Giving Londoners Back Their City

Steve Norris, TRG Patron and former Conservative Candidate for Mayor of London writes for the TRG about what he thinks the Conservative Mayoral Candidate in 2008 should campaign on.

Even a stopped clock’s right twice a day so perhaps it is inevitable that even this government occasionally gets something right. That was the case when the incoming administration decided there ought to be an elected body responsible for strategic issues in London, and that the best mechanism to deliver those strategies was an elected Mayor. Before too many Conservative hackles rise, let me explain.

London has had a citywide authority since the nineteenth century. By the 1980s, that body was the Greater London Council. It was killed off by Margaret Thatcher after Ken Livingstone, its then Leader, had turned it into an ugly pastiche of every incompetent hard left council you ever witnessed. Demonstrably useless at what it was supposed to do, it meddled everywhere else – Ireland, Central America, Cuba, the US, the Middle East, in fact anywhere but London. Despite Livingstone’s dire warnings, the decade after the GLC went was arguably the most productive in the city’s long history. But by the mid 1990s, having been Minister for Transport in London for almost 5 years I was convinced there was a sensible middle course between the ludicrous GLC and no strategic body at all. The Greater London Authority was designed as a slim body covering those issues that are naturally strategic – principally transport, economic development, inward investment, strategic planning and policing.

And elected Mayors? How many people does it take to change a light bulb? We are consumers as well as voters and we demand quality service from the private and the public sector. We want action, not politics. We want our streets clean and safe to walk in, the lights on and our rubbish regularly collected. We want to move around quickly and reliably. We want as much value for public money as we demand in our shops. We don’t want councillors debating nuclear weapons, the future of the European Union or hunting with hounds in Hackney. So why not elect someone the whole community has a chance to vote for by name, who stands on a manifesto committed to delivery knowing that success means re-election and failure means sudden death? It works in virtually every other great city in the world and it can work here.

What should our candidate campaign on in 2008? Obviously, sensible ideas on keeping London moving rather than conducting a political campaign against motorists. Appointing someone to the London Development Agency who has the faintest idea about how business works. Campaigning in all of London rather than just in Zone One and promising to spend more time in Haringey than Havana would be a good start.

But above all, the failure of policing in the capital is what matters to Londoners. Livingstone may typically have spent billions of our money on more officers, but Londoners want to know where they are. They feel less safe now than they did twenty years ago. They also know the crime statistics lie. They want a more responsive police force that serves the community rather than dictating to it. A regular police presence on our streets; police stations open 24 hours a day; officers actually answering the phone in a local station - frankly, what they would expect from any self-respecting retailer. And they want the Mayor to back the police when they have to do tough but necessary things. Good police officers deserve no less, and London’s Mayor is uniquely able to demand change, offer real leadership and vital support when necessary. A Conservative Mayor in 2008 can not only lead the charge for David Cameron’s assault on Labour in the country, but also give Londoners back the city they once knew and loved