As economic storm clouds gather in the London sky, down below the political
contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson for the city’s mayoralty
is turning equally nasty. This is excellent news. Democracy and decorum
never mix. A grudge match between the cheeky chappie and the Tory card is
guaranteed to project London politics onto the national stage. And there is
still three months to go.
Livingstone has been in office for two terms and is falling foul of the
corruption of power. Longer terms are banned by constitutions the world
over. Tony Blair’s ever slapdash legislators forgot this, giving Livingstone
the chance still to be with us in the Olympics year.
Belaboured by police inquiries and media revelations, Livingstone last week
bizarrely pleaded with the public to lay off him as London had a
“presidential constitution” like in America. Accountability was due only at
the next election. Until then, by implication, he is an elected dictator.
Those who did not like it should blame Blair - a habit he has caught from
Gordon Brown.
Livingstone is wrong. Presidential constitutions are rarely dictatorships.
They customarily have supreme courts and independent legislatures, usually
with control over presidential budgets. Livingstone suffers no such
constraint. He was granted extraordinary power by John Prescott in 2000,
when Prescott incidentally assured Londoners that a mayor would cost them
just 3p a week. Livingstone is now costing the average council taxpayer £300
a year. His staff costs have inflated from £12m when he came to office to
£33m today, while his publicity empire is estimated at £100m, including a
mayoral newspaper.
Mayor Livingstone has become the same man as ran the Greater London council
into the ground in the 1980s, except that the range of favoured cronies and
clients has expanded. His luxuriantly upholstered front organisation is the
London Development Agency, linked to his “race relations” ally, Lee Jasper,
with a budget of some £400m apparently immune to serious scrutiny.
Millions flow from the LDA to such obscure outfits as the Rich Mix centre, the
Green Badge Taxi School and Brixton Base, allegedly “safeguarding” 1,000
jobs in the capital. Many recipients are unknown to the Charity Commission
or Companies House and the LDA paper trail is said to defy audit. This is
government worthy of Haiti.
Meanwhile, the mayor’s aides, on public salaries of £100,000 or more, blast
the ether with dirty tricks e-mails aimed at such sworn enemies as Trevor
Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Notting Hill
carnival organisers or writers for the London Evening Standard. Last week
Rosemary Emodi, Jasper’s city hall right-hand woman, was caught with a
friend (and recipient of LDA handouts) on a freebie to Nigeria. The two of
them claimed to be investigating a mayoral plan “to bring youths of African
descent from the UK . . . to reconnect with their roots” in Nigeria.
This is all pure GLC. When charged with illegally using public money for
private political purposes, Livingstone chirps that his staff “work such
long hours” that they have too little private time to show their love for
him by safeguarding his electoral interests from home. Besides, they must
accompany him, en masse, to India, Cuba and Venezuela.
Such spending is supposedly accountable to an elected London assembly, to
auditors, regulators and Whitehall’s “government office for London”. None of
these has even remotely done its job. The last has contrived to grow bigger
since Livingstone ran London than it was when it ran the capital on its own.
The Greater London Authority Act was overseen by a minister, Nick Raynsford,
who reportedly had mayoral ambitions at the time. Accordingly it opted for a
“strong mayor” model and in spades. The assembly was kept small and
powerless. Its one serious power, to reject the entire London budget,
requires an improbable two-thirds majority. It has become the mayor’s
much-abused poodle.
Meanwhile, local auditors are consumed with the top-down monitoring of central
government targets. They have proved useless as a curb on inefficiency and
corruption in local government (except for Shirley Porter, the Tory leader
of Westminster). The Audit Commission’s green light to Livingstone’s regime
at city hall is a scandal. So, too, is the Charity Commission’s tolerance of
his use of Muslim organisations, supposedly charitable, openly to campaign
for him. This would have them stripped of charitable status were they not
“ethnically sensitive”.
So who will guard the guardians? The answer, for want of anything else, has
been the press in the form of London’s one serious newspaper, the Evening
Standard.
The Standard has fought a lonely but effective campaign to bring the mayor’s
misdeeds to public attention. In doing so it has rendered the local global.
The result of its campaign has already been four police investigations into
the LDA and a possible inquiry by the Electoral Commission into
Livingstone’s use of public funds for personal vendettas.
Even the Tories on the assembly have been showing signs of life. Livingstone
merely accuses his tormentors of being racist or Tory or in thrall to
embittered whistleblowers.
We can almost hear him saying in the tones of New York’s Tammany Hall, “and we
know where they live”.
I was an enthusiast for elected mayors. More than a dozen of them have taken
office in England and have proved successful, most being reelected last
year. In London I must therefore swallow the Livingstone experience with a
dose of salt. He began well. He ran as an independent and emerged as an
undeniably popular mayor of all Londoners, unlike group leaders elsewhere,
answerable only to party factions.
The speed with which Livingstone’s decisions favoured certain
developer/architects was, shall we say, surprising. So, too, was his U-turn
to get rid of bus conductors and in favour of skyscraper offices and luxury
flats. But as he pointed out last week, no other big British city under
party group control has forced policemen out of their cars onto the streets
or levied a congestion charge against government opposition.
These achievements may be equivocal: the extra policemen are extras and not
out of cars, while the congestion charge costs a fortune for precious little
return. But Livingstone, at least in his early years, gave the leadership of
the nation’s capital the stamp of legitimacy that it sorely lacked under
Whitehall direct rule. Although he lost his battle with Prescott over the
wasteful privatisation of London Underground, he was right to fight and was
proved right in the outcome.
Direct election has refreshed politics in the capital. Still three months from
the vote, its politics has become national box office. The campaign of
Johnson, the jokester Tory, started as farce but is acquiring confidence and
plausibility, as has that of Brian Paddick, the reticent Liberal Democrat
and former police officer. Johnson is a rare Conservative both in his appeal
to the young – where he is far ahead of Livingstone in the polls – and in
his capacity to match his opponent’s adroit use of humour. To those who
complain that his experience of office is limited he can ask if they really
prefer Livingstone’s unlimited experience.
Livingstone has sacrificed any credit he might deserve for so firmly
entrenching the London mayoralty by his incorrigible cronyism. He lacks any
vision for the city beyond that it should be a tax haven for the rich and
the Thames should be pepper-potted with ugly riverside towers. He should
never have been allowed to stand for a third term. That a new law passed
last year not only did so but actually gave him even more power, notably
over London borough planning, is scarcely believable. The capital is in
chronic need of a properly accountable assembly.
Yet while the minuses of Livingstone outweigh the pluses, the account of
mayoralty as such remains in credit. It has pluralised public debate and
diluted the dominance of the big party leaders. As of today, its security seems
proof even against the antics of the incumbent. I would still rather have a
mayor than not. But London needs a better one, desperately.
