Diane Abbott: defending Hackney North with half an eye on City Hall

Thanks to the outstanding Hackney Citizen newspaper, hustings were held at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre on Sunday, one for each of Hackney borough’s two parliamentary seats. Labour will win both comfortably, which may suggest that the hustings were a waste of time. They were not. If anything, the difficulty of the other parties’ tasks made it all the more important that their arguments were heard. That’s democracy, a precious thing. What’s more, showing up meant I saw the national leader of the Animal Welfare Party do her stuff. Beat that.

I was, though, mostly there to hear what Diane Abbott had to say. She’s been the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987 (and has therefore represented me in the House of Commons since I moved from Homerton, which lies in Hackney’s other parliamentary seat, to Clapton in 1992). She might not be doing that job for too much longer, though. Abbott would like to become London’s next mayor and has said that after the general election she will formally enter the contest to be selected as Labour’s candidate to fight for City Hall in 2016. That selection contest will begin in short order after the big national vote on May 7.

As Abbott herself quipped at its end, she didn’t talk much about the mayoralty during the Arcola debate. She did, though, commit to values and policies that signaled the type of mayor she’d aim to be. In her opening comments she praised past Labour governments for a “stellar record of investing in Hackney”, citing transformations in public transport and schools. But she underlined that she’s been ready to criticize her party’s leaders too, notably on Iraq (she voted against the war), the renewal of Trident, tuition fees and more recently its “push to the right” on immigration. If re-elected in Hackney, she said, she’d be “a strong, genuinely independent voice” - a characteristic widely considered a strength in London mayors.

Abbott is a stalwart of the parliamentary Labour left, a member of its Socialist Campaign group who some predict will be well-supported in her mayoral ambitions among London’s party activists, where what is sometimes termed the “Ken left” – admirers of former mayor Ken Livingstone – is strong. This hasn’t conflicted very much with backing Ed Miliband during the election campaign, notwithstanding his sacking her as shadow public minister back in 2013. Abbott’s been out on the party’s pink bus drumming up support from women, down to Thanet South to help tackle Nigel Farage, given a plug to #milifandom and tweeted-up Labour’s assault on the tough target marginal of Battersea. At the same time she’s called Labour’s contentious immigration mug “shameful” and welcomed Miliband’s announcements on stamp duty and regulating private rents with the caveat “more work is needed in London”.

At the hustings she named her party’s policies on non-dom tax privileges and the mansion tax as strong measures to help reduce inequality. She’s previously expressed concerns about the latter, describing it last June in Progress magazine as “in effect, a tax on London” and getting into a public spat over the matter with Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy as recently as January. However, her call for the measure to be implemented fairly, meaning not hurting the so-called “asset-rich, income poor”, has been followed by refinements by Ed Balls. Abbott assured me after the hustings that while she felt the policy presents “some challenges” she supports it in principle.

During the debate itself Abbott backed the idea of London having its own legal minimum wage to reflect the capital’s high cost of living and said that the Greater London Authority, which the London mayor heads, should not enter into contracts with companies that didn’t pay the voluntary London Living Wage. Some of Hackney’s most successful secondary schools are its academies, which are outside local authorities’ direct control. Abbott, though, would prefer councils to be in charge of all schools, believing this would make it easier to plan for the extra places required.

She’d like property developers to make larger contributions to meeting that need, echoing a widespread feeling in her party in London that such companies should make larger community contributions in general, including affordable homes, as part of being granted planning permission. Abbott also wants an end to the “off plan” buying of property – often only potential property at that stage - by overseas investors on the grounds that it drives up house prices. London’s mayors can exercise considerable powers over borough-level planning decisions, especially in relation to housing. How these, or the threat of them, are used can have significant effects on what it and isn’t built across the city.

Throughout Abbott exuded the modest authority of a politician nowadays sometimes called a veteran who knows she’s going to win her seat. Becoming Labour’s mayoral candidate will be harder. Tessa Jowell and Sadiq Khan are widely thought to be the front runners and David Lammy and Christian Wolmar are still fighting hard.

Abbott has previously said that, as mayor, she would want a four-year freeze on public transport fares. She would also speak up for the benefits of immigration, seek greater scope for boroughs to borrow to build council homes, campaign against zero hours contracts and agency work, and speak up for trade union rights and freedoms. In a speech at the London School of Economics she gave in November, she promised “an assault on health inequality”. It’s the sort of platform you’d expect from Abbott, though important planks of it are shared with other mayoral hopefuls. It will be interesting to see how each seeks to mark out distinctive turf once the selection race is formally underway.

Meanwhile, there’s the backyard to take care of. At the Arcola, there was a gentler tone than might have been expected. The candidates from parties of the right adjusted as best they could to the political climate of this part of town, where there is a much poverty, huge ethnic diversity and an ever-growing liberal middle class which, as Abbott has remarked, sometimes seems to include the entire Guardian newsroom.

It’s full house country for London Labour, although the Conservatives’ Amy Gray, who’s taught English in one of Hackney’s secondary schools, acquitted herself well, jokingly upbraiding people who over-use carbon-emitting tumble dryers and placing the gigantic boringness of dopeheads at the top of her list of reasons why illegal drug use should not be decriminalized – as a legalizer, this is, in my view, by far the strongest argument for prohibition. Ukip’s Keith Fraser expressed his convictions in tones of mild apology, giving an underlying impression of nervy gratitude for being allowed into my pinko borough at all. That may have been wise.

The territory is more fertile for other challengers. The Liberal Democrats’ candidate is Simon de Deney, an actor and writer who’s done voluntary work with young gang members. He had the best diction and also the best shirt. His party finished second in 2010 and will be relieved to do so again this time. The Green Party’s articulate Heather Finlay will hope to gain from the general fall in Lib Dem popularity and from what seems to be an energetic local campaign (the Greens have put more literature through my letterbox than anyone else). They did well in 2005, but finished fourth last time, a full 10% of the vote share behind the Tories.

Completing the line up were Jonathan Silberman of the Communist League and, as billed above, Vanessa Hudson of the Animal Welfare Party, filling in for the constituency’s candidate Jon Homan who couldn’t make it. Silberman, unostentatiously dapper in a brown suit and matching tie, offered the type of vintage, over-arching, Marxist analysis of everyone and everything rarely heard in public meetings these days. We need workers united in militant trade unions to overthrow the propertied class, he explained. Anything else would be a waste of time: “Our only stake is in the struggle against our class enemies.”

Hudson’s party’s vision is intriguing - rather like that of the Greens in its environmentalism, yet proceeding from the premise that the Good Society will be built by shifting food production towards plant-based agriculture and fighting the scourge of speciesism. This may seem a marginal if not unnerving philosophy, but it’s one that’s secured electoral footholds in the Netherlands and had I been debating Hudson at the hustings over, say, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which came up in questions from the audience, she’d have kicked my backside halfway to Bexley. People have fought and died for freedom and democracy. As I headed for the bus stop, I gave thanks.