Mayor Johnson
The headline news is, of course, the victory of Boris Johnson. It is no secret (at least if you’ve been reading this blog!) that I was and remain a strong supporter of Ken Livingstone and that I have very grave doubts about the Johnson mayoralty. I have tried to draw a comparison between relations between the GLA and the boroughs on transport and on housing. On housing, there is no doubt that some boroughs – particularly Tory boroughs, and particularly Wandsworth (11%) and Westminster (10%) – are doing very little in terms of affordable housing. The figures in brackets refer to the amount of newly-built affordable housing as a fraction of total new build in the boroughs; the requirement is for fifty per cent. Despite the protestations of ‘New Boris’, many Conservatives in the capital will resent interference and instructions from on high and simply do not see affordable housing as a priority. I believe the same problems will occur when it comes to the Freedom Pass and other aspects of transport, such as bus routing. Without co-ordination and, indeed, compulsion from the centre, the boroughs will do what they perceive as best for their patch, rather than what is best for the totality of London. It represents a step back from strategic governance of London.
Staying with transport, Johnson has a pretty good starting point: the Bill authorising Crossrail is working its way through Parliament; London Overground has come on-stream and work to improve it is taking place; the East London line is being extended and plugged into London Overground. There are many challenges, not least of which is Crossrail. Johnson will, likely as not, try to make good on his pledge to scrap or, at least, redeploy the bendy buses in London. This, combined with his rather creaky mathematics on a new Routemaster, could end up in a lot of money being spent in rather inefficient and unproductive ways. If we take as a single example the 507 route that connects Waterloo and Victoria stations, we see the advantages of the bendy buses for some routes; few people are travelling without paying as most have travelcards and the ease and speed of ingress and egress is important on a route that is carrying full busloads of commuters at peak times. I understand that Mr Johnson wants to develop river services. While it sounds like a nice idea, the tidal nature of the Thames means that times will never be the same from day to day. At best, it will remain a minor part of London’s transport mix.
My concern is that much of the good work of the last eight years will be either lost or not used to best effect. Livingstone had a vision for London and a vision for London’s transport that encompassed a variety of modes, saw cycling and walking as part of the mix, and put being able to move about, even if you’re poor, as a high priority. For this reason we saw, for instance, London Overground to facilitate circular (day-to-day living) rather than just radial (in-and-out journeys for work in the centre) journeys and the driving through of the Tube to one of the poorest boroughs, Hackney, that did not have a tube station to call its own. Equally, the ambitious plans for further trams and the Greenwich Riverside Transit bus scheme and the like must lie under a cloud.
There is a particularly dark cloud over the Freedom Pass. Shortly before the election, Mr Johnson announced Brian Cooke, chair of London Travelwatch, as one of his supporters. I wrote about it at some length here, but with an advisor who has panned the Freedom Pass and a light-touch attitude towards making the boroughs fund the Pass, I am doubtful that it will be extended in any meaningful way and concerned for its future as a whole.
Beyond that, I fear that the environment and congestion will worsen in London as Johnson is at best lukewarm about the c-charge and opposed outright to the £25 charge for the most polluting cars. I also remain concerned at the effect of Boris shooting his mouth off at the wrong time.
Lib Dems
The Liberal Democrats fell apart. Brian Paddick was not the man to lead them to a bright new dawn in London. It would appear that Boris Johnson’s victory is due to Lib Dems and UKIPpers supporting Johnson, with their shares of the mayoral vote dropping 5.2 and 5.1% respectively with the Tories’ rising by 14.3%. To be honest, there’s not much more to say than that a resurgent Tory party can take votes from Lib Dems and some former ‘dissatisfied Tories’, which bodes not well for Labour in the next general election.
The Lib Dems on the Assembly now hold the balance of power. There are eleven Tories; the eight Labour AMs and two Green AMs mean that, no matter which way the BNP go, the Lib Dems must choose between red and blue. It will be interesting to see which way they generally go and whether they articulate a coherent vision for London.
The Greens
I make no secret of my positive disposition towards the Green party. I think they will be disappointed not to have achieved another seat, but given that all the traffic was towards Johnson and Labour was going hell for leather to make sure that everyone who might vote Labour did vote Labour. As my friend Aled, who ran for the Greens, says in the comments
“Despite the major party Labour-Tory ’squeeze’ which crushed the Lib Dems, we held onto our 3 seats and weren’t that far off 3. Our vote stayed pretty much the same as last time and our constituency votes rose in most places, meaning we saved all deposits except one.
We were also a clear fourth in Mayoral 1st Preferences and came 3rd on 2nd Preferences (however meaningless that is!).”
The BNP
The BNP have a seat on the assembly. Across the capital, 5.33% of voters chose to vote for them. It behoves all of us to watch Richard Barnbrook like a hawk. The only good thing is that the BNP’s share of the vote barely rose, by one-fifth of one per cent, and that they were unable to win a constituency member even in City & East. There, they did poll 9.62%, which is still pretty worrying.
I am not sure what long-term effects the BNP’s victory will have. It is their first win off a local council, but they had been hoping for two seats. They will seek to capitalise on the publicity and the salary and expenses will be useful; however, their previous elected officials have been woefully inadequate, frequently not turned up to meetings and attracted allegations of sleaze pretty quickly. It will hopefully galvanise people to work against the BNP in east London, much as happened in the West Midlands. In the short term, I am very concerned about what will happen; it is all to easy to see an increase in racially-motivated violence, as happened in Tower Hamlets when the BNP gained a councillor.
The Left
The left don’t matter in London. Despite being able to cast a second preference for Ken, only 16,976 gave their first preferences to Lindsey German and the Left List for the mayoralty. By way of comparison, their 0.68% share of first preferences is less than the 0.91% for UKIP, 1.60% for the Christian Choice and represents slightly less than a quarter of the 2.84% who voted for Richard Barnbrook of the BNP.
There is scarcely more comfort for the left on the Assembly. Respect (George Galloway) only ran in one constituency, City & East, and came third behind the Conservatives. The Left List (the SWP part of Respect) did best in the Enfield & Haringey constituency, where they won 3.5% of the vote.
I would go so far as to say that the only thing achieved by the left parties was to stop the BNP getting a second seat on the Assembly.
One London
UKIP/Veritas/One London have disappeared; I cannot say I am particularly surprised or disappointed. Damian Hockney and Peter Hulme Cross were non-entities on the Assembly. Hockney stood down from the mayoral election after protesting that media attention was all on the large parties; given that Sian Berry received quite a lot of coverage and Lindsay German a fair amount, I think the charge doesn’t stand up. Given that Hockney and Hulme Cross stood as UKIP, ditched them for Veritas and then became One London when Kilroy-Silk’s party fell apart, I’d say that it was pretty obvious that they were going to be kicked off the Assembly.
Labour
It’s bad. Of that, there can be no doubt. It’s not quite time to write Labour off for the next election; not yet, anyway. For many people, myself included, this is the first, major setback at elections in our adult life; I was not old enough to vote in 1997 and a period without the executive of London may prove a salutatory experience.
Labour did, in fact, gain one seat on the Assembly and the vote for Ken was slightly up, by seven-tenths of a percent, on last time round. There is still a viable, progressive coalition in London but against a strong opposition, it is not enough on its own unless every ‘core’ Labour supporter turns out to vote. I suspect that the current state of the national party did not help, but the performance of Ken and the London Labour party against a rubbish overall picture was remarkable.
Three final points
The Evening Standard was cheerleading for Johnson and against Livingstone for some time. I may return to this in future, but the unique position of the paper as the only paid-for, London-wide newspaper (if London Lite and thelondonpaper can even be considered newspapers) gives it a powerful position. I am well aware that it is a private newspaper, but the effect is similar to the BBC campaigning for the Tories. It may be time to launch the Morning Courier.
The London Assembly has been a bit anonymous. This is a subject I will definitely return to as individual AMs and the Assembly as a whole need to be more visible.
Beyond London, the lessons are fewer as the demographics of the capital are very different to the rest of the country. The main issues is that voters are leaving the Lib Dems for the Tories and that, at least when there is no European election, UKIP voters are joining them. I don’t know whether this will impact on the timing of the general election.
xD.
Erm, Dave – have you forgotten about the Greens?
Despite the major party Labour-Tory ‘squeeze’ which crushed the Lib Dems, we held onto our 3 seats and weren’t that far off 3. Our vote stayed pretty much the same as last time and our constituency votes rose in most places, meaning we saved all deposits except one.
We were also a clear fourth in Mayoral 1st Preferences and came 3rd on 2nd Preferences (however meaningless that is!).
🙂
Sorry, shoudl read:
“… we held onto our 2 seats and weren’t that far off 3”.
Oops!
The perils, Aled, of writing while packing. I’ve put the Greens in!
Very kind of your, Dave! 🙂
Greetings Dave – Strictly the LibDems do not hold a ‘balance of power’ on the 25-seat London Assembly, because the only time a majority is really needed is over the Budget…and the Tories with 11 seats have their majority by a mile because the Budget passes without any amendments with a third of the votes of the Assembly. There is no ‘power’ in a simple majority.The majority on the Assembly is, if you like, a third of the votes for the party of the Mayor. That is why the Greens in the last Assembly used their position with two votes as a party friendly to the Mayor to ensure that there were enough votes to add to Labour’s 7 to enable the Budget to pass (9 needed out of 25). There is of course a simple majority from the point of view of who is Chair, or in the passing of motions, but if you look at the meaning of that, it is actually very little. Dozens of motions were passed by the majority in the last Mayoralty, and they made no difference at all. And the role of the Assembly is not to propose policy or implement it, it is to ‘hold the Mayor to account’.
Dave, you are not really accurate in the reason why we decided not to field a candidate for Mayor, and you may have picked up on incorrect rumour which circulated. The reasons, which we announced very clearly, were: first and foremost, there was the ban on candidates writing direct, personally, to the electorate (by means of restricting the amount spent) allied to the state radio and tv guidelines on coverage for smaller parties, issued just prior to our withdrawal and well in advance of any media coverage. These guidelines set a statutory amount of coverage on the basis of equivalence between small parties in two tiers. The rules are entirely different for the 3 ‘main’ parties given the enormous volume of coverage they would get and their protected status.The amount of ‘advertising’ allowed (and that is what it effectively is) for the ‘minor’ parties on state radio and tv was tiny, and the restrictions effectively created in advance a statutory maximum level of coverage: so, in the event that a BBC programme might decide to cover an additional aspect of a smaller party, or include them in an issue, it was obliged to have all the others on in equivalent manner and equivalent times. It is too much like hard work for the broadcasters, so they do not do it, and it also would mean they would sometimes have to give coverage to their boogie man the BNP. So even more they don’t do it. The Greens suffered in exactly the same way, and had very little BBC or independent broadcast coverage at all – we monitored it so I can assure you that the amount of BBC coverage between candidates of the second tier as specified by the guidelines was almost exactly the same. Producers told me at the time it is an absurd process which hampers them from actually covering the elections in any way journalistically. However, the Greens did have the value of being described as a ‘main candidate’ by the Evening Standard and given appropriate coverage. As the Evening Standard is a private business they are entitled to be as biased as they like…but they have to be aware that commercially this can sometimes have an important effect – a usual Tory voting member of staff in my publishing company said on this occasion she was voting for Ken because she felt sorry for “the smears against him in the Standard day after day” (only quoting, I make no comment!). She added that she had gone off the Standard and would be unlikely to buy it again, or at least not as often. And on independent broadcasters there is only the duty of “balance” between the ‘minor’ candidates – the day I pulled out I was on the Nick Ferrari programme and his words were, on air: “it is ridiculous that I could not have you on at all during the mayoral elections if you were a candidate because of the guidelines, but I can now allow you on to hear the reasons why you are standing aside!” Independent broadcasters have no self-imposed duty of minimum coverage so they simply ignore all the ‘minor’ candidates other than maybe for one spot.
Is it not absurd also that the London Assembly elections must be some of the only elections in a democracy where candidates are barred from writing to their potential voters? Again because of spending rules.
“Nonentities”? “Tchhhhhhhhh,” as my Trini aunt would say…
Regards Damian
A typically balanced assessment (and thanks for leaving out the “b” – buffoon – word).
Your “Left” (Dale Blogging Guide: “Extreme Left”), which I would probably call (following the Socialist Unity people) “Left of Labour”, doesn’t include the Greens. Perhaps it should? Certainly that is what some of the Left of Labour people think. I’m not sure what the Greens think.
I think there are some real questions over whether a jump to £25 at a single point in the CC banding can be regarded as acceptable – given that it is highly regressive. Other aspects of the existing transport policy seem to me to be somewhat irrational – does it really make sense to give people free travel in the rush hour, or to have a scheme which *completely* divorces travel from the environmental costs of that travel in an age of Greenery?
The big surprise to me is that we are still – days later – seeing a wide reliance on anti-Boris image arguments (“buffoon”, “toff”, “dilettante”). Those seem to me to be boomerangs, bearing in mind all the other politicians who have precisely similar educations and backgrounds, or less experience.
My current thoughts.
Damian,
Thankyou very much for your comments; I do apologise if I was bit, ahem, brusque. In my defence, I wrote the post on the hoof, so it is a bit incoherent.
I’m going to reply to you at greater length in the morning, but I wanted to say that I was really not aware of the restrictions you talk about. I’m going to look into it.
Matt,
There is a question about whether the Greens in the UK are a watermelon party (green on the outside but red on the inside, with little black anarchist bits). If you look at some of the continental Greens, and here I’m thinking particularly of the Italian example, you see a neo-communist party in all but name. While there are some ultra-left people in the Greens here and some who would like it to become a watermelon, it is not, I think, a party ‘to the left of Labour’. I don’t think the left-right continuum holds, for one thing, but their appeal is not just to disaffected socialists so much as people disaffected with the liberal end of UK politics (including the Lib Dems) and so it remains a different beast to Mr Dale’s ‘extreme left’.
The ultimate reason that the Greens cannot be considered part of the traditional ‘left’ is that they are enjoying some electoral success!
Usually, the image issue is a canard. In this instance, I disagree with you. Mayor Johnson has, in the past, put his foot in his mouth and had some difficulty removing it. He needs to ditch the persona of an amusing eccentric and become a serious politician.
xD.
Dave
Thanks for your reply.
It will be interesting to see what the Greens make of Norwich, should they ever control the city.
>He needs to ditch the persona of an amusing eccentric and become a serious politician.
I wonder if he does. Ken Maintained his “cheeky chappie” persona in addition to being a dedicated machine politician before he went Independent. I’m not calling that one yet.