Boris and Starmer make case for votes in capital’s key battleground

BORIS JOHNSON and Sir Keir Starmer went head-to-head today in an eleventh-hour appeal to Londoners to vote for their party in the town hall elections tomorrow.

- Nicholas Cecil

The Prime Minister and Labour leader laid out their election platforms for what could be closely fought contests in many wards in the capital, which is a key battleground.

Mr Johnson sought to put the focus firmly on council tax and town hall services. Writing in the Standard, he said: “While other parties will try to make these elections about other issues, what you as Evening Standard readers will be voting on tomorrow is councillors and councils who decide on important issues in our everyday lives, like how often our bins are collected, how much of our rubbish is recycled, how often our streets are cleaned and how much we pay in council tax.

“And when you look at the record of Conservative councils in London compared to Labour and the Lib Dems, the difference could not be starker.”

However, Sir Keir tore into Mr Johnson’s administration as the “most anti-London Government in living memory, excluding it from funding and talking London down”.

He said: “Over the last decade the Tories have slashed funds for local government but the biggest cuts in the whole country are being forced on London. Londoners are facing a triple whammy of energy price hikes, tax increases, and rising inflation amid a cost of living crisis. The Tories are forcing hard-working Londoners to pay for the cost of their failure when one-third of London households are already struggling to pay their bills.”