Rachel Blake and Labour colleagues and supporters this week, including Ellie Reeves MP and the city council leader Adam Hug
“TACKLING dirty money” has been made a central plank of Labour’s general election campaign in central London.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak has sent candidates scrambling into action after announcing a snap election for July 4.
Rachel Blake is looking to win the Cities of London and Westminster for Labour for the first time in the constituency’s history.
After a rally alongside Ellie Reeves MP in Pimlico on Wednesday, she said: “Dirty money harms communities and our economy, eroding trust and confidence in our systems and leaving homes and high streets empty or just fronts for money-laundering. Labour’s plans will clamp down on dirty money.”
Labour is also hoping to win the new Bayswater and Kensington, where former North Kensington MP Emma Dent Coad is standing as an independent against Labour’s Joe Powell.
Mr Powell also said on Wednesday: “Tackling dirty money and corruption in the UK will make Kensington and Bayswater a better place to live.
“That’s why I launched the Kensington Against Dirty Money campaign.”
This follows a focus on foreign investors in Russia and Azerbaijan holding assets and running businesses in areas like Kensington, Mayfair and Belgravia.
The “Two Cities”seat has been held by the Tories since it was created in 1950.
Conservative candidate Tim Barnes, who was selected in April, said that the shock announcement had led him to axe a short break away to a log-cabin in Cornwall with the “young lady in my life”.
He said: “Inflation is coming down and getting close to historic levels we have been targeting.
The Tories’ Tim Barnes [www.twocitiesconservatives.org.uk]
“Rishi is a man in charge of his own destiny… The sun is shining, there is optimism about.”
He said he felt sorry for Ms Blake who would have a heavy schedule of council meetings in Tower Hamlets that “are going to go out of the window”, and added: “Covid was on the scale of a major war.
“It left us with a huge amount of debt. It left us with cures and vaccines, furlough.
“But we haven’t ended up with a 1920s-style Great Depression. We are knocking on doors and people are saying they are still Conservatives. We saw a drop in Tory vote five years ago. We are not sure it’s fallen any further and – in terms of my prospects – the core vote in London is holding up.”
Asked whether he agreed with Mr Sunak that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer did not have a coherent plan for power, he drew an analogy with a film from the early 1990s rushed out ahead of a coming blockbuster.
He said: “I remember Robin Hood Prince of Thieves was going to come out and then there was that terrible other Robin Hood film that everyone went ‘god that’s awful’.
“It had Uma Thurman, but it was really terrible.
“You can’t say we are going to have a go at acting out someone else’s script, with less conviction, with a replacement cast who don’t believe in it in the first place.
“That’s what Labour is doing. When Star Wars first came out, everyone rushed out sci-fi films on the back of that. I’d rather be Star Wars than Battlestar Galactica.”
