Changing London. David Robinson
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 (