Giving the vote to teenagers may be getting the headlines, but Labour are also planning to rig London’s mayoral elections by restoring supplementary voting. It’s a plan based on dangerous assumptions, warms James Ford

Labour is clearly panicking. There is a very real fear that, come 2028, the combination of a deeply unpopular Labour government in Whitehall and a long-serving Mayor drowning in missed housing targets and rising crime will not be a vote winner. Even the possibility of a new Labour candidate for Mayor may not be enough to keep City Hall in Labour’s clutches.

When it comes to shameless election-rigging, the announcement that 16- and 17-year-olds will get the vote by the time of the next election may have attracted all the headlines, but it was not the only devious stratagem that Labour have revealed recently to cling on to power. Hidden in the depths of the English Devolution Bill is a clause to restore supplementary voting in mayoral elections in England, including those in London. (The 2022 Elections Act had, briefly, made all mayoral elections first past the post).

The electoral calculus by Labour is obvious: these voting........

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