Brixton House Theater is the perfect venue for conversations about a city on the path to recovery and regeneration. In early 2022, with the coronavirus pandemic still raging, a smart, purpose-built venue on Coldharbour Lane will become the new home of The Oval House, following decades of budding growth at its home next to the Surrey cricket ground. has provided opportunities for the talents of actors and writers. There, in the cafe on the ground floor, I met Rob Blackie, Liberal Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of London and London Assembly.
This is his home territory. The 50-year-old has lived in and around the area for more than 20 years and currently runs a business in neighboring Herne Hill, where he handles marketing and communications for a biotechnology company. Other recent efforts include the creation of the “Breaking Putin’s Censorship” campaign, which is dedicated to helping Russians find real news about the war in Ukraine.
his previous resume It is rich and diverse. He comes from a “family of Londoners” and has lived in London almost all his life. Although he was born in Wiltshire, he grew up in Pimlico from an early age. His first career was in foreign aid, and he worked as a civil servant for the Namibian government from 1996, just after Namibia secured independence. He specialized in environmental economics, which he describes as “a really strange and niche field at the time.”
Blackie’s efforts included developing the now widespread model in which elephant conservation and wildlife management is placed in the hands of rural communities. “It meant they were treated better and more resistant to poachers,” he says. “This was a huge conservation success story,” but it meant “we were almost killed by elephants many times.”
Surviving the ingratitude of great beasts was one of the many “interesting scrapes” he experienced as the new nation rose. He also worked on “supporting smallholder farmers who were losing land to governments” and developing climate change strategies, which he calls “the biggest thing in my career since then.” .
Although he had long been a Liberal Democrat, he was not politically active. Things changed after he returned to England, where he answered a job ad and “ended up working for Charles Kennedy.” Mr Blackie’s role with the then Liberal Democratic Party leader began in 1999 when he was an adviser on financial affairs, after which he became director of research. He helped write the party’s manifesto in his 2001 and his 2005 general elections.
Blackie says she learned during that time that it’s “much better to be bold and stand up for what you believe in than to be intimidated by people who might attack you.” He cites Kennedy’s opposition to the Iraq War as the clearest example, but also the Liberal Democratic Party’s challenge to the Labor government at the time.
“I think we forget that a lot of the arc of when Labor was in power was not similar to what a Keir Starmer government was ultimately likely to be,” he said. look back. Just because you’re surrounded by good people doesn’t mean things will magically change. ” He further added: “One of the things that I’m really worried about about the Labor Party right now is that they’re going to repeat that mistake of not understanding the extent of the crisis we’re in. That is, and the situation is much worse now than it was in the midst of them” – the 90s. ”
Blackie admits that being a Liberal Democrat means that he “has to fight for every advantage” he can get in what he does, at national and local levels alike. He details the success of grassroots efforts after Labor changed refugee laws. He said this had an immediate impact on Lambeth, with “an overnight impoverishment of a very specific group of refugees”.
The Refugee Council in this borough suddenly had people in need on their doorstep. “Local people organized to help them,” Blackie said, praising the efforts of the late Liberal Democrat MP Anthony Bottral.
In 2005, Blackie decided to try something new. Around that time there was a proposal by the NHS to set up a drug treatment center in a building on Brighton Terrace, near Brixton station. Mr Blackie welcomed the idea, especially as there was a strong local need for such a facility, but local Labor councilors said they opposed it.
“They succeeded in scaring people on the street that it was going to be a complete catastrophe,” he says. He and some of his friends put together a petition in support of the project, which attracted around 450 signatories. Blackie believes this helped create the pressure needed to get the project through the planning process.
That center still stands. Blackie’s interest in the potential of digital campaigns is equally long-standing.
After serving as an advisor to Whitehall’s communications director, he became managing director of Blue Rubicon, and in 2011, he founded Blue State, an American company famous for working on President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.・I was hired for the same position in Digital’s UK division. 2012 presidential election campaign. Blackie then moved to advertising giant Ogilvy. Throughout this period, climate change remained a central concern. It seems Ogilvy’s advice to UN climate change chief Christiana Figueres was not for nothing.
It’s a big job for a man who chose one of the small mainstream parties and stayed there. What drew him to the Liberal Democratic Party? “I think society’s problems come from concentration of power,” he says, adding that many on the left have legitimate concerns about this in the business world, forgetting that it also applies to government. He claimed that there was. Because humans are humans, we don’t want an all-powerful government, even with the right person in charge. They end up ruining things. We need checks and balances. ”
For Blackie, the UK’s most fundamental need is decentralization, and he believes this principle should be applied to London’s operations. In his view, this is especially true for police. “The biggest thing I will talk about in this campaign is going to be crime,” he said, adding that much of the responsibility for Metropolitan issues will lie with the 12 Basic Command Units (BCUs) that will replace the Metropolitan District from 2017 to 2019. It is said that this is due to the founding of the company. The former 32 borough-based organizational structure.
These mergers were prompted by the need to cut costs at the Met, which announced it would cut spending by around £100m a year. But Blackie believes the BCU creates an unwanted extra distance between police officers and the communities they serve. He also followed the current state of information technology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. About London He characterized it as “far behind normal practice in the private sector” and said it had particularly dire results in rape and sex crime investigations, according to the report.
Louise Casey’s damning report into Metropolitan Standards and the Home Office’s Operation Soteria have become a thorny seam for mining the category of crime that he describes as the main reason he is running for mayor. He cited understaffing, overwork, mistakes and delays, and the case has been going unchecked for four to five years, and the passage of time could make the victims less convincing as witnesses. . Lack of resources is part of the problem, but some of it can be fixed quickly and cheaply. He highlighted that the freezer where Casey kept forensic evidence had been broken and filled up, saying it was “absolutely shocking and will cost hundreds of pounds to repair”.
Another area he would like to see change is drug policy and investigations, particularly cannabis and, more recently, laughing gas. “The impact it has on the community is huge,” he says. As a result, distrust deepens, people are less willing to provide information to police, and police spend more time that could be spent doing other things. His views are echoed by Brian Paddick, a former Lambeth borough police chief, assistant metropolitan transport commissioner and two-time Liberal Democratic mayoral candidate.
On housing, Mr Blackie gives the impression of being much broadly pro-development, perhaps more than usual for the Lib Dems, whose activists often align themselves with local resistance groups. He praised the approach of Lib Dem-run Sutton City Council, before expressing support for the party’s long-standing national commitment to build 10 new garden cities, adding: “We have to call on the whole country to build more. “We must do so,” he said, adding that he supports the idea. City Hall itself becomes a housing provider.
On transport, his campaign highlighted the need for improved services in London’s suburbs and better and more efficient electric vehicle charging infrastructure, particularly for delivery drivers and others who spend long hours on the go. ing. He has criticized Sadiq Khan’s latest fare freeze, which is good but “counterproductive” in terms of relations with the central government, which he has long called for financial support. Ta. “My question to Mr. Khan is whether he intends to keep the freeze in place beyond the election year,” Blackie said.
Meanwhile, Mr Khan’s question for liberal-democratic Londoners is: “Will you lend me your vote on May 2nd?” The government’s immediate abolition of the top-up electoral system and imposition of first-past-the-post is clearly aimed at improving the chances of Conservative mayoral candidates, despite all the twists and turns about ‘strong government’. There is.
Mr Khan’s proposals have raised fears of a minority coup by Susan Hall, a far-right Brexiteer and Donald Trump fan who opposes the Conservative Party. Why haven’t the Liberal Democrats responded to the Labor mayor’s call? Mr Blackie’s answer is simple: “There’s zero chance the Conservatives will win.”
To put it harshly, if that were the case, Blackie’s own chances would be even smaller. The latest poll showed Mr Blackie receiving 10% of the vote, compared to 23 votes for Mr Hall and 50 votes for Mr Khan. The prize he could win, of course, is a seat in the House of Representatives. The Liberal Democrats currently hold two of the 25 seats, both secured through proportional representation voting across London. This time, the resignation of the experienced Caroline Pidgeon leaves Blackie in second place in the party, behind Pidgeon’s colleague Hina Bokhari.
He doesn’t want life experience. Another feature of his biography, dating back to 2003 when he was living in Vauxhall, is that he was attacked and hit on the head by a group of children. “I used to do a lot of kickboxing back then, so I was used to getting hit,” he says. “So maybe I was a little too relaxed about it.” Twelve years passed before the fracture in his neck was discovered. “My head was basically floating,” he said. She underwent surgery in 2018 and “now has a titanium neck.”
Blackie has vowed to run a bold campaign. It will be interesting to see if he stands out in what already looks like a one-horse race to some.
Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and you’ll get more bang for your buck. Click here for details. Thread: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: on london and dave hill. Photo from Rob Blackie’s campaign site.