Changing London. David Robinson
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Robbie de Santos, Rosie Ferguson, Ruth Stokes, Sadiq Khan, Sally Goldsworthy, Sally Rogers, Sam Tarry, Sarah Holloway, Sarah Richardson, Sean Baine, Sheyda Monshizadeh-Azar, Simon Chouffot, Stan Harris, Steve Wyler, Sylvie Bray, Tahseen Chowdhury, Tessy Britton, Tessa Jowell, Tim Jones, Toni Nash, Yvonne Roberts and Zoe Kilb.
Thank you all.
Some opinion poll data in this book is from unpublished quantitative analysis of the BritainThinks 2014 ‘Capital Gains?’ research report and it is used with their kind permission.
Introduction
London is a wonderful city, diverse and full of talents, but is it the best that it could be?
Almost 9 million people live here, alongside some of the world’s most successful organisations. It is, in many ways, a rich and gifted city, but not always a happy, healthy or productive one. More than a third of its citizens fear crime on the streets, 28 per cent are in poverty, and the richest can expect to live twenty years longer than the poorest.
The London mayor holds the UK’s biggest directly elected mandate. We should expect from them an ambition that matches the scale of the opportunity – it should be fair, deliverable, bold and, above all, it should be ours, not marketed to voters with badges and balloons in the four short weeks of an election campaign but imagined and owned by us all.
San Antonio’s mayor ran huge live events for thousands of citizens to decide the city’s budget. Bogotá’s former mayor Antanas Mockus asked citizens to voluntarily pay 10 per cent extra tax, and 63,000 did. Oklahoma’s mayor transformed his city’s waistline by personally fronting a campaign to ‘lose a million pounds’. Helsinki’s mayor introduced a youth guarantee of a job, study or training place for every young person. And bike-sharing schemes are common now, but they were pioneered – in the face of widespread ridicule – by former Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë. The list goes on. Mayors across the world have rocked their cities in recent years with extraordinary achievements. If they could do it, couldn’t we?
The next mayoral election in May 2016 and, in particular, the primary contests to choose the candidates in summer 2015, give Londoners the opportunity to set a different agenda and to break new ground.
We set up a website in November 2012 and invited contributions. Changing London was to be a platform for generating and debating ideas, drawing on the experiences of other cities, but first and foremost on the creativity and innovation of Londoners. Thinking anew, not only about the direct responsibilities of the mayoralty but also about exploiting the powers of influence – the voice, the visibility and the unique capacity to convene that comes with the office. These are the superpowers of the mayoralty overlooked by policy brewed in Westminster and ignored in a feeble public discourse that fixes too often on political celebrity.
We didn’t have to wait for very long. The ideas and the discussion flowed freely. This book brings it all together under five big visions for London: What would the city look like if we determined to make it the best place on earth to raise a child? Or if it was a friendly city, where neighbourhoods thrived and everybody mattered? How could we build a fair city where lavish wealth is as unwelcome as abject poverty and both have been eradicated? Or maybe a healthy city, that did no harm and tackled sickness at its source? And, to lead it all, how should we revitalise and retool a sham democracy that saw only 38 per cent vote in the last mayoral election?
Ideas range from play streets to plotting sheds, London Sundays to a Have-a-Go Festival, a London Fair Pay Commission, a Children’s Trust Fund and a cultural guarantee for every child, Citizens Budgets, a Mayor’s Share in the biggest businesses and the April Vote – an annual London referendum.
These and hundreds more are not a manifesto for the next mayor but a rough guide – a glimpse of how our city could look if we dared to gaze beyond the cautious consensus that has infected Westminster debate, and if we reclaimed the city as a place we share and build together.
The ideas here are bold – some might say idealistic – but they are not naïve. At the last mayoral election Boris Johnson was returned with the support of less than one in five Londoners. That leaves a lot of stay-at-home voters left to play for. They won’t be reached with politics-as-usual. Our headline message to the mayoral wannabees assembling at the starting line is therefore unequivocal: fresh, engaging, innovative plans, building on the ideas and touching on the everyday interests of ordinary Londoners, would be good for London, good for politics and, potentially, very good for you.
But Changing London didn’t start with mayoral candidates and it doesn’t finish with them. We think the business of change is a concern for us all. We hope that the ideas here will inspire all our readers to do the following five things.
Carry on imagining: you will know what needs to change in London. It may be sparked by an idea in the book, or something you spotted yesterday, or it could be a plot you’ve been hatching for a while. Share your ideas on Changing London (www.change-london.org.uk) and read what others have come up with, too.
Be heard at a hustings: for the primary campaigns in summer 2015 and the election itself in spring 2016. Push the candidates and stretch them with the breadth of your vision for London and the standards you expect of our next mayor. Share the ideas in the book or ideas of your own.
Do it yourself: London isn’t made by the mayor alone – anything but. Many of the ideas in the book could be made real in your neighbourhood, right now. Pick something and have a go – set up a play street or a community group, campaign for local businesses to pay the living wage, or, if you run one yourself, start paying it. Join something, start something. Do something.
Hold the winner to their word: twenty-first-century politics is synonymous with broken promises. If London’s next mayor is going to be different they must start by sticking to their word. It is our job to make sure they do.
Keep it up: ideas can take time to germinate and even a superhero mayor won’t be able to do everything in their first year. Persevere.
Martin Luther King Jr famously believed that change wouldn’t come overnight but that we should always work as though it were a possibility in the morning. A website and a little book won’t deliver the change we want, but ideas light the fuse. Share yours. Vote for yours. Work for yours. Rock this city.
1. Because We Dwell Together
Londoners awoke to the news on a damp May morning in 2012: Boris was back.
Less than one in five had voted for the sitting mayor but this meagre support was endorsement enough. His opponents had polled even less.2
Why did a city with, at the time, seventeen Labour-led councils and twelve controlled by the Conservatives3 reject Labour policies and choose a Tory mayor and why, above all, did 62 per cent not vote at all?
The disinterest was surely not borne of contentment. London is a buzzing city of nine million souls but one in four are lonely often or all of the time.4 Some of our families are extremely wealthy, but a third of our children grow up in poverty5 and although our richest citizens outlive the Japanese, the healthiest nation on earth, our poorest have a similar life expectancy to the people of Guatemala, ranked 143rd.6
The questions that should have occupied progressive minds after that last mayoral election were brushed aside as attention shifted to the personalities that might participate in 2016. The cabals were reconvening, bloggers were blogging and the Evening Standard, and even the national press, was puffing out the gossip. Would Tessa Jowell run, David Lammy, perhaps, or Sadiq Khan?
With more than three years to go before the next vote, no one stopped to wonder: does anyone, beyond the faithful anorak, really give a monkey’s? If not, why not, and what lessons can we learn before the game begins again?
Our Rough Guide
Livingstone and Johnson are as interesting and as entertaining as anyone in British politics but they couldn’t excite enough commitment to compel the weary majority to the ballot box. Plainly, big personalities do not, on their own, generate mainstream engagement.
We