So Labour have set out the timetable for the London Mayoral selection. The formalities kick off on May 18th next year with the ballot closing on July 31st. We should be whipping up the conversation now, not with the question “who should stand for mayor?” – that can wait – but rather asking “what should the Mayor do, what should they stand for?”
We started Changing London with a blog here last year. We wanted to gather suggestions and we wanted to do it with a bottom up approach to politics. We weren’t backing a single candidate. We were backing the people of the city to come up with their own proposals for changing London. Now, with Boris Johnson gone, a mayoral contest about ideas not personalities really should be possible.
For six months we posted suggestions like a Co Production Academy and a Mayor’s Share in the top 100 businesses, Children’s Zones and City Sundays, play streets and a time based currency. Now we are marshalling that material into themed papers and again encouraging discussion. We will be starting public meetings on the full set on December 9th (please come) and a book, published at the start of the primaries will pull it all together.
There’s plenty to do here: the income of the 10% who earn the least has dropped by 24% in the last 5 years, 1 in 4 of us feel lonely often or all of the time, and 1 in 3 worry about crime on the streets. Politics should matter but barely a third voted in the 2012 mayoral election. London hasn’t quite reached the position of Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, where the most recent mayoral elections had to be repeated three times due to lack of interest but we are heading in the wrong direction.
Some ideas have concerned the formal powers of the mayoralty, applying planning controls, for instance, to design social connection into the places where we live. Some have focused on the “super powers” – the voice, the visibility and the unique capacity to convene, speaking out for the Financial Transactions Tax, for example, or leading a converted effort to eradicate illiteracy in the capital. Pretty much everything has been about people. Politicians and their advisers, in thrall to Westminster orthodoxy but remote from voices on the ground, often miss the obvious. Mayoral visions like “the world’s most competitive city” don’t connect with our everyday lives and although global markets may indeed be important, it’s people that vote.
London is no powder keg not least because the lonely, the mentally ill and the very poor are an improbable insurgency but there are faultlines here largely unattended and, again contrary to conventional wisdom, they concern more than a few. The Centre for London’s “Hollow Promise” report concluded that the 20% of Londoners who are low to middle income earners “are increasingly disenchanted with the political system. Unless London does better by them London’s politics could increasingly turn sour.”
Democracy only works when the voters believe that it can. An enfeebled mandate means a weaker mayor, a weak mayor undermines the faith yet further. The Scottish referendum has shown the potential of a different approach. Here more than double the number of eligible voters made their mark – 38% in London, 84.5% in Scotland. Voters relished serious debate and towards the end of a two year discussion the politicians were no longer dictating the terms of the debate. For once in modern politics in the UK the dog was wagging the tail.
In the immediate aftermath national politicians seem to recognise an appetite for the devolution of powers away from Westminster and Whitehall and towards the regions, maybe also the big cities but this represents only half of the learning from the Scottish experience.
The results of the vote revealed an appetite for devolution. The level of engagement, in the campaign as well as in the vote itself, revealed an appetite for democratic participation. The first, challenging though it is, may be easier to satisfy than the second but we won’t engage Londoners and we won’t tackle London’s problems if the next mayoral election offers no more than a dreary parade of top down, patronisingly short, infinitesimally differentiated, bog standard political retail campaigns. If London needs a new mayor with a strong mandate, then London needs a new approach to politics not just at election time but all the time.
In the latest London Paper – A Deeper Democracy – our contributors have imagined retooling democracy for the 21st century with a new permanent agency “Ideas for London”, sat alongside Transport for London and Homes for London seeking, out and developing great ideas. They have suggested the “April vote” – an annual referendum and accompanying debate on an issue of current concern and new processes for involving voters in running local services, choosing between options for an allocation of the budget, or even opting into a voluntary tax. Utterly ludicrous? What if it was linked to an ambitious life changing programme like a job guarantee for every London youngster? Bogata’s Mayor Mockus tried it and 63,000 citizens contributed.
We conclude that our next mayor must draw from the experience of the many, seek opinions on priorities, work with others on design and delivery and, because collaborative leadership is only purposeful leadership when the goals are explicit, they must root it all in an equivocal set of values unconditionally upheld.
We think that this combination of fresh ideas, strong values and a deeper democracy would be good for London. We also think that a mayoral candidate offering this approach to leadership in 2016 would be very smart politics.
Finally three things that Changing London hasn’t been about: First, we aren’t backing individual candidates; although perhaps we might if some commit and others do not. Second we certainly aren’t standing our own although who knows if none step up? And third we aren’t writing a manifesto. It’s not for the unelected to do that. The book will be a job description, not a programme. This is what we want from our next mayor. Now, who will deliver?