Sadiq Khan, the Labor mayor of London since 2016, has been re-elected to the government of the British capital. As far as it is concerned, his victory gives Labor one of the few moments of elation in the vote for municipal and regional, which took place on Thursday: the so-called ‘Super Thursday’ has in fact consolidated the advance of the conservatives in England and the nationalists in Scotland.
Khan – who beat the Tory challenger, Shaun Bailey – did not obtain an absolute majority in the first count of votes, where only the candidates chosen as the first option are counted, and had to wait for the votes that had designated him as second to be counted option: he obtained 55.2% of the votes in the second count (in the first, in which there were all candidates, he had 39.8% against 35.1% for Bailey, a much smaller gap than expected by surveys). “I will do everything possible to get our city back on its feet. A better future is possible and we will make it happen together,” he promised in his first reaction on Twitter.
When he then appeared in public he promised a “national reconciliation“:” the scars of Brexit remain, a hard cultural war that separates us more and more “. “We must use this moment of national recovery to heal those divisions,” he stressed, noting that the coronavirus does not care if someone was for or against the European Union.
A convinced Europhile, a fierce opponent of Brexit and of its main champion, Prime Minister Tory Boris Johnson, who preceded him as Mayor of London, Khan is committed “build ponti “, even between the London City Council and the central government, with which he clashed several times in the last legislature. Muslim and of Pakistani origin, Khan will have a shorter term than the previous one since the elections had been postponed.
That of a new referendum for Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom it is a question of “when” not “if”. This is what the Scottish premier said, Nicola Sturgeon, in his telephone conversation today with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a spokesman said. Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party won a landslide election victory over the renewal of the Scottish Parliament.
The SNP did not reach there for a seat absolute majority but it can count on the support of the Greens, also in favor of independence, who have won eight benches in Holyrood. “The premier made it clear that in the immediate future she intends to focus on leading the country through Covid and towards recovery and that the new Scottish government will work with the UK as much as possible on this front,” said the spokesman, according to which the two leaders “agreed on the importance of the two governments collaborating constructively for the success of COP26, both in organization and in results”.
“The prime minister also reiterated his intention to ensure that the Scottish people can choose his future when the crisis is over and made it clear that the issue of the referendum is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’ “, concluded Sturgeon’s spokesman.