit, which Goldsmith hopes will be saleable. Khan may need to persuade voters that it’s rot. The Tory candidate will also claim credit for the Met’s budget not being cut even if, post-Paris, it would have been reprieved anyway. As for transport funding, while Osborne has handed out more than expected to TfL for now, which should take of big investment programmes like the Tube upgrades, Crossrail and so on, he has also set about taking away its operational subsidy earlier than previously advertised. Grants for the day-to-day running of services will be phased out by 2018, two years earlier than TfL had anticipated. That means more upward pressure sooner on public transport fares, which Khan has promised to freeze for a full, four-year mayoral term. Get ready for a Goldsmith assault on that pledge’s credibility. Khan, with characteristic energy, has spent the weeks since becoming Labour candidate cannily building his defences against obvious lines of attack and getting himself known. Goldsmith, by contrast, has seemed fairly quiet. But now his campaign pitch is taking shape - with the help of some influential friends. |