London: Mayor & More

Ken Livingstone On Tim Parker

He declares:

"The appointment of Tim Parker as first deputy Mayor shows clearly the path of decline of London represented by Boris Johnson’s administration. Mr Parker’s record as a downsizing cost-cutter is the exact reverse of the management of large-scale investment projects London requires. His record of brutality and heartlessness towards workers in his own companies is totally unsuitable for dealing with the complex communities of London. With this appointment Boris Johnson admits his inability to run London and simultaneously his inability to chose anyone suitable to do so."

He hasn't ruled out running again, by the way. I've asked.

London Assembly Labour On Tim Parker

Group leader Len Duvall:

"Londoners need to know who is actually running their city. Is it Boris Johnson, who yesterday did not know that one of his deputies has been making major planning decisions on his behalf? Or is it his coterie of unelected appointees? The Mayor should be doing the job he was elected to do, not leaving it to his unelected backroom advisers while he writes his £250,000 a year Daily Telegraph column and looks after his constituents in Oxfordshire.

The whole appointment process is becoming more and more bizarre by the day. We now have a First Deputy Mayor, three notional deputy mayors and a statutory Deputy Mayor whose responsibilities seem extremely vague to say the least. There is a genuine lack of clarity about their respective remits. Londoners need to know who is running this show as it's looking less and less like Boris Johnson.

The chair of the London Assembly is already considering taking legal counsel as to the propriety of Mr Parker's appointment and it is rumoured that a number of other people were approached for this position before him but turned it down. At the very best it looks farcical."

Legal action could be interesting. And with grey areas surrounding the positions of Sir Simon Milton and Kit Malthouse, who knows, there could be quite a lot of it.

Boris's Boss?

Obvious question: Will Parker rather than Mayor Boris really be in charge? More from Pippa Crerar here and here. Second obvious question: He might be "First Deputy Mayor" for just a quid, but will he chair TfL for next-to-nothing too?

GMB's Paul Kenny on Tim Parker

Union General Secretary Paul Kenny:

"This is a scary moment for London’s commuters. Tim Parker is one of the multi- millionaire elite private equity buccaneers who asset stripped the AA by cutting jobs and cutting services and raising prices to customers. At AA he targeted and sacked by bullying out of the door the sick and disabled staff. He took £30 million out of AA when he left it last year, having saddled AA/SAGA with £4.8 billions of debt. The good work of the last number of years is under threat."

Makes Bob Crow sound rather restrained...

Bob Crow On Tim Parker

Quoted in an RMT press release:

“Tim Parker has a reputation as a private-equity asset-stripper and has been dubbed the Prince of Darkness by unions that have encountered his methods in the past. We are well aware of his track record, and Mr Parker has the opportunity to leave that reputation behind him when he starts work for the Mayor of London. The world’s finest metro system does not need an asset-stripper or a Prince of Darkness, but it does need its modernisation programme put back on track if it is to be ready for the 2012 Olympics. Tube users and workers have already had more than a bellyful of privatisation with the huge waste and failure of the PPP and the collapse of Metronet. The Tube needs public investment to improve it for Londoners and the restoration of Metronet’s contracts to TfL control will be a massive step along the right road. RMT exists to improve its members’ living standards and to defend their jobs and conditions, and it will continue to do so."

More on Parker here and here and in my short blog for the Guardian.

Tim Parker: Another Sort Of Deputy

Mayor Johnson has just announced that businessman Tim Parker is to become his First Deputy Mayor and Chief Executive of the GLA Group. Fascinating. Presumably his title means that he's more important than deputies Lewis, Malthouse and Clement as well as being a different sort of deputy from deputy Barnes. He's also to be nominated by Boris as the next chair of Transport for London. I'm still not clear how all this fits together. I do, however, know that Parker will be paid a nominal salary of £1 a year. How can he afford to? Well, it probably helps that he's accumulated successive mountains of money from his previous jobs at the AA, Kwik-Fit and Clarks shoes. Unions call him - a former Trot, apparently - the Prince of Darkness. I wonder what Bob Crow's thinking. Now read on.

Dalston, Regeneration & Community

I wrote this for Guardian/Cif, where it went live on Tuesday and inspired a higher percentage of constructive comments than is usual. I've tried to open up some issues that seem increasingly relevant across London as a whole. See what you think.

Two week ago at my local blog, I linked to an article in Socialist Worker by Michael Rosen. In it, the distinguished children’s author and broadcaster resumed his long-running opposition to a major regeneration project in Dalston, east London, where he lives and which lies within walking distance from my home in another part of Hackney.

The scheme centres on the redevelopment of the old Dalston Junction railway station (closed in 1986) as part of the northern extension of the East London Line, but also includes the construction of new shops and homes, a library and a public square. Its backers – Hackney Council’s Labour leadership, former Labour mayor Ken Livingstone, Transport for London and the London Development Agency – say it will regenerate the centre of Dalston. So do the house builders Barratt, whose East London MD claims that the scheme “will finally lift Hackney into another league.”

For Michael Rosen, though, “regeneration” is a fig leaf word to cover something else. “What’s happened,” he writes, “is that the Labour Party has lubricated the wheels of big property developers and retail magnates in order to ‘regenerate’ an area. But it hasn’t been ‘regenerated’ for the people living and working there. They’ve been shoved out.”

Boris In Croydon

From the Croydon Guardian:

"London's Mayor Boris Johnson took up the challenge of riding one of Croydon's buses with a local resident today after she confronted him about the antisocial behaviour and crime on public transport."

Her name is Maureen Reynolds and she's a satisfied customer so far. Now read on.

SuitWatch

Boris misses some things. The Tory Troll misses nothing.

At Guardian Politics: What's Ken Up To?

Just gone live at Guardian politics:

What’s he up to? The question is asked in spite of – in fact, because of – the impressive array of activities Ken Livingstone has committed himself to since his defeat by Boris Johnson three weeks ago. The latest is to host from next month an afternoon phone-in on London radio station LBC, where he looks likely to become a sort of inner-city left counterpart to the seething suburbanism of breakfast show host Nick Ferrari. (The contrast could be constructive: as Ferrari’s frequent guest during his mayoralty, Livingstone seemed to savour the abrasion.)