Why I’m standing for London Assembly
I am standing to be a Labour London Assembly member on Thursday 6 May.
Transforming London will require the courage and vision of ordinary Londoners who often know what their communities need. We need politicians who recognise this wisdom and are willing to go beyond consultation and instead towards meaningful participatory politics.
Now more than ever, we need our Labour values of solidarity and equality in the fight for justice. London needs the voice of a young Londoner like me who’ll fight for more. Every day it becomes clearer to me that the people most in need of political change have been shut out of decision-making. If successfully elected onto the London Assembly it will be my priority to work with disabled people, LGBTQI+ communities, women and BAME folk who have had to fight for a seat at the table. I’ll make it my mission to take our movement into City Hall from climate strikers to trade unionists, it’s time these voices set the political agenda.
What I’ll fight for
A Green New Deal
As we recover from this pandemic, we can use a Green New Deal for London to create a radical plan that promotes climate, health and economic equity.
Let’s begin by ensuring our workers and marginalised communities are central to defining this transition so it can be truly just.
Our Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has laid out his commitment for a London Green New Deal with an aspiration to make London zero-carbon by 2030. This is a fantastic commitment, and how we meet this target is equally crucial as the target itself.
We must continue asking Londoners what they need, and collaboratively build on London’s Green New Deal so it can become the blueprint for London’s transformation with social justice at its heart. Some of this collaborative visioning work is already being undertaken by activists in London’s climate movement, this report offers some insight to it.
Housing Justice
We need genuinely affordable homes and the rapid construction of social housing, with a focus on accessible and spacious homes, with steps to prevent working class people having to live along our most polluted roads.
The housing crisis in this country is at breaking point. Campaigns like abolishing section 21 (that enables no fault evictions) have been won because campaigners and politicians have stood shoulder to shoulder against the government. We must achieve the same for rent controls.
We need to upgrade all our fuel poor homes if we are serious about ending fuel poverty by 2030. And we should ensure lettings agents are meeting the legal minimum energy efficiency, and increase standards.
Community Land Trusts show us the strength of community-led housing and the power of enabling communities to co-design their neighbourhoods. Combining this with community owned renewable energy generation schemes could take London’s green transformation one step further.
Jobs for Londoners
Young Londoners have an increasingly tough time in our city. The gig economy has turned the clock back on our hard won rights in the workplace and hit young people the most.
We need a fair deal for workers and London should be leading this fight. This should start with ensuring all workers have ‘worker status’.
Trade unions have spent decades fighting for dignified working conditions like structured hours, minimum wage, sick pay and annual leave - removing worker status for gig economy workers undermines the basic workplace protections we should all have.
We need a London living wage for all our workers so that all Londoners can go beyond surviving, to thrive.
