Soon after graduating, I became one of the founding members of the Wolmar for London campaign, a grassroots movement of volunteers supporting Christian Wolmar’s bid to become Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London. The campaign team consisted of 20 volunteers, from political advisers and ex-police officers to health specialists and environmental campaigners, all driven by the prospect of changing the direction the city was headed under the mayoralty of Boris Johnson.
We worked tirelessly for two-and-a-half years to generate new and radical policies around transport, housing, policing and public health, as well as hosting events to crowdsource new policy ideas. Dave Hill, the Guardian political correspondent, described us as, “the most extensive grassroots political campaign the capital has seen in recent times”, and many of our policies went on to influence Sadiq Khan’s mayoral pledges, including his Homes for Londoners scheme and the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street.
