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.

Stephen Norris Gets Two Jobs. Or Even Three?

MayorWatch was on the case with this with this one yesterday, reporting that the former Tory mayoral contender had been asked by Johnson to sit on the boards of both TfL and the LDA in order to "co-ordinate their work". The latest is he's likely to chair Crossrail too. Now read on.

Kate Hoey Gets a Job

Hands up who saw this one coming.

More On Munira Mirza

News of her appointment is now on the GLA site. Her formal title is Director of Policy, Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries and we are told that she, "Will lead on the construction and implementation of policy for Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries on behalf of the Mayor and represent the Mayor in engaging with stakeholders to ensure his manifesto commitments are met." But what were those manifesto commitments? I remember a promise during the Sky/LBC debate to retain the big festivals, but I can't find anything written down here.

Munira Mirza: What Are "Freedom" & "Quality"?

What do we know about Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed culture director? (Or should that be "adviser"? And is there a difference?). Well, we know she worked for the right-of-centre Policy Exchange think tank, co-authoring the report Living Apart Together, about young Muslims and multiculturalism (whatever that means, and so on) published last January which found that for most Muslims in Britain, "religion is not a barrier to integration and is very often perfectly reconciled with being - and feeling - British."

We also know that she, herself a Muslim, believes the press must be free to ridicule Islam because "Press freedom is the foundation of a free society." And she tells today's Standard that, "I've argued for a much less instrumentalist politicised approach, freeing up the arts and enabling them to deliver high-quality projects."

What might this mean? Well, Mirza wrote in the - rather wearingly contrarian - libertarian Right Spiked Online that, "The troubled artistic search for truth is dismissed as ‘a bit dodgy’ and state-funded artists are happily recruited to produce propaganda for the latest war against social exclusion." The same argument was deployed in support of the New Generation Manifesto - of which I am a signatory - on the grounds that "diversity policies...encourage people to see everything through the prism of racial difference."

But hold on a minute. What if one group's freedom inhibits the freedom of another? What if "diversity policies" aren't actually the primary cause of narrow racial and religious identities, but historic patterns of social exclusion driven by prejudice are? What if "freeing up" the arts fosters not the "troubled search for truth" but dull conventionality? And who decides what "quality" is? Can it be measured objectively, or will even the freedom-loving Munira Mirza's judgements be subjective and political? These and other obvious questions may or may not be answered sooner or later.