Will Londoners fall for Sadiq Khan’s election bribes?

Taxpayers are being treated to a clutch of pre-election bribes from a politician who only a few months ago was claiming there was a lack of money for anything. That will almost certainly be true of Jeremy Hunt’s budget on 6 March, but it is already true of Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoralty budget for 2024/25.

Khan was in no doubt who was to blame last December when he announced that the Mayor’s precept on council tax bills in London would rise by 8.6 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. The government, he claimed, was starving London of money. It was ‘due to the continued lack of national investment in London’. As a result, he had ‘no viable alternative’ to jacking up council tax.

But it is funny how Khan can find money when he really needs it, such as when there is an mayoral election coming up. Suddenly there is money to provide free meals for all 270,000 state primary school children in London – a perk which has been extended for another year at a cost of £130 million. 

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Free school meals have been a potent political issue since footballer Marcus Rashford’s intervention during covid, but this is not money that will be handed to the poor. Children from low income households already qualify for free school meals, and so much of the benefit from the mayor’s largesse will be going to the middle classes. 

Khan’s generosity with taxpayers’ cash doesn’t stop there. There is also £123 million available to freeze Underground fares for the next year. And Khan stuffed London Underground workers mouths with gold in order to avert a strike at the beginning of last month. Another £50 million has also been found down the back of the City Hall sofa for the Ulez (Ultra Low Emission Zone) scrappage scheme; an extra £76 million has reportedly been found for the Metropolitan Police; and £3 million provided for extra toilets on the Underground. Khan has even been talking about rolling out a free, open-access Wi-Fi network across London. That plan is unlikely to see the light of day, but Khan has already put aside £20,000 to ‘improve internet connectivity for visitors and Londoners’.

If ever there was a case of a politician blatantly bribing the people with their own money it is Khan. He has jacked up council tax, using government tight-fistedness as an excuse, and then used the cash in an attempt to curry favour with voters. The government forces taxes on you, in other words, but I hand out the goodies.

Will he get away with it? Khan is no doubt calculating that Londoners won’t notice too much the sharp rise in the Mayor’s precept on council tax bills. The thing about council tax is that the bills don’t go out in the Mayor’s name – rather they are levied directly by London’s boroughs. It is the borough’s precept which forms the bulk of bills, with the Mayor’s demands forming a smaller contribution on top. You have to read the small print of a council tax demand to see that the mayoral element has risen by twice the rate of inflation.

But people are not stupid. By election day, voters will surely be aware of what has gone on. Khan has tried to buy their votes with a large pre-election bribe which has come out of their own pockets.