By Selina Seesunkur
Whilst Sadiq Khan won a second term as Mayor, it was not an easy fight. In the first round, no one candidate secured 50 per cent of the vote at first preference. Very few imagined that Shaun Bailey AM would do as well as he did, but Shaun ran a clean fight based on his own personal experience of growing up in hardship in London, enabling him to increase the Conservative vote share by 1.5%. This meant the Conservatives were able to obtain an extra seat on the Assembly.
Pollsters predicted Khan would win more than half of the first-round votes, but he failed to reach his record-setting vote total of 2016, winning with a 228,000-vote majority. Voter turnout was 42%, a drop of 4% from 2016. Despite having a vey high number of candidates it certainly was a two-horse race with Sadiq Khan obtaining 1,013,721 of the first preference votes and Shaun Bailey 893,051. But the gap widened when the count went to the second preference votes, with Shaun Bailey achieving 26,3812 and Sadiq Khan 40,0478. Labour now holds 11 seats, whilst the Conservatives hold 9, Green Party 3 and Liberal Democrats 2. A record number of ballot papers were rejected as the new style pro-forma caused much confusion with voters, resulting in 114,201 rejected. Could this have made all the difference?
In his speech Shaun said he had been written off “by pollsters, by journalists, by fellow politicians. But it’s no surprise to me that Londoners didn’t write me off.” Shaun promised to tackle crime by recruiting 8000 more police officers, he said he would reverse the ULEZ, and would deliver 100,000 shared ownership homes that would be sold at £100,000 each, whilst Khan has a track record of failing to deliver on crime, housing and the environment.
