The enormous campaigns of Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Conservative Party candidate Shaun Bailey are, according to polling, odds on to emerge victorious at next years mayoral election. However, it is not uncommon for the race to see outsider candidate throw their bid in to highlight core issues.
Rapper Drillminister has relaunched his London mayoral campaign this week, including pledged to address issues such as housing, law enforcement, and plans to cancel the “racist and ineffective” stop and search policy.
In a statement on Friday, the musician, who also goes by the name of Yung Drilly, reignited his 2021 bid to become mayor of the UK capital, which he describes as “one of the most unequal and corrupt cities in the world”.
Drillminister took aim at the nations leading politicians, citing the flouting of coronavirus restrictions by “architect of Brexit and puppet master Dominic Cummings”, the refusal to “feed the poorest children in society while discussing pay rises for themselves”.
He said his “grassroots” campaign would come “from the bottom up” and be based on interactions with “those who experience the worst” of the city’s current economic situation.
In condemnation of the Conservative government and the “Blairite” Labour opposition in Westminster, he described the existing political binary as being subject to the interested of private interests rather than the public, indicated by the coronavirus crisis.
Yung Drilly outlined his major policy platform, namely: Housing and London’s policing regime.
He proposed following the Finnish model for housing provisions, citing psychologist Professor Sam Tsemberis, who created a program called Housing First, which includes “housing the people most in need first without condition and then supporting them with mental health, addiction, medical care, income, and education”.
Based on a meeting with former UN Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Leilani Farha, Drillminister promised to make London an “inhospitable environment” for private shell companies based in tax havens to buy up housing in the city in order provide accommodation as a human right instead of a commodity.
The artist then promised to tackle the “root cause” of violent crime and described the city’s stop and search policy as “government harassment” that “robs you of your basic human rights”.
The announcement follows the release of the music video for Drillmaster’s song #BORISISAPUSSIO, which shows a mock-up blond-haired decapitated head – seemingly a model of Boris Johnson.
Anticipating accusations of promoting violence, the rapper responded by accusing the UK government of “corporate manslaughter” that takes place around the world every single day.
New Inroads in the London Political Arena?
The issues he addresses are certainly supported by the numbers. Net income inequality in the UK capital has steadily risen over the last 20 years, seeing London’s Gini coefficient – a global measurement of wealth polarity- reach 0.43
Economic life has long fed into rising discontent in the city, with rising homelessness and house prices being a major contributor.
A study by the non-profit organisation Transparency International in 2015, using Land Registry and Metropolitan Police data, discovered that £122bn of property in England and Wales is held on offshore tax-havens.
The official data shows that over 40,000 London properties are owned by foreign companies, with nearly 90% being assimilated in tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, where divulging ownership information is not a requirement.
Drillminister’s mayoral bid is, at this time, comparatively small to the established campaigns of Mayor Sadiq Khan or Conservative challenger Shaun Bailey.
However, the artist has in the past made reference to the 2016 campaign of US President Donald Trump, who was also written-off as a joke candidate.
In a recent video, Drillminister issued a direct response to the United States presidential election, where he criticised both Democratic contender Joe Biden and incumbent President Trump for being beholden to corporate interests and an “imperialist” system.
The artist accused established political interests of sidelining progressive left-wing figures such as former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Democratic primary challenger Bernie Sanders. The artist’s signals of support for the socialist firebrands on both sides of the Atlantic indicates that his political campaign could become a new addition to the global populist left.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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