Boris v Ken: London's great unpopularity contest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/apr/27/boris-ken-london-unpopularity-contest

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The London mayoral election has always been more about personality than party, and one wonders whether this wasn't deliberate, in the first instance. Cast yourself back to May 2000, when the streets ran with credit, party ideology was very last century, and the main worry of the political class was public apathy: why not make politics more presidential? Why not choose an executive? Isn't that a lot more fun?

This time it's still personal, but not in such a fun way. This election is really about who you hate the most. Its most visible voices aren't from within each candidate's campaign, they're guerrilla hate-crews ranged along the edges, the redoubtable Sack Boris protesters down one side, the tireless Andrew Gilligan (writing a blog at the Telegraph) and many other commentators and activists on the other.

Political scientist David Wearing said: "It's not unusual to have an election based on who people hate the least, and those are characterised by very low turnouts. But it's quite unusual to see an election fought on who you hate the most." Jenny Jones for the Greens and Brian Paddick for the Lib Dems are routinely ignored, not because votes for them don't count but because nobody hates them enough. It's a bit of a rum deal, from their perspective. And from the perspective of Johnson and Livingstone themselves, they've both got reason to quibble over the charge sheet.

I should for the record state that I hate Boris Johnson, I hate him like the devil. Matt Hanley, who runs the guerrilla Sack Boris campaign, said simply: "He's a nasty, rightwing bigot who hates the majority of Londoners." That's roughly what I think (and said in 2008), but the evidence is all quite … well, subtle. He didn't come back from holiday during the riots. He hasn't done anything about air pollution. He didn't extend the congestion zone. He's hiked up fares. He spent £1.4m on that daft bus he promised, without addressing the environmental-friendliness of the existing fleet. He's a bit of a flake, in other words.

Atmospherically, he is a snob, but if you look for concrete proof in support of that thesis, there isn't very much. Gilligan said: "I get tired of the left's manic attempts to claim that Boris has been a disaster and the city has collapsed into barbarism – it clearly hasn't." I agree, but I wonder if this isn't exactly what it would look like with no mayor at all.

Ken Livingstone, meanwhile, attracts rage of an equal intensity. The two main charges against him are that he avoided paying his national insurance contributions, through an entirely legal but somewhat grasping tax mechanism, and that he has inflamed Jewish opinion. I'm declaring an amnesty on Livingstone on kapos (when he likened a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard) and Boris referring to black people as "piccaninnies", as they were just too long ago.

Sensible people found both these utterances offensive, but no sensible person stays offended forever.

Interestingly, Gilligan levels at Ken exactly what the Sack Boris group say about Boris – that he's "sectarian": "The thing about London is that people of all groups and races mix. We have largely common, not sectional interests. I despise Ken's New York Democratic party approach of carving us up into ethnic fiefdoms. The only thing he ever talks to Muslims about is Palestine, as if they didn't care about the bus service or crime like the rest of us."

I personally find the tax business a non-story – it seems pretty minor. I would never change my vote over it. But when it comes to Livingstone, many people on the left share the unease of Atul Hatwal, from Labour Uncut, who says: "This is a pattern of behaviour, it's a normal-rules-don't-apply, 'do as I say, not as I do' mentality.'"'

It's as if both Livingstone and Johnson got into this position by disowning their parties, claiming they were for London first and foremost. As a result, neither is afforded even the slenderest allowances we make for the political class – instead, they're being treated as heroes who repeatedly let us down with their unheroic behaviour.

Lindsey German, who co-wrote A People's History of London, to be published early next month, notes one classic problem with a figurehead mayor: they don't have any power. If you look at the current crisis of the housing benefit cap forcing families out of London altogether, there's nothing either Livingstone or Johnson could do about that. They have no jurisdiction over benefits, and they can't build more houses. "So it becomes very much what they say, how they dress, whether they're too old, whether they're too grumpy."

But German also points out the pessimism of this age. It's depressing to look at the eras that created London's landscape; the titan philanthropists of the 19th century (Peabody & co); the post-war building boom, which mobilised the architectural talent of a generation, funded publicly, to house the city's inhabitants.

With this neutered mayoralty, the only things that get built are prestige projects such as the Shard that have nothing to do with living, breathing, voting Londoners (except that we all have to look at them, all the time).

And yet … there are huge things that are within a mayor's power, and could change London, both as a city and as a lived experience. First is air pollution. From two completely different sources – Ted Reilly, a road safety campaigner, and Alice Bell, a lecturer in science and society and part-time Sack Boris campaigner – I heard astonishing things about air quality in London. They say it correlates, not vaguely but absolutely precisely, with the traffic volume, that it is the largest threat to public health after smoking (seriously!), and that once you get any distance from its source – 20 yards – it vanishes.

In other words, if you pedestrianised major thoroughfares from 8am til 8pm, if you dropped speed limits, if you made public transport cheaper, if you consolidated deliveries to the periphery and got one provider to bring it all to the centre ("We used to call it the Royal Mail," Reilly remarks, erm, wryly) you could do as much for the health of London as the person who discovered that smoking caused cancer.

Being a pedestrian in London is much more dangerous than it needs to be (in 2010, there were 5,000 pedestrian and 4,000 cycling casualties; 58 pedestrian and 10 cycling deaths. If you look at it per mile travelled, rather than per capita, cycling is safer than walking).

Economically, it comes up repeatedly in living wage analyses that the cost of transport is not just a pest, it changes people's lives. The tube has become a luxury, a young professional's option. For someone with two separate cleaning jobs, most likely the only way to make that work economically would be by bus. Say that adds an hour (it's probably more) to the commute, that will ricochet into that person's stress levels, their parenting, their mental health, everything.

The mayor, whoever it is, can do a lot more with the powers he (or she, ha!) has than Boris Johnson is doing, or Ken Livingstone is suggesting. But it is also worth considering that, paradoxically, if they had more power, we would probably hate them a lot less.