London: Mayor & More

Murder & Inequality

Criminologist Richard Garside at Cif:

"Most behaviour currently defined as criminal remains unknown and unmeasured, making simple comparisons of economic trends and the official crime rate a dubious exercise. A stronger case can be made that what matters is levels of inequality within a society, rather than the aggregate level of national wealth."

But it is the distribution of homicide risk that is the most telling feature, as research by Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield illustrates. He found that the risk of homicide for those living in the richest neighbourhoods fell during the 1980s and 1990s. The risk of homicide for those living in the poorest neighbourhoods went up sixfold.

Placed alongside research by other scholars such as Professor Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham, there is a compelling case to be made that unequal societies are more crime-ridden, violent and harmful."

And London is the home of inequality.

Mayor Johnson Press Conference

By the time you read this I'll be perched attentively in the front row at what will be only the fourth press conference Mayor Johnson has held since his election - and one of those was that debacle with Ray Lewis. As with the last one, this will be dominated by the co-appearance of a senior Met officer introducing what I'm told will be a major new crime initiative. Last time the top cop in attendance was Sir Ian Blair. I suppose in view of recent events we shouldn't be surprised that this time his deputy, Sir Paul Stephenson will be fielding the awkward questions. I anticipate these proceedings with a rather heavy heart. Will be Twittering and reporting here later.

Isabel Dedring: Darren Johnson AM Responds

Following Jenny Jones comment, the Assembly's other Green member writes:

"It is a relief that he [Mayor Johnson] has actually appointed someone. Some of his appointments were made wth undue haste only days after being elected while others such as this have had to wait four months, at a time when it has been vital to have a clear steer on the green agenda."

A thought: would Dedring have got the job were Parker still on the team?

Isabel Dedring: Jenny Jones AM Responds

She emails:

"I'm delighted that the Mayor has finally appointed an environmental advisor, and a woman at that. I look forward to working with her over the next four years in an attempt to green a very ungreen administration."

Is there a "green light" metaphor here? Anyone find it for me, please?

Isabel Dedring: Bad News For Cars?

Boris Watch is hopeful. You read it here second.

Environment Adviser Announced!

My, the Mayor's media centre's been busy this morning. No scope for "downsizing" there, it seems to me. The fourth of five press releases I've been sent this morning begins:

"The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is delighted that Isabel Dedring has agreed to take charge of the crucial environment brief at City Hall. Isabel is currently Director of the Policy Unit for Transport for London, overseeing over the last four years the development and delivery of a wide range of strategies covering climate change, low carbon transport, low carbon building retrofits and sustainable travel planning. She has previously worked for McKinsey and Ernst and Young."

Isabel Dedring? She's "smart, tough, lean and American," according to The Guardian.

Boris's Shambles

Hello again. Here's Philip Stephen from yesterday's FT:

"It is all a bit of a shambles. Such is the take of one senior member of David Cameron’s Conservative party on Boris Johnson’s City Hall...The spate of high-profile resignations from Mr Johnson’s mayoral team during his brief spell in office scarcely amounts to a great crisis. Albeit bruised by the credit squeeze in global financial markets, Britain’s capital seems to be getting on with its business. It has another four years to get the Olympics right. For all that, the revolving door of senior advisers in City Hall has pointed up the absence of any obvious mayoral strategy and sounded a warning nationally for the Tories."

I'd be a bit more generous - there may be a political strategy in there somewhere. But I agree that it is far from obvious. More obvious still is the lack of an organisational structure to make it clearer, let alone effective. The good news for Tories is that Parker's departure ought to help. Don't ask me to tell you who's been telling me that.

At Guardian Politics: Boris & Big Buildings

A little something I threw together in my spare time (joke)....

Boris Johnson’s campaign promise to protect London’s architectural heritage and its neighbourhoods’ characters was a significant part of his election pitch. By pledging to prevent new tall buildings from towering, uninvited, over cowering communities or spoiling the capital’s skyline he spoke to powerful conservative sentiments about tradition and also signalled a contrast with the readiness of Ken Livingstone to collaborate with trendy architects and charmless property developers. Under his leadership, Johnson claimed, structures with lofty ambitions would be permitted to sprout and congregate only in aesthetically and socially acceptable locations.

Already there are cries of betrayal. Some have come from east London, close to West Ham Football Club, where a local campaign group has upbraided Johnson for giving a barely-qualified green light to a 31 storey tower that would be part of the proposed redevelopment of the local Queen’s Market. I should admit to being biased: I own a set of green, see-through dinner plates of the type Tommy Steele would have eaten egg and chips off in his heyday which I bought from the market many years ago. But Johnson’s hands-off attitude to the proposed development does appear to be at odds with the principles he previously espoused.

A higher profile – and higher physically – example is, according to Johnson’s critics, his capitulation to a proposed 43-storey tower of luxury apartment in Doon Street on the South Bank, behind the National Theatre Approved under Livingstone, it was “called in” by communities secretary Hazel Blears for a public inquiry, but given the go-ahead by her earlier this month despite the objections of her own planning officers and English Heritage.

Johnson had very little chance of stopping this. The inquiry had taken place by the time he became mayor and although he could have reversed Livingstone’s decision before Blears’s findings were announced, it would have cut no ice with her and risked accusations of costly gesture politics. As a spokesperson for Johnson put it, “it is not possible for the new Mayor to re-open the matter without exposing London taxpayers to significant legal and financial risk.” Nonetheless, it’s a gesture some believe Johnson should have made. Writing in the Evening Standard, his erstwhile supporter Simon Jenkins described this as Johnson failing his “first test” as “an emphatic city mayor.”

The mayor’s office reiterated that Johnson, “has pledged to review London's planning policies including those relating to affordable housing and tall buildings” Furthermore – though only after a one heck of a fashion – he has the experienced former Westminster City Council leader Sir Simon Milton to assist him. But the Queens Market and Doon Street controversies both demonstrate in their different ways that matching pledges on urban planning with effective and consistent policies is no straightforward matter. They also show that a failure to do so where tall buildings are concerned can excite political passions as high as the buildings themselves.

Will appear on the politics blog later.

At Guardian Comment: Mayor Johnson's Disarray

Hello. Yes, Spain was lovely thanks. Here's my first effort for the Guardian since my return. I'll be blogging here only sporadically for the next few days but getting back into serious action next week.

The Blond and the silly season were made for each other, I suppose, and their mating during this August has satisfied all implicated parties. As the scheduled Death of Gord tragedy ran out of plot (for the time being) newspapers’ summer craving for much political intrigue about nothing has been gratified by speculation that Mayor Johnson has designs on deposing David Cameron and becoming the giggliest prime minister in British history.

In a Telegraph column Johnson argued that Team GB’s successes in Beijing cast doubt on the view that society is “broken” and our youth devoid of moral purpose and backbone. This was read as a challenge to Cameronian orthodoxy and when subsequently Johnson used the Heseltine formula – professing himself unable to foresee circumstances under which he would seek to replace his leader - to deny having a covetous eye on Dave’s job, the frogs of speculation hopped still more madly in their box.

Johnson’s other contribution to the filling of holiday season column space came with the Olympic hand-over proceedings. Humorous diversion had been widely anticipated and Johnson duly obliged, struggling rather plumply to unfurl the ringed banner he was required to wave six times and later delivering a notably unbuttoned speech in which he pointed out that the sport of table tennis, at which the Chinese have long excelled, was a British invention.

This historical winding-up was not received with universal amusement by Johnson’s hosts. But it got up my nose for a different reason. I witnessed it for the first time shortly before 3.30 on Monday morning, having just returned from my holiday (on a camp site near Barcelona, since you ask). During my time away I’d seen only snippets of Olympic action, largely avoided newspapers and kept my mobile switched off for days on end. Only on Friday morning, 48 hours after the event, did I discover text messages telling me the dramatic news that Tim Parker, Johnson’s First Deputy and chief executive, had resigned.

This was a huge London story and still is. Not only was Parker the third of Johnson’s senior aides to resign since he took office, he was the mayor’s most powerful lieutenant. As Parker himself put it, his job had been to “run the place” on the mayor’s behalf, a brief which was intended to include chairing the board of Transport for London whose budget accounts for more than half the annual total of £11 billion the mayoralty controls. China might be another country and the Olympics another issue but given the circumstances back home a display a comedy jingoism about “ping-pong” looked flippant at best.

Now that Parker has stepped down the already fragile (not to mention still incomplete) structure of Johnson’s administration appears in disarray. The most detailed account so far suggests that Parker lost a power struggle with another of Johnson’s deputies, Sir Simon Milton. Unlike Parker and Johnson, Milton has experience of running London local government and plenty of it. If it is true that Sir Simon was so appalled by what he found on the eight floor of City Hall after four months of Johnson’s regime that he threatened to resign unless Parker stepped aside, it is grave indictment. The implications have not been lost on his media cheerleaders who have responded to the Parker crisis by reverting to tired red scare rhetoric against his (famously business-friendly) predecessor, their now standard default tactic when obliged to admit that their boy has screwed up.

Now what? In a thoroughly evasive press release, Johnson accepted that the political character of major TfL decisions make it necessary for him to chair the board (as Ken Livingstone had done) and that he could only delegate so many powers. This might be his first public admission that what his friend Charles Moore once described as his “Merry England” view of life is not suitable for a modern political machine; that running London might require a bit more than simply handing out top jobs to a few clever chaps and leaving them to get on with it; that there is a difference between light touch leadership and abdicating responsibility.

My conclusion about May’s mayoral election campaign was that in some areas (not least transport) Livingstone had better policies and where there wasn’t much to choose between the two candidates his experience made him the safer bet. This doesn’t mean I wish disaster on Johnson. He’s done the whole country a service by moving youth disaffection and safety on the streets up the political agenda. His cultural ambitions for London could produce valuable results and his approach to providing affordable housing – whatever that exactly means – may yet enhance the capital’s social as well as its property development.

But 21st century London is not Merry England and it’s certainly not the Merry Spectator. It’s a complex society of over seven million people, many of them frightened and poor. Mayor Johnson has made them several large promises. How long will it be before the million who voted for him conclude that he’s failing to take honouring them seriously?

Holiday Interlude

I'm not leaving from Croydon airport or traveling in one of these. But I am flying to Spain for my family holiday tomorrow morning. As I'm unlikely to go online while I'm away, forgive me if I don't deal with your comments or emails for a while. But please keep them coming. I have plans for this blog to be put into effect soon after my return and you, dear readers, are part of them. Till soon!