London 'ignored for too long' claims Luke Taylor MP

So why is it that when his supporters try to paint London as a fortress of middle-class wealth, (maybe not with streets paved with gold, but definitely silver or bronze) he himself doesn’t raise his voice to correct them?

London has been talked about in recent weeks as though there are no deprived neighbourhoods or left-behind communities. It's been portrayed as a city where the status quo has lined the pockets of every one of us - rather than the complicated patchwork of towns and boroughs that it really is, where inequality between (and even within) postcodes is glaring.

To state the obvious - most Londoners do not live or work in the narrow tourist-guide map that spans from Holland Park to Canary Wharf, or from Regents Park to Battersea Power Station. Our city is not really a city but a region of regions - if Sutton and Croydon alone were not London Boroughs but a combined town, they would form the fourth biggest council area by population in England.

Perhaps Burnham doesn’t want to acknowledge this because if he did, he’d have to recognise his own party’s failure to fix inequality in London.

In a valley of failure stretching from Croydon to Enfield, Labour Councils and Mayors have failed to build the affordable housing we need. London’s average private rent is now £2,273 a month. An average one-bedroom home in the capital costs almost 50% more to rent than elsewhere in England. Homes cost more than ten times average annual earnings; the worst affordability ratio of any English region - and a major contributing factor to the shameful truth that one in three children in this city grow up in poverty. One in three.

Our Mayor has failed spectacularly to get his party in Government to fund the projects London needs as he promised he would when he was elected for the third time in 2024. Hammersmith Bridge is still closed, seven years later. Crossrail 2’s blueprint is collecting dust on the shelf. The extension of the Tram to Sutton remains a distant dream and the Croydon Rail Bottleneck still snares up our trains.

And Councils have been robbed of funding and their seat at the table. It took a special type of hypocrisy for Steve Reed MP to write on the day Burnham took office that “you can't make funding fairer for the rest of England by making it unfair on Londoners”, when that was precisely what he had done with his unfair Funding Formula that left many London Councils worse off. And it will sting for so many Council leaders to hear of devolution to the regions while London Boroughs still have no say over what Mayor Khan does, despite being accountable for most of the day-to-day services that people rely on.

So if Andy Burnham’s followers really do believe Londoners have benefited unanimously from the last forty years of policymaking, and don't need new powers, new funding and a new effort on tackling inequality - they have fundamentally misunderstood our city - and they should expect those of us who are proud Londoners to remind them of that when Parliament returns in September.