One of the great things about London is how its immense diversity coexists with its one-ness. Londoners feel attached to their communities but they feel an umbilical link with their parent city. It’s this sense of unity that Boris Johnson has got so wrong in his first year in charge of the most diverse city on earth.

Boris’s early months were marked by some disastrous appointments. Ray Lewis, a black former church minister, quickly imploded as deputy mayor for youth amid allegations of serious financial irregularities. The mayor’s team hadn’t done their homework in their eagerness to allay the allegations of racism and appeal to a more diverse cross-section of Londoners.

That work was further undermined by the resignation of Johnson’s deputy chief of staff James McGrath after he told black Londoners who didn’t want a Tory running London to ‘go home’. Boris’s more recent decision to stop funding London’s popular anti-racist festival Rise has only fuelled fears that the mayor of this extraordinarily diverse city doesn’t really care about diversity.

Before the election, Boris talked Londoners’ language on crime. While Labour’s campaign pussyfooted around the issue, despite Ken Livingstone’s great record in introducing neighbourhood policing, Londoners felt we were out of touch because we didn’t talk about crime in the way they do.

Boris promised to ‘clean up crime’ with a Rudy Giuliani-style crackdown and free the police from the burden of bureaucracy. What we actually got is cuts, gimmicks and the political sacking of the Metropolitan police commissioner.

London’s Tory mayor slashed millions from the policing budget at a time when crime topped Londoners’ list of concerns. He announced £472m of cuts over three years and, despite his claims this would come from back-office savings, the acting deputy police commissioner Tim Goodwin conceded that frontline services would be hit. Johnson’s policing adviser Kit Malthouse, a former Westminster councillor, told worried Londoners that focusing on headline policing numbers was a ‘stale debate’. This was all very different from Boris’s campaign rhetoric.

With knife crime high on the agenda, Boris wanted to be seen doing something. He set up temporary knife arches at tube and train stations and made British Transport Police officers drag young people, particularly black youngsters, through them in full public view. This illiberal decision to demonise all young people as potential criminals was not only divisive, it showed a new authoritarian streak London’s new mayor hadn’t revealed during his chummy TV appearances. What it didn’t signify was any serious attempt to tackle knife crime. Labour plans to spend an extra £1m a year tackling violent youth crime in the five worst affected boroughs were slashed by 95 per cent.

Then came an astonishing episode. Boris hounded the Metropolitan police commissioner out of office with the slow dripfeed of innuendo intended to undermine London’s top cop. Even the intervention of a furious home secretary couldn’t prevent the Tory mayor carrying out the first political sacking of a senior police officer in recent British history.

Johnson’s lack of respect for policing was further underlined by the Damian Green affair. The mayor was accused of ‘potentially corrupting’ a police investigation after he phoned the Tory MP shortly after he was bailed as a potential criminal suspect. For the mayor to use his privileged access to highly sensitive information to prejudge an active, albeit controversial, police inquiry was seen as highly inappropriate, not least by senior police officers increasingly worried by the new mayor’s gung-ho approach.

London suffers a desperate shortage of good quality affordable housing. In areas like Barking and Dagenham this is the issue that drives support for the far right as working class people feel their aspirations are being ignored. Despite this, one of Johnson’s first decisions was to scrap Labour’s requirement for 50 per cent of homes in all new developments to be affordable.

Boris acted under pressure from Tory-controlled boroughs opposed to increasing social housing. His approach echoes the policy pursued by arch-Thatcherite Dame Shirley Porter in Westminster in the late 1980s. In a deliberate attempt to remove potential Labour voters from marginal wards, Porter conceived an illegal plan to ship council-housing tenants off to sub-standard housing in less marginal areas or out of the borough entirely. She eventually fled the country rather than pay the £20m court-imposed surcharge she incurred for her gerrymandering.

Boris has given Tory-run councils the freedom they craved to reduce the provision of affordable homes in new developments. He needed to balance this against a manifesto pledge to build 50,000 new homes by 2012. His solution was to come up with targets for new affordable housing for each borough. In a highly political move, the Tory mayor decided that densely populated and generally poorer Labour-run boroughs had much more capacity to provide social housing than leafier and wealthier boroughs under Tory control.

The mayor wants Labour-run Newham in London’s East End to provide 5,754 new affordable homes, while Tory-controlled Bexley in the outer suburbs needs build only 566. Labour councils are keen to get more social housing built, but it needs to be right across London, not just corralled into boroughs that are already poor and overcrowded relative to other parts of the capital.  

Then there is Boris’s plan to bring back the old Routemaster buses – the emblematic open-backed buses much beloved of Londoners that were scrapped on health and safety grounds. While even Boris has no idea what the final cost or timescale for this might be, we do know that a Routemaster bus carries 40 per cent fewer passengers than a bendy bus at a time when London needs an increase, not reduction, in public transport. But that hasn’t stopped the mayor planning to spend up to £112m, at Transport for London’s own estimates, on what amounts to little more than a personal vanity project while hiking up bus fares with rises that leave the average Londoner £90 a year worse off.
London’s economy, like the rest of the country, is facing recession and Londoners might reasonably expect their mayor to take action to support their jobs. One glimmer of hope in the economic gloom is the potential boost to tourism from the lower exchange rates for the pound against the euro and the dollar. How perverse, then, that instead of investing to promote London abroad Boris announced a one-third cut in budgets with a total spending reduction of £6.5m.

In another blow to London’s economy, Boris has cut skills training at a time when unemployment is increasing. He cut funding from the Camden Jobs Brokerage that helps unemployed people back into work. He then removed all GLA funding from the Kings Cross Construction Training Centre that has, in the past two years, helped 2,000 people gain a construction-related qualification and a further 1,000 to gain employment in the industry.

The reality of Johnson’s first year is a series of gimmicks, inappropriate politicisation and cuts in the very services he promised to support. Labour’s response must be to focus back on the issues that matter most to Londoners. People want to see a closer partnership with the police to crack down on crime, but they don’t expect to see our young people demonised. We need to extend opportunity to help people meet their own and their families’ aspirations for better housing, jobs and education – but right across London, not just in some parts. And we need to bring London together as one city while empowering people in their own communities and neighbourhoods.  

Policy by policy, this divisive Tory is pulling our city apart. Boris is dividing inner London from outer, black from white, young from old, rich from poor, employed from unemployed, homeowners from council tenants. It’s now Labour’s challenge to show Londoners we’re listening, we’re changing, and that we can bring London back together to create the city they want to live in.