et out and vote. Vote for a London mayor at this time as a result of the subsequent hundred days in London’s historical past could possibly be vital. This has been the bleakest mayoral election in London that I can keep in mind, however that doesn’t matter. Not one of many 20 candidates appears as much as main one of many world’s six biggest cities. However London nonetheless wants a mayor.
It wants a mayor as a result of 2021-2 could possibly be probably the most difficult within the metropolis’s fashionable historical past. Its public transport faces imminent chapter, its knife crime is rising and nobody, completely nobody, is aware of if central London’s financial system on popping out of the pandemic will totally get well — or discover itself getting ready to collapse.
Not all these challenges straight concern the mayor. However they concern the mayoralty. It was invented in 2000 to set the Thames on fireplace, to supply London as an entire with seen management. Ken Livingstone did that, as did Boris Johnson, although the fires had been mainly to heat himself. That custom have to be rekindled.
The previous 12 months’s pandemic has introduced actual worth to points of London’s native public administration. Medical doctors, clinics and hospitals have needed to carry out means past capability and have completed so fantastically. Native social work departments have been serving to the susceptible, all the way down to the extent of particular person streets and estates. Westminster, Camden and Kensington have fought to maintain their cafés and eating places energetic and on their toes, or a minimum of on their pavements.
Now the problem is for a mayor to rise up and be seen. Transport for London is shedding billions and requires an pressing political confrontation with the Prime Minister and the Treasury.
Why are the nationwide railways being bailed out and never London’s? The reply is that Johnson desires to make some extent that he cares extra for the North, and that London can undergo. It should not.
What’s London to do if its workplace financial system now loses 20 per cent of its occupancy, leaving crazily indulged speculators with empty towers on their arms? Suppose, as would possibly occur, each London excessive road sees its market merely implode?
What if tourism doesn’t get well from the pandemic, London’s airports clog and swathes of the capital’s jobs merely vanish? Different points are additionally getting ready to going vital. Knife crime has taken on a weird savagery, which London appears unable to regulate. That is identified to replicate a collapse in policing the drug legal guidelines, notably within the suburbs.
And what of the cannabis market? Virtually each metropolis in north America, from Los Angeles to Toronto to New York, affords a solution. The following mayor wants solely a airplane ticket, not an additional fee of inquiry. Not all these challenges are straight of concern to a mayor. However London expects a mayor to have solutions to questions, to be the champion of coverage whether or not or not she or he is working the capital.
The mayor must be shouting options from the rooftops. That’s how Nicola Sturgeon fights for Scotland and Andy Burnham for Manchester.
It could appear trivial however generally small circumstances are revealing. The continuing saga of the closure of Hammersmith Bridge makes me really feel I dwell in a banana republic capital.
It doesn’t matter who is definitely accountable. We all know solely {that a} swathe of west London is struggling interminable chaos because of an absurd “well being and security” diktat nobody has the center to overrule. Nothing occurs.
Each London bridge might shut and nothing would occur. The problem is civic management. If nobody is seen to be taking cost, critics of the mayoralty will ask: why trouble to have one.
The most important hazard now’s that if too few electors trouble to end up at this time, some Westminster politician will attempt to repeat Margaret Thatcher’s transfer 38 years in the past, when she abolished London’s city-wide democracy altogether.
A turnout beneath 40 per cent at this time — it was solely 45 per cent in 2016 — will likely be disastrous. For a political mayor, the dimensions of mandate is all. The purpose of a mayor is in essence certainly one of management, to battle relentlessly in Whitehall, in Westminster, within the press and in public for insurance policies that dictate the standard of life in London. It’s to be the voice of a metropolis, to bang heads collectively and smash down doorways. It’s to be larger than the job, not smaller. Above all it’s to live on. Londoners should get out and vote.
Author: ” — www.standard.co.uk ”
