The London election

Down my way, things are looking good for Labour on 1 May.

The campaign being run by the London Labour Party is stretching us to the limit of our organisational capacity, but that's a good thing - the political equivalent of chucking the kitchen sink at it is now going on.

At the very start of the campaign I encountered a bit of Evening Standard-generated anti-Ken feeling amongst middle class voters, but now people seemed to have woken up to the threat from Mr Johnson and recent canvassing sessions I've led in different bits of Hackney North & Stoke Newington have shown uniformly strong support on both estates and owner-occupied streets. It seems to be easy to get people to put posters up and this is the first election I've ever been in when a voter was so pleased to see the Labour Party come round that they hugged me.

The Tories certainly aren't being slouches - they had a team of a dozen people out in De Beauvoir this weekend, a ward they used to hold in the '90s.

The Lib Dems don't seem to have ventured beyond the ward where their agent lives, and Green activity seems a lot less than in municipal elections (though I think their councillor said something about getting leaflets delivered commercially). Left List (i.e. SWP) are leafleting heavily, and the other bit of Respect, in the person of George Galloway, interrupted my trip to the fishmongers in Stoke Newington High Street by driving past up the A10 shouting in an open top bus in the rain.

However, Hackney isn't Bexley or Bromley or Havering, and I'm conscious that big decisions that could make life a bit more difficult for residents here in the inner city are just as influenced by voters out there in suburbia.

What are other people finding on the doorstep in other parts of London?