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1. Because We Dwell Together

Londoners awoke to the news on a damp May morning in 2012: Boris was back.

Less than one in five had voted for the sitting mayor but this meagre support was endorsement enough. His opponents had polled even less.2

Why did a city with, at the time, seventeen Labour-led councils and twelve controlled by the Conservatives3 reject Labour policies and choose a Tory mayor and why, above all, did 62 per cent not vote at all?

The disinterest was surely not borne of contentment. London is a buzzing city of nine million souls but one in four are lonely often or all of the time.4 Some of our families are extremely wealthy, but a third of our children grow up in poverty5 and although our richest citizens outlive the Japanese, the healthiest nation on earth, our poorest have a similar life expectancy to the people of Guatemala, ranked 143rd.6

The questions that should have occupied progressive minds after that last mayoral election were brushed aside as attention shifted to the personalities that might participate in 2016. The cabals were reconvening, bloggers were blogging and the Evening Standard, and even the national press, was puffing out the gossip. Would Tessa Jowell run, David Lammy, perhaps, or Sadiq Khan?

With more than three years to go before the next vote, no one stopped to wonder: does anyone, beyond the faithful anorak, really give a monkey’s? If not, why not, and what lessons can we learn before the game begins again?

Our Rough Guide

Livingstone and Johnson are as interesting and as entertaining as anyone in British politics but they couldn’t excite enough commitment to compel the weary majority to the ballot box. Plainly, big personalities do not, on their own, generate mainstream engagement.

We think the ground is won or lost between elections, not with tittle-tattle and intrigue, but with intelligent conversation that feels relevant to the people who could vote but probably don’t. It’s big ideas, not big names, that light the slow fuse of the possible.

That’s why we launched Changing London in autumn 2013, with a tiny website and two ambitions. We wanted to gather suggestions for the next London mayor – practical ideas and the big vision – and we wanted to do it with a bottom-up approach to politics.

We didn’t have a lighbulb moment. There was no dream and we didn’t even have a plan, but we did have a hunch – a hunch that Londoners experiencing different aspects of our city might have ideas about how it could be better. We were interested in creating a ‘warehouse of ideas’ for the next mayor because, like Eleanor Roosevelt, we think that ‘small minds discuss people, great minds discuss ideas’ and that diminishing the issues belittles the electorate and fuels disaffection. We weren’t backing a single candidate, we were backing the people of the city to put forward their suggestions for changing London.

And they did.

We set up a daily blog generating and debating those ideas and also drawing on work in other cities. We were especially interested in how the great change-making mayors across the world ‘catalyse action and get stuff done’ by exploiting so effectively the powers of influence that come with the office – the voice, the visibility and the unique capacity to convene.

Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley had published The Metropolitan Revolution earlier in the year.7 ‘Cities and metropolitan areas are action oriented’ they had written, ‘they reward innovation, imagination, and pushing boundaries. As networks of institutions they run businesses, provide services, educate children, train workers, build homes, and develop community. They focus less on promulgating rules than on delivering the goods and using cultural norms rather than regulatory mandates to inspire best practice. They reward leaders who push the envelope, catalyse action, and get stuff done.’

We shared numerous examples of the kind of stuff that Katz and Bradley were writing about: Seoul’s mayor, former community activist Park Won-Soon, has launched a visionary programme to transform South Korea’s capital into the world’s first ‘Sharing City’.8 Boston’s Thrive in Five brings together hundreds of teachers, social workers, parents and children to ensure every child is ready to start school at the age of five.9 Stockholm aims to be the world’s leading green city by 2030,10 and Amsterdam plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2025.11 The list was long.

For six months we posted hundreds of suggestions: Play Streets and London Sundays, a Have-a-Go Festival and a cultural guarantee for London’s children, a Mayor’s Share in the top 100 businesses, citizens budgets and an annual London referendum … and so on and so on. Then we marshalled that material into themed papers and we organised events to discuss them. This book is the product. It is our rough guide for the next London mayor.

The Mayoral Super Powers

Over the past seven years, Mayor Johnson has become one of the UK’s most recognisable politicians, deploying the bully pulpit to develop a profile far in excess of that warranted by his formal powers. Consider how worthwhile that might have been if only he had more to say that opened hearts and minds, that was constructive, healing, generous, collaborative, bold or inspiring. The mayoralty, we think, comes with a set of ‘super powers’ – a voice that is heard afar, a visibility that extends far beyond the official remit, and a unique capacity to convene people from across the city, the government and the world in the interests of London and Londoners.

Imagine switching on the news one evening and hearing the mayor, our mayor, saying:

I want to start a conversation. Our financial services sector is a vital employer, generating wealth and opportunity. We are proud to be world leaders but that means we must embrace the responsibilities of leadership. This is why I want to discuss the Robin Hood Tax – a tiny tax on global financial transactions. Hong Kong, South Africa and South Korea have found a way to do it. Couldn’t we?

Or perhaps, picking up the Evening Standard and reading of a mayor, our mayor, making this case to fellow Londoners:

I refuse to call London a ‘great city’ while one third of our children grow up in families that are struggling. Poverty stems from the structure of our society and the rules of our economy: it is about the rich just as much as the poor. We need a more thoughtful approach to policy at the bottom. We also need a more thoughtful approach at the top.

The capital needs a leader who can inform public opinion and articulate an ethical argument, doggedly shifting the moral centre of the conversation. A mayor who will listen to and speak up for those whose voices are seldom heard and little understood.

The cautious consensus that infuses almost every ‘debate’ in Westminster is carefully calibrated for the swing voter who, apparently, abhors the different, the bold or the radical. It is not an approach that works for would-be mayors. The electorate has demonstrated a lively appetite for alternatives in its city favourites. Across the UK, and indeed throughout the world, mavericks have run well in mayoral contests, and neither Johnson nor Livingstone campaigned as figures of the establishment although both, with distinguished exceptions during Livingstone’s first term, largely governed in prose.

What might this more radical approach look like in 2016? The rest of this book is full of examples and ideas but we highlight two here. At the Changing London Open Meetings, candidates and possible candidates talked a lot about children and a lot about inequality – two of our most significant themes – but they centred almost all their remarks around poor people and poor children.

This is easy but it is not nearly enough. A bold candidate would ask instead: how do we build a fair city, where power and wealth and opportunity are shared more equally? This is not primarily about working with the poorest, because the ugly inequality that is flourishing in London at present is manifestly not their fault. Children’s centres and good schools and work experience are important, but so are a maximum ratio between the lowest and the highest paid, employees being appointed to company boards, a financial transactions tax to rein in the City, the end of speculative investment in London’s housing, and much more. Similarly, a mayor with high ambitions for London’s children wouldn’t only have a policy prescription for its most ‘troubled families’ but a shared vision that applies to all of what it means to grow up a London child.

A healthy city, a fair city, the best city in the world to grow up – these are wide, inclusive ideals. Delivering them will call for big bold inclusive ideas and the strength of character to see them through.

Bill de Blasio had both. He came from behind to win the mayoral race in New York by exposing the widening gap in income and opportunity between the richest and poorest. He attacked the ‘lazy logic of false choice politics … that those of us who serve can’t expect to achieve anything at all if we dare to advance policies that are bold and morally right.’12

Brave? A certain gumption, perhaps, but other mayors have also shown the way. The mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, has spoken about the time when a quarter of the city’s population were sent to concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. When a fascist Golden Dawn candidate was elected to the city council, the mayor wore a prominent Star of David on his chest at the swearing-in ceremony.13 Mayors make news, news influences opinion, and opinion shapes behaviour, both amongst the movers and the shakers in the city and, ultimately, amongst the voters next time around.

In this context, deeds matter almost as much as words. In Chapter 5 we reference the overweight mayor of Oklahoma who led by example in a city-wide campaign to ‘lose a million pounds’. Now, not only are its citizens thinner and fitter, but lower healthcare costs and diminishing workplace absentee rates have attracted unprecedented investment, unemployment is down and Oklahoma City boasts the strongest economy of any major metropolitan area in the US.

Canadian Naheed Nenshi became the first Muslim mayor of Calgary – indeed the first Muslim mayor of any major north American city – in 2010. The relatively unknown former management consultant snuck into office with 40 per cent of the vote in a field split by competing stalwarts of the establishment. He then surprised them all with his flagship project – 3 Things for Calgary (www.3thingsforcalgary.ca) – encouraging his citizens to imagine three things that they could do for their community and then to persuade three friends to do the same. Calgarians embraced the innovative approach with great enthusiasm and returned him to office for a second term with an impressive 74 per cent of the vote.14

A younger generation that is disillusioned with mainstream politics identifies with issues, not tribes. A same-old versus same-old contest in London in 2016 will not ignite the passions of an electorate that is young, substantially unaligned and increasingly bored – if not terminally disaffected – by business as usual. For mayors and would-be mayors, breaking new ground is very smart politics.

A New Approach to Politics: Do or Die

‘In this century, metropolitan areas, rather than nation states, will shape the world’s social, cultural and economic agendas’ says the international think tank the City Mayors Foundation.15 City mayors don’t have the power of prime ministers but nor do they have the constraints, or the distractions that come with that wider responsibility. When once threatened by an opponent who claimed to ‘have a plan’, boxing champion Mike Tyson replied ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’16 So it is with national governments. Every new PM has a plan, then events fight back. City mayors are in a different ring, less affected by the unforeseen.

Changing London has focused on the areas where mayoral candidates have been short on ideas in the past. This isn’t to say that bus fares and congestion charging and inward investment aren’t important, they assuredly are, but we believe London needs candidates who think beyond the points of marginal difference.

We need contenders who raise the debate, leaders who inspire and stretch us all and push at the boundaries of the possible.

And without wishing to be too alarmist, we look at the figures from the last election and we look around us now, and we fear it’s do or die.

For the last fifty years the mainstream parties have been haemorrhaging membership and core support as the big voting blocs based on social class have steadily declined. ‘The mass membership parties of postwar Europe’, says Nick Pearce, ‘not only represented the political demands of their core constituencies, they helped to frame and organise their social lives and civic engagement… Voting for a party was not just a rational choice but an expressive act through which ties of loyalty and belonging were given meaning.’

‘Increasingly, however, as the communities of social class fractured, parties came to lose these moorings. They became more professionalised and narrowly composed, with recruitment and promotion mechanisms increasingly focused on access to, and advancement within, the hierarchies of public office. As the realm of the state became more important, the special adviser took over from the shop steward.’17

This loss of identity and the consequential sense of powerlessness have contributed, according to Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford, to ‘growing levels of anxiety, addiction, depression and loneliness. Problems that have a social cause are experienced as humiliating personal failures. Individuals are left alone to cope with these problems as best they can and public services treat the poor like supplicants and victims.’1

Politics and politicians no longer provide the answers or even offer hope, something to believe in. Add in the expenses scandal and an apparently ever-increasing disappointment in the conduct and integrity of people in high places, top it off with some deeply divisive policies like the Iraq war, tuition fees and the deficit-reduction strategy, and it is unsurprising to discover that public support for politicians has never been lower: just 18 per cent of the British public now have any trust in the people who govern us.18

Inevitably, people stop voting or they find a party that appears to represent something completely different. Immigration dominates the agenda, ‘refracting voters anxieties’ say Cruddas and Rutherford, ‘into a brittle politics of loss, victimhood and grievance’. A positive political discourse is displaced by blame and recrimination. Romanians, benefit claimants and single parents, ‘troubled families’, young people, old people, teachers and social workers are variously offered as the scapegoat. ‘Brittle politics’, small minded, self-serving, mean spirited and unattractive. So it is that party members find better things to do and voters look away.

Changing London is very small, but within this tiny initiative there are the seeds of an approach that has the potential to better serve a large and diverse electorate and to reinvigorate democracy for a new generation.

Our contributors aren’t mindlessly happy but they are optimistic. They recognise very clearly the challenges and the problems in this city at the moment, but all of the ideas here are about making London better in the future – anything that was just a whinge did not make it onto the blog.

Clement Atlee famously believed that Labour won the stunning victory in 1945 because ‘we were looking to the future. The Tories were looking to the past.’ Similarly, our contributors believe it is by dreaming new dreams that we improve the lives of Londoners, rebuild interest in the political process, and win the mayoral election in 2016.

A Time for Ideas

Two wider developments make this a particularly timely moment for crowdsourcing and debating new ideas for the next mayor.

First, the Labour Party has introduced selection primaries for members, registered supporters and affiliates to choose the standard bearer. At the time of writing it looks likely that the opportunity will attract at least half a dozen candidates and probably more. It also seems probable that the other main parties will adopt a comparable process. A faithful and undifferentiated incantation of the Westminster line on every issue won’t enable anyone to stand out from the crowd. Bold distinctions will be debated, refined and selected or rejected. Ideas will be needed.

Second, devolution will be a major point of discussion in both the selection process and the subsequent election. As cities and regions across the UK pitch for enhanced powers, London has so far been unconvincing in its response. Specifics are thin on the ground, and at the moment it is only a bullish sense of entitlement that seems to unite London politicians, commentators, lobbyists and cheerleaders.

The deal for Greater Manchester, the first in the wake of the Scottish referendum, gave the mayor control of a new housing investment fund, enhanced planning powers, increased responsibility for local transport, welfare-to-work programmes, existing health and social care budgets, business support and further education and up to £30 million a year from the Treasury in recognition of the extra growth – and tax revenues – that Manchester will generate.19 It’s a big deal for the city.

So why Manchester, some Londoners wondered, and not London?

At a meeting shortly after the Manchester announcement the responsible minister, Greg Clarke, supplied the answer with visible exasperation: ‘Manchester came to me with a plan for what they would do with more power’ he said, ‘Londoners keep telling me why they are entitled to more power. That doesn’t wash.’

Nor should it, and if the discussion hasn’t gathered substance by the time of mayoral selections and elections it must do then. Our next mayor needs to earn new powers. They need a plan for London that inspires popular and cross-sector support and that demonstrably merits government approval. Once again, they need big bold inclusive ideas.

Here are ours.

Changing London: The Headlines

There is much to admire in London, but it isn’t perfect. Our city tops the tables on ‘technology readiness and economic clout’ but is way down on health and fairness and work–life balance.20 Leading is good but ensuring that no one is left behind is even more important. An explicit commitment to fairness and equity has been a running theme in the Changing London discourse.

We live in an age of new technologies disrupting and changing relationships and behaviour. An internet sensibility infects all that we do, online and off. We expect customised service and user involvement. Changing London has been less about what the mayor can do for us – we no longer trust the promise anyway – and more about what we, with the right mayor, can achieve together.

These principles – fairness and equity, voice and agency – have underpinned our conversations and are the load-bearing poles of a big and popular tent. Within this framework we imagine a mayor with three distinct approaches to their work.

First, they would inquire and listen, inspire and explain, convene and provoke, engage and collaborate.

Second, they would prioritise a little light institution building. Ideas need vehicles to carry them forward, and we’re not looking for short-term projects but serious commitments with enough investment to embed them in the landscape of our lives.

Third, they wouldn’t stop talking about the big vision – the best place in the world to grow up, a fair city or a healthy one, these are big visions – but nor would they miss the strategic power of the local initiatives that can catalyse wider change. There are times when social acupuncture can be more effective than monolithic bureaucracy.

This book isn’t meant to offer a step-by-step political programme for the next mayor any more than a rough guide for travellers offers a coherent itinerary for a lengthy expedition. It is a set of practical suggestions rooted in real-life experience. We have imagined London as a great place to grow up, as a neighbourly community where everybody matters, as a just city where power, wealth and opportunity are fairly shared, and as a healthy place where sickness is tackled at source. And we have imagined how we might achieve the changes we are calling for in a deeper and revitalised democracy.

Of course these approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. A good place to grow up would also be safe and healthy, a fair city would also look after its children, ensuring that none are left behind, and a place where neighbourhoods thrive would be fertile ground for strong local democracy and civic engagement. The sum of the parts, a clutch of modest ideas and a few big ones, would change for good the political narrative in London and transform our capital city.

A Great Place to Grow Up

In the next chapter we imagine how the next mayor might make London the best place on earth to raise a child. We suggest a set of six rights promised to every London child, including a fun and friendly neighbourhood, the extra help whatever it takes, and the first steps into a good career. Ideas include the introduction of 10,000 Play Streets, building on a ‘presumption of consent’, a Cultural Guarantee of the things we will have experienced by the time we leave school, an overarching strategy for the elimination of illiteracy, an annual ‘Have-a-Go Festival’ and a London Child Trust Fund so that all enter adulthood with some savings to their name.

A City Where Neighbourhoods Thrive and Everybody Matters

In Chapter 3 we reflect on how the places where we live, and the relationships within those places, shape the quality of our lives, and we imagine a city where neighbourhoods thrive and everybody feels important. Ideas include using guidance and regulation to design social connection into the places where we live, not design it out; introducing the Danish concept of a ‘Right to Space’ for community activities and adopting a ‘social acupuncture’ approach to seeding new projects; driving the colocation of local services with a London Register of Public Assets; establishing a Co-Production Academy; and openly measuring social progress with a London Index.

A Fair City

In our fourth chapter we tackle fairness and equality and imagine a city where power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few. Here we suggest four guiding principles.

On poverty: having enough to live on should be an entitlement in a rich city, not a privilege.

On wealth: remuneration distorted beyond the dreams of avarice is no more useful here and no more welcome than abject poverty.

On business: businesses of good character are defined not by shareholder return or contribution to GDP but by the difference they make to the lives of Londoners.

And on housing: houses in London are for people to live in and there must be enough for everyone. They should no longer be treated as investment vehicles.

Ideas include a Mayor’s Share in London’s biggest businesses, a London Fair Pay Commission, a Mayor’s Pledge adopted by ‘businesses of good character’ to pay fair wages and fair taxes, and – like the mayors of Nantes and Brussels – active mayoral support for a tax on financial transactions.

A Healthy City

We look at a city that prioritised the health of its citizens and imagine the programme of a mayor tackling sickness at source in Chapter 5. To promote healthy communities he or she should tackle inequality, clean the air, make it easier and safer to cycle and walk, outlaw smoking in parks, and ban fast food outlets near schools. Tackling mental health stigma, introducing traffic lights on restaurant food and learning about first aid, cancer, diabetes and how to keep fit in an annual Save Ourselves Week would ensure that we all have the knowledge to stay healthy.

A Deeper Democracy

Chapter 6 takes a different approach. Whilst earlier chapters have been about what the mayor might do, this one focuses on how they might do it. It’s about effective leadership and retooling democracy in London for the twenty-first century. ‘Ideas for London’ would be the new permanent City Hall agency charged with seeking out and developing new ideas. An annual April Vote would see Londoners take part in a referendum on a big issue facing the city. Citizens budgets would give us a say over how our money is spent, and a Table for London and a London Calendar would provide the infrastructure around which we settle the really difficult issues, decide on priorities and work together on improving the city we share.

A Spirit of Can Do

If there was a single continuous thread in the many and diverse contributions to Changing London, it was a spirit of can do. We don’t like everything we see but we do think change is possible.

We are bewildered and even alienated by the vision often repeated by mayoral wannabes – ‘the world’s most competitive city’ – partly because, as one contributor at our open meeting pointed out, it raises the question: competitive at what? Ballroom dancing, quiz nights, drinking games? But mainly because it has so little resonance with the average Londoner. Although 77 per cent of London residents are proud to live here only 17 per cent believe that they benefit from the building development in the capital.21 Big-shot London – big offices, big salaries, big business – is relatively peripheral to most of us, and 75 per cent say that there are a lot of things that they would like to do in London but simply cannot afford.21

A winning candidate would understand that reality, and develop a promise for the next mayoral term that owed less to the Westminster playbook and more to the people of London. We have ideas, we believe they are practical and we think they would reach the parts of the electorate that others never reach

As Boris Johnson is now stepping down and Ken Livingstone isn’t running again, the next mayoral election will be contested by first-timers. They have the chance to be something different, to stand for something more. It is very likely that they will be well-known, experienced, national politicians with a reputation to think about. Big ships are safest close to port but it isn’t what they are built for. Though caution might be understandable it would also be a wasted opportunity, for London and for politics.

One of west London’s most distinguished residents, T. S. Eliot, once asked:22

When the Stranger says:

‘What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’ What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?

It’s not a simple either/or – choices in government rarely are – but it is about priorities, and contributors to Changing London were unequivocal: we want candidates who know what matters most, leaders who will listen to Londoners and, in 2016, a mayor who will embrace fresh ideas and a new approach to politics.