It took over seven hours to elect the new Speaker of the House of Commons. It may take seven weeks to elect a President of the United States. The GLA managed to elect its Chair in less than seven minutes. If only everything else in London were as simple.
The Mayor and Assembly have now had some six months to work out the scale of our task. It is formidable.
Nearly two decades of Tory neglect gave London thousands of new millionaires, created on the city’s phenomenal success as a global centre for finance and business. But this success came at a high price for millions of ordinary Londoners:
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Spiralling property prices are shutting crucial workers out of London and threatening a recruitment and retention crisis.
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Family homes averaging £200,000 – way beyond the reach of teachers, nurses and police officers.
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A crumbling transport system utterly unable to cope with the ten billion plus passenger journeys made by Londoners each week.
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Traffic congestion that pollutes the streets and endangers children.
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A growing fear of crime, the rise of a gun culture in parts of the city.
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A widening division between rich and poor, with a great crescent of deprivation that stretches halfway around the capital.
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A stubborn and growing underclass with more unemployed than all of Scotland and Northern Ireland put together.
All of these problems are beyond the province of any individual local council. For example, Haringey or Croydon may well be able to provide backing for regeneration projects, but they can’t build a new transport line that would bring workers and customers from across the city to a new industrial park. That is the role of a strategic authority.
The Mayor and the 25 member London Assembly arrived in May, bruised after a long, difficult election campaign, and carrying high hopes and expectations. There was, and still is, a huge fund of goodwill amongst Londoners towards the GLA. The Mayor and Assembly, though wary of each other, have begun to find ways of working together. The Authority as a whole is, in principle, pioneering in its openness. The Mayor has been vigorous in his use of patronage putting men and women from London’s diverse communities in positions of influence.
The Assembly has started to wrestle with the demands of its unique scrutiny role, starting major investigations into environmental and transport issues. A critique of the Mayor’s plans for congestion charging has been widely praised. This was all the more remarkable given that the Assembly has no natural majority, with nine Labour members, nine Tories, four Liberal Democrats and three Greens. A procedural agreement between Labour and the Liberal Democrats has given the Assembly stability that helped us to avoid many of the pitfalls which created problems for the other devolved bodies created by this Government. Key functions, such as the Metropolitan Police and the Fire Authority are presided over by Labour members. Externally we are creating partnerships with business, voluntary organisations, faith communities and ethnic minority communities to find solutions to the city’s problems.
There are downsides. The Authority as a whole lacks powers. Think of it as being asked to cut the grass on a football pitch and being handed a pair of sewing scissors. There is a legacy of suspicion and hositility from the campaign which can make relations with the Mayor difficult. We have yet to persuade Londoners that between the London Authority and the Government, we have found a robust soution to the problem of finacing the Tube. And, though in itself trivial, the failure to pull together a New Year’s Eve celebration for London showed that we still lack the clout to make all the agencies in London work together.
All that said, the GLA is a move forward in modernising government. Some would say that the lesson we learnt in London was that we should not tamper with the tried and trusted ways of doing things. I say exactly the opposite. Even if democracy does not deliver the result we want, there is still a struggle to be waged to deliver Labour’s values in action through local government. And London is the greatest test for Labour’s modernisers: if we cannot combine prosperity with equality in the wealthiest city in Europe, then we will never do it anywhere. The holy grail of a New Labour majority for a generation could be won or lost in the capital.