We need a Mayor who offers London serious alternatives

 Speaking at the launch of Labour’s summer campaign last week Ed Miliband said “We need a new leadership: Leadership that thinks deeply and offers creative, new ideas. Leadership that seeks to be faithful to principle, even when it’s hard to do. Leadership that listens and cares.”

His eyes, of course, are set on the general election but he could have been talking about the London mayoral campaign. This time next year a very short primary season will be in full swing and members will be choosing a candidate for the UK’s largest directly elected mandate. Now, more than ever, we need to learn the lessons from last time.

Ed spoke of cynicism and a style of leadership that feeds that cynicism. Nowhere has that been more evident than here in the capital. Barely one in three people voted in the 2012 mayoral election with the vote topping half the electorate in just two wards and dropping elsewhere to less than 20%. Contributors to Changing London told us that politicians’ “big visions” often seem remote from their everyday lives and they have been very clear about the central issues.

The second Changing London paper is published today. It calls for a city where “neighbourhoods thrive and everybody matters” and it draws on a strand of debate that was started by Linda Woolston who argued last November that Sunderland is more friendly than London. She asked “why can’t London be more like Sunderland?”

The piece could have been easily dismissed – it didn’t look like serious politics. But that reaction would have been a big mistake. Linda hit a nerve; her blog was more widely read, liked, tweeted and shared than almost any other. Londoners know what they want from their next mayor and stronger communities are top of the list.

We want to live in a place that we love and we want to be loved in the place where we live; a place where people are friendly and generous – not in an in your face, happy camper kind of way but neighbourly and supportive. It makes us feel safe, strong and more capable.

We don’t want to be unnoticed. The stories of people dying alone, unseen for days, offends our common humanity and it scares us. We know that some people who live in London, particularly in the centre, are just passing through for part of their lives or part of the week, but most of us aren’t. We belong here and we have a right to be seen. We have a part to play, however small and want to be wanted. We have a voice and a right to be heard. These are the simple reciprocities, the give and take, of a place where people belong.

A good mayor would, apply planning guidance and controls to design social connection into the places where we live, not design it out. They would rethink streets, endorsing a presumption of consent for Play Streets and other shared activities that are community led, and they would support the development of high streets as places where people enjoy meeting as well as shopping, promoting local currencies and loyalty cards.

They would encourage participation in the design and delivery of services and they would support 1,000 local “platforms” for building neighbourhood connections applying a “community acupuncture” approach to local ideas which can influence the bigger context. And they would know what works because they would be measuring social and environmental performance with a London Index that is designed and run by the citizens of London.

Contributors to Changing London pictured this city of thriving neighbourhoods with these and other ideas not because social capital is more important than, say, policies for tackling poverty, reducing crime or improving health but because almost four times more people find work through friends and neighbours than through Jobcentre Plus, because stronger neighbourhoods have significantly less crime, and because living in a supportive community increases our chance of good health by 27%. In short because the quality and quantity of our relationships and the strength of our local communities significantly determine economic and educational performance, local crime rates, long term health and much else besides.

“Do we want a London mayor” wrote Steve Wyler last November “who will seek to win status and popularity with grandiose projects and thereby perpetuate power and control in the hands of the few or do we want a mayor who sees the goal as lifting London up from its foundations, investing in its neighbourhoods, building cooperative communities and thereby releasing the vast resources and resourcefulness of London’s most precious commodity, its people.”

Just as Ed Miliband asked his leadership question last week we think that Steve’s question should be put to Labour Party members next summer by mayoral candidates who offer Londoners a serious alternative – a city where neighbourhoods thrive and everybody matters. Most of all we think that these kinds of ideas, radically different policies, should be debated and developed now. Wise policies are seldom made on the campaign trail and by this time next year the bus will have left.

If you’d like to join the discussion, to suggest an idea, improve or disagree with something we have suggested, please join us at www.change-london.org.uk

Will Horwitz helps to run Changing London