Okay, I’m going to be painfully honest and admit I have a very slim chance of becoming Mayor of London after the ballots are counted on 2 May. I’m being asked why I’m standing a lot at the moment, and the truth is it’s not because I think I’m actually going to be Mayor.
But, I do believe in giving voters a full choice of candidates in every election, and I know that many voters will want to send a strong message about wanting more progress on green and social justice issues, and that’s what a Green first vote is all about. Then, as I have blogged before, I am recommending people cast their final round votes for Ken Livingstone to save London from the horror of becoming Boris Johnson’s playpen for the next four years.
This is what I’m calling their ‘insurance’ vote, and I also have an insurance policy of my own in this election. I am fourth on our London Assembly londonwide list, and so I do have a realistic chance of becoming an Assembly Member after election day.
Provided we run a decent campaign (which of course I’m largely responsible for making sure of, working in the high-profile mayoral candidate role), I think we should be able to win the confidence of the same proportion of London voters as in the last council elections in 2006. This was 13.5%, and would just about be enough to put me in via the fiendishly complicated D’Hondt counting system used to assign the list seats.
The only problem – and it’s not a small one – is the pitifully tiny amount of attention actually given to the Assembly elections by the ‘Boris and Ken show’ obsessed press. Hardly anyone is aware we have a progressive, almost-fair, PR-based system for the Assembly election, or that they can vote for who they like and be sure their vote will count towards winning AMs for their chosen party. Hopefully this will improve though, as the campaign goes on, and of course I’m doing my little bit by posting this here.
It’s a double shame for us in the Greens that the Assembly is so invisible in this election, because our current two AMs, Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, have made far and away the best job of being on the Assembly over the past four years. I have honestly never known two more hardworking, morally upright and astute politicians.
Unlike the part-timers from the other parties, they have worked tirelessly to make London better; and not just on green issues either. Some people are aware that Livingstone’s increased investment in cycling and home energy-efficiency is down to their casting vote over his budget each year. But how many know that they were also responsible for the creation of the Living Wage Unit, which calculates what a Londoner really needs to earn to pay for the basic essentials and enables campaigners such as London Citizens to go out and shame big employers like Citigroup into paying their cleaners decently?
The scale of their achievements came home to me the other day, when I was putting together this webpage, listing what they have got done. Yes, as they (probably) say, ‘you can take the woman out of the web manager job, but you can’t completely take the web manager out of the woman’, so fiddling with the London Green Party website is still my spare time hobby. The amount of material was so large I ended up putting it over four pages in the end, and it still needed a list of id-tagged contents at the top of each page.
So, while a Tory monopoly will still leave us with lots to do, my two hopes for this election are that, first, we retain a Mayor over which the Greens have an influence and, second, that I can be working alongside them in City Hall making it all happen.
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