Mayoralty

The piece is an excerpt from a speech which also talked about wealth inequality, congestion, and austerity (but I appreciate its tone is very rosy in isolation). To what extent do you think the mayoralty has driven the ‘poverty machine’?

1. I haven’t read Richard’s longer speech which deals with negative issues and I would love to do so, if it exists in writing. Meanwhile…

2.  London has always produced poverty alongside wealth, the wealth itself being partly the product of the exploitation of people generally in capitalism, and partly through mechanisms specific to cities, and to this particular city. The process was well established in its modern form before we gained the mayoral system in 2000. Already in the year 2000 I was writing about it: Edwards, M (2002) Wealth creation and poverty creation: global-local interactions in the economy of London. City6.1, 25-42. ISSN: 1360-4813 [ Eprint here ] [ DOI link ]

3. So impoverishment in London can’t just be attributed to mayors, individually or severally,  Sorting out cause and effect would be tricky and a big research. Subject to that, I’d highlight the following:

4. Livingstone did a lot for working class Londoners, especially in transport policy. The transformation of bus frequency, reliability and quality was a major progressive step, only now beginning to unravel. That was linked with the congestion charge which helped the bus renaissance but also helped London towards its massive achievement of reversing the trend of car dependence and must also have helped air quality. The Overground was a boon for suburbs, even though many of the benefits have ben diverted by gentrification. In terms of housing the Livingstone record is mixed. As part of his Faustian pact with financial and real-estate interests he was able to introduce strong-looking policies requiring social housing to be a target proportion of total housing output and that policy did deliver some much-needed homes. We criticised him at the time for not making these demands tough enough but, in combination with the grant support then available from a New Labour central government, xx,000 social housing units were added to the stock. But most of his other planning polices did fit the imperatives of private landed interests and his pursuit of densification helped boost the mass of rent and property profits being sucked out of the pockets of citizens. [This para could expand into books and Duncan Bowie‘s is only the first.]

5. The main drivers of inequality must have been declines in real wages for low earners and the rises in private rents, neither of which the mayor can much influence. Livingstone, under heavy pressure from Greens in the Assembly, did promote the London Living Wage. I suppose we’d look to My Fair London and the New Policy Institute for analysis of all this.

5. Johnson was of course a menace. He showed no interest in the housing needs of the poorest, nor in protecting working class communities threatened by displacement, despite a famously fluent speech decrying ‘cleansing’. Just one example: the evidence presented by Just Space groups at the hearings on the 2010 London Plan persuaded the Inspector to recommend that estate regeneration should never engender a net loss of social housing. Johnson used his new power (negotiated, I think, by Livingstone) to reject that recommendation. Transport was the Emirates dangleway and the garden bridge. What did I forget?

6. 2010 saw a new national government, a coalition of conservatives and liberals (LibDem) which quickly adopted a raft of severely damaging neo-liberal measures aimed at impoverishing the poor and disabled through benefit changes, service reductions and so on. They enacted the new, Orwellian, usage of ‘affordable’ housing in place of council or social housing and that was fitted in nicely by Johnson in his plans as a helpful way of redirecting housing production away from those most in need towards supporting the middle markets and speculative housing production in general.

7. It’s a bit early to say what Khan’s contribution has been.  But looking at his actions so far and his proposals in the new draft London Plan it appears to be very much business as usual. No more grasp of the need to damp housing speculation than Johnson had. A renewed emphasis on densification which is a joy for developers and landowners and a boost for council estate ‘regeneration’.

The jury is out, of course, and this is just a quick jotting at the end of the day over a glass of wine.  (revisions, no doubt, tomorrow, and more links). Do comment here or on twitter.

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And then there’s the issue of whether a mayoral system has been positive or negative. In my view it has been strongly negative and in a way I agree with John Lipnicki who wrote today