A square one moment: That was how Guardian columnist John Harris described this post election phase at the excellent Compass Radical Hope event last Saturday – a time for drawing hope and inspiration from the countless local endeavours that connect and support, that imagine a better world and work for it in communities across the UK, day in day out.
I agree. Alvin Toffler once said that “you’ve got to think about big things while doing small things so the small things go in the right direction”. As we have been talking to Londoners about their ambitions for the next mayor we’ve learnt to think about it slightly differently: we can’t achieve the big things we want for London if we don’t attend to the small things first. Great places are made from the particular and it is the smallest parts of this big city, the communities where we live and the relationships within them that shape the quality of our lives.
Contributors to Changing London have been exploring five big visions for our city. Their ideas are all in the little book that we are publishing today. www.change-london.org.uk. One of those visions, developed long before the disappointments of May 7th, is of a London where “neighbourhoods thrive and everybody matters”.
We pictured a city of thriving communities where supporting one another is a natural part of every day living not because the local bonds and little bridges are more important than, say, policies for tackling poverty, reducing crime or improving health but because almost 4 times more people find work through friends and neighbours than through the Job Centre, because stronger neighbourhoods have significantly less crime, because loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and because living in a supportive community increases our chance of good health by 27%.
In short the quality and quantity of our relationships and the strength of our local communities significantly influence economic and educational performance, local crime rates, long term health and much else besides. Attention to the individual, to the local, is not an alternative to a big vision; it is the making of it. That’s why, if the election results present an imperative for hard analysis, and they surely do, it is right to begin at least one strand of that thinking in the smallest places close to home.
Nominations have now closed for Labour candidates for the London Mayor. The forthcoming primaries are an opportunity to make this case. Doing it well has obvious benefits for London but it also matters further afield. If elected next year the Labour candidate will hold the most significant public office of any non-Conservative English politician and carry responsibility not only for leading London well, but also for reminding Britain what progressive governance can achieve and for showing the left a way to succeed. We need to have the best person but even more important than that, they need to have the best platform.
Today we, 70 contributors to Changing London, have written this open letter to the mayoral candidates.
Dear Christian, David, Diane, Gareth, Sadiq and Tessa,
We are counting on you.
Now more than ever Labour needs to set London alight with a bright, bold and brand new approach to the Mayoral contest.
The 2016 election will be the first opportunity for the progressive cause to win again, our first chance to take back the UK’s biggest directly elected mandate and to reclaim the national megaphone that comes with the job. Labour did well in London on May 7th but we will never know what it might have achieved in government. If elected by this left-leaning city next year you will hold the most significant public office of any non-Conservative English politician and carry responsibility for leading London well, for showing Britain what progressive governance can achieve and for showing the left the way to succeed.
Just 38% voted in the last mayoral bout. Turnout was higher at the general election but still one in three stayed at home. Same old vs same old in the next London poll will not ignite the passions of an electorate that is young, substantially unaligned and demonstrably unimpressed by politics as usual. The mayoral primaries that begin this week are an opportunity to talk about important issues from a fresh perspective. They must be the testing ground and the launchpad for new ideas.
Some will be found in “Changing London: a rough guide for the next London Mayor” released today. It brings together ideas that we and other Londoners have suggested and offers five big visions for our city – visions based on active participation, fairness and the building and sustaining of relationships. Each would realise the potential of the mayoralty and reach the parts never reached by mantras from the Westminster playbook.
We also feature in the book stories from around the world where mayors have transformed their communities with radical but practical and popular programmes. Cities, more nimble than nation states, but stronger and more influential than smaller municipalities are important in themselves and fertile territory for the seeding of new ideas and a new approach to politics. Many of these achievements elsewhere, like many of the suggestions in Changing London, defy what New York Mayor de Blasio has called the “lazy logic of false choices”. These are ideas that embrace a bigger vision, deploy a different language and feel of another age from the weary conventions of centralism versus extremism that are already framing and fatally constraining our national post poll analysis.
If we want to live in a city, indeed a country, where everybody counts, one that better meets our needs, that has the audacity to imagine and the capacity to deliver and if we want to own that place, play a part, speak and be heard, we need a London mayor, indeed a Prime Minister, who won’t think down the same narrow tramlines, do the same things over and over again and promise different results.
As contributors to Changing London we envisage a politics of ideas, of collaboration and of compassion in a city where aspirations are high and rising and where the achievable ambitions for one are achievable for us all.
And for the avoidance of doubt: at a time when London’s richest citizens may outlive the Japanese, the healthiest nation on earth, but our poorest have a similar life expectancy to the people of Guatemala, ranked 143, when a third of our cities children grow up in poverty and when a newly mandated government is manifestly committed to policies that will widen the gaps, our top priority is non negotiable. A ferocious assault on inequalities, wherever they hurt would be good for us all.
You ask for our vote. We ask, now more than ever, for reasons to believe. Give us bold ideas. Give us the opportunity to contribute. Give us back the energy of hope.
Thank you
David Robinson, Will Horwitz, Rebekkah Abraham, Namaa Al-Mahdi, Andrew Attfield, Nicola Bacon, Kate Bagley, Sean Baine, Pete Baker, Hilary Barnard, James Beckles, Harry Booty, Tony Breslin, Radhika Bynon, Steve Bynon, David Christie, Steve Clare, Sam Clark, Frances Clarke, George Clarke, Hilary Cottam, Lucy de Groot, Robbie de Santos, Andrew Dick, Ann Easter, Mary Jane Edwards, Ossie Fikret, Stephen Frost, Sally Goldsworthy, Stan Harris, Alisa Helbitz, Paul Hocker, WeiHsi Hu, Andrew Hull, Pierpaolo Inga, Ernest James, Claire Jeffery, Athena Lamnisos, Neal Lawson, Eleanor Lines, Harley Manning, Maeve McGoldrick, Richard McKeever, Esther Murray, Toni Nash, Mark Parker, Luke Price, Fiona Riley, Dominic Robinson, Ellie Robinson, Jessie Robinson, Eleanor Rosenbach, Peter Sebastian, Frank Sheppard, Lorraine Slee, Nick Stanhope, Ruth Stokes, Jan Tallis, Sam Thomas, Andy Thornton, Clare Tickell, Paul Twivy, Yasmin Waljee, David Warner, Mandy Wilkins, Nicolo Wojewoda, Linda Woolston, Derek Wyatt.
(70 signatures)
For more information and to buy the book visit www.change-london.org.uk