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Mr. Terry Dicks (Hayes and Harlington) : If we accept what the hon. Gentleman says, why did he and his deputies try to lie to the British public in the last years of the GLC and say that £140 million had to be cut from GLC
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spending? The hon. Gentleman knows that his deputy was lying to him and that documents were shredded. In the end, the GLC had to increase expenditure, not reduce it by £140 million.Mr. Livingstone : There was an internal power struggle inside the GLC Labour group. Fortunately, I won it. It was remarkably similar to the problems which are afflicting the Government today. They are in conflict about the direction in which they should be moving.
Mr. Dicks : The hon. Gentleman is a liar.
Mr. Livingstone : What we proposed--
Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Hackney, South and Shoreditch) : The hon. Gentleman is calling my hon. Friend a liar.
Mr. Livingstone : It will not be the first time or the last time, but I am not terribly worried about it.
We proposed a policy to use the engine of London Transport to make London more attractive. We cut the fares. However, we did not assume that that was all that had to be done. We wanted a programme for massive capital investment. We were blocked year after year by the Government.
We also recognised that, to be truly effective, we needed a completely integrated transport system. We wanted to integrate British Rail services throughout great areas of south London, and other areas where it was the main form of transport, with London Transport. We wanted to put money into British Rail so that it could increase the frequency of its services to match those on the tube, and reduce its fares to the level of tube fares.
I went to see the Conservative Minister of Transport in July 1981. I said that the GLC would give the money to British Rail to enable it to do what we proposed. The Minister, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) who still represents the Conservative party in the House, said, "If you proceed with that policy, we shall cut the Government grant to British Rail by an equivalent amount in order to invalidate it." That was simple, narrow, partisan, ideological opposition to what we were doing.
When people say that London does not want to go back to the days of the GLC, I say, "You have not been travelling on London transport." Every day, I am stopped by people on London transport. I am stopped not only by transport users, but even by drivers of black cabs, who are not usually members of the International Marksist Group or a natural constituency of the Labour party. One can hardly find anyone today who is dependent on public transport, or who drives around London in a car, who does not regret the passing of the GLC. They remember the first few years of the 1980s, which saw a reduction in traffic congestion and fares cuts, with a 5 per cent. fall in the numbers of commuter cars on the streets of London. Every taxi driver remembers that period, because they recollect being able to get around more easily. Industry was also able to get its goods and services to the point of production more easily.
Mr. Robert G. Hughes (Harrow, West) : Either the hon. Gentleman is being disingenuous, or his memory is failing him. The traffic reduction of which he speaks occurred
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after the fares fair policy had been ruled illegal. What the hon. Gentleman is telling the House is simply not true-- and he knows it.Mr. Livingstone : The hon. Gentleman is probably confused by the fact that the figures were published after the judges ruled that our policy was illegal. We did not have long. We cut the fares in October, and Lord Denning stuck his oar in in December. It was not until January or February that the traffic statistics were published. When we cut the fares a second time, in 1983, exactly the same thing happened. Some London firms even cancelled their car and petrol allowances and gave their employees bus and tube passes instead. They recognised the financial advantages of doing that, as well as the overall benefit to London.
I urge those who say that Labour's policy will be an albatross around its neck that they should talk to Londoners. They should talk to the people waiting in a queue for a bus. They should ask people how much longer they wait today, and how much longer they must allow for their journey to work. I know from talking to people on buses that, whereas they used to allow half an hour to get to work, today they must allow 45 minutes. It is not all a matter of congestion, because there are fewer buses on the roads.
When a bus does arrive, because it is on one-man operation, it stands there causing congestion while the driver has to take the fares. That is a disastrous practice in a heavily congested and densely populated city. That policy has been adopted not to increase mobility but to achieve cost savings, and it was pushed through under pressure from central Government. During the five years of the Labour GLC, we resisted all further moves to one-person operation. I was interested in the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) about the quality commission, which will give citizens the right to challenge the level of services. I would like to think that we will extend that concept nationwide. I fail to see why only Londoners should be given an opportunity to mobilise pressure on local authorities when they are not providing a proper level of service.
It is clear from the faces of Conservative Members that they know that Labour's policy is popular. For the first time, a Labour Government will have the time to create a local government structure for London. In the past, local government reorganisation has been undertaken by Conservative Administrations, which I deeply regret. There has never been a system that accurately reflected basic socialist principles of efficiency.
There is no inherent commitment to waste in socialism. When we ran London Transport, we made it clear that no extra jobs were to be created in its central bureaucracy, but that that bureaucracy was to be scaled down. We saw a shift of resources into direct service provision. I want to see that concept applied across the whole range of Government services. The new authority and the quality commission will give us an opportunity to begin reconstructing London's government.
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4.53 pmMr. Richard Tracey (Surbiton) : My right hon. and hon. Friends and I welcome this debate on the government of London. We have been calling for one for some time to highlight the problems that exist in London, particularly in Labour borough councils.
The motion in the name of the Leader of the Opposition and other Labour Members is incredible. In its references to pollution, homelessness, filthy streets and inner-city decay, the motion draws attention to precisely what we and so many Londoners know to be the state of affairs in Labour- controlled boroughs. That is where the BBC and ITV should take their cameras. They should show that the problems to which the motion refers are not those of Conservative boroughs, where one sees waste bins, swept streets and the provision of proper services.
The motion refers also to realising London's
"full potential as a manufacturing, trading, financial and cultural centre" --
as if Labour could achieve that. One has only to examine the facts to know that London has already attracted numerous financial institutions. There are more American banks represented in London than in New York. Some 270 foreign banks have opened offices in Germany, but 478 have realised the need to open offices in London. The sum of $900 billion has been deposited in the form of Eurocurrency in London. That is one fifth of the world total and equivalent to all the Eurofunds deposited elsewhere within the European Community. That is the London that we understand, and as it is understood in Europe and the wider world--on the other side of the Atlantic and of the channel. Tourists spend £4.5 billion each year in London, and some 80 per cent. of that figure is in foreign currency. Labour's new policy document was rather appropriately launched as its leaders floated down the river a couple of weeks ago. They are trying to draw a smokescreen over London Labour authorities. Their vision of London is that represented by the Labour group whip on Brent council, Councillor Cyril Shaw, in his recent letter to the Labour members of Brent council :
"We need, above all, to win back the confidence of the electorate, and that will not be possible if we are seen as a disorganised, undisciplined rabble."
The New Statesman is not necessarily a journal that is friendly towards the Conservative party, but in a recent article, it stated : "Labour local authorities have provided the sole model of Labour in power in the past decade, and many have given the electorate a good fright."
That is why Labour constantly attempts to portray London as a dirty city. As my hon. Friend the Minister pointed out, that is a disgraceful allegation. Labour is running down London in the eyes of the rest of the world, thus proving that it is so carried away with its public relations designs that it is prepared even to damage the reputation of our capital in the minds of tourists and foreign business men.
There are many examples of inefficiency in Labour authorities in London. In 1987, Brent council apparently lost £8.8 million in grant because it was five months' late in submitting budget details to the Government. Its failure to submit a claim for repairs after the hurricane in October 1987 cost it a further £750,000. Camden council, another model of Labour party control of a borough, has a startling record of financial mismanagement. Facts show
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that the building department overcharged the housing department by £100,000 for jobs, some of which had not not even been started. Those are a couple of examples of how Labour party behaves in power, yet it is seeking to impose a further tier of government on London. My hon. Friends and I have often cited disgraceful examples of rent arrears and empty houses in Labour-controlled boroughs in London. The facts show that those authorities have the worst arrears in council rents and the most empty council houses, which could be used to house homeless people and solve, at a stroke, the problems of homelessness that we see so close to central London. Brent, which was Labour-controlled until two of its members sensibly crossed the floor recently, tops the list, followed by Lambeth, Southwark, Hackney, Islington, Ealing before it became Conservative-controlled--the Leader of the Opposition may have voted for the right party in the May elections--Haringey, Waltham Forest and Newham. Those councils, with a little contribution from Liverpool, are the worst in the country and are owed a total of £135 million in council rents. That is a disgraceful record.Education has been called the "big idea" by the Labour party. What would happen if London's education authorities were Labour-controlled ? Presumably they would follow the examples of the authorities that are at the bottom of the league table and produce the worst results in Britain for their children, such as the unlamented Inner London education authority, which was close to the bottom of the league table, Waltham Forest, Brent, Newham and Barking. Those are examples of what we believe is typical of the Labour party's education standards.
It is perhaps an opportune moment to quote what the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) told the 1990 Labour party conference : "our nation and our children deserve the best ; from us they shall get the best."
As the press has revealed today, he is seeking the best for his children by sending his 11-year-old to a school in the City of Westminster, which is controlled by the Conservative party, and, as a new education authority following the abolition of ILEA, firmly intends to achieve fine results for its children.
Mr. Dobson : Has the hon. Gentleman considered what the city of Westminster intends to do to finance its education service in the next year ? Is he aware that it has made no allowance for inflation, and therefore will insist on substantial cuts in its education service ? Like my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), who lives just across the river from Westminster, some of my constituents send their children to Westminster schools, just as Westminster parents send their children to schools in Camden because, under ILEA, boundaries did not matter. Is he aware that a substantial number of my constituents have written to complain about job cuts in Westminster's schools as a result of the policy of the Government and of that council ?
Mr. Tracey : That was a long intervention. The hon. Gentleman simply must talk to the hon. Member for Blackburn, who presumably is the Labour party's expert on education and who chooses, in the cool light of his own judgment, to send his child across the river to Westminster. Westminster has said that it will run an efficient education
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authority. It will allocate resources to the classroom rather than to an over-fat bureaucracy, which was ILEA and the GLC before that. While the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) is on the subject of Labour education authorities, he might like to note that Haringey recommended that education authorities should establish full-time posts both to promote anti-heterosexual attitudes in education and to fight to abolish all laws and procedures that seek to restrict sex education to the promotion of family values. That is what the Labour party is up to in the classroom and in its education authorities--quietly, of course, behind the scenes and not too publicly lest it ruins any slight chance that it might have of impressing the electorate with its public relations programme. We hear that the Labour party wants a Greater London authority--a lean and hungry beast, and quite unlike the GLC. The Herbert commission's idea of an all-London authority was for it to be lean and hungry, but that lean and hungry beast grew to have 22,000 staff and to spend £1,000 million. I suspect that this lean and hungry beast would soon grow into a rather fat creature similar to the GLC, which failed to be a strategic authority or to do anything with docklands or about traffic in south London. In 1964, the south circular road began its life under the GLC as a collection of signposts ; in 1985, it finished its life under the GLC as a collection of signposts. Despite that, Labour Members claim that the GLC was a strategic authority. It took 11 years to produce a strategy, by which time it was out of date.There is no earthly reason why any sensible person in London should want a Greater London authority. It would have little to do--the GLC was responsible for only 10 per cent. of the administration of London--and would spend its time producing motions about South Africa, eastern Europe and Northern Ireland, as we know only too well. That is not the voice for London that we want.
I should point out to the House an interesting comparison which I assume was made 10 days ago on television. The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras and I were presented with a film about Birmingham--a city which apparently has great civic pride and achieves great things for its people. Since then I have done a little research into Birmingham council and I do not believe that the people of Birmingham are too keen on it.
A new Greater London authority might follow the example of the Labour-run Birmingham city council, especially with regard to foreign trips for councillors. Birmingham charge payers paid for 149 trips to 31 countries, including Puerto Rico, the Gambia, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, the United States of America, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Soviet Union. The most popular destination was France, with 29 trips by Birmingham city councillors. Cannot we just imagine that that is what the 100 slimline, lean and hungry councillors of the new Greater London authority would be up to? It is not surprising that when Birmingham city council funded a MORI poll to find out whether the people of Birmingham liked their council, it found that three out of four residents thought that the council wasted public money and only a minority were in any way satisfied with the key services. Some of my hon. Friends want to speak in the debate, especially, I suspect, about transport matters, so I shall bring my remarks to a close. Londoners do not want another elected supra-tier authority. The Government are
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inviting opinions from the rest of the country on unitary authorities. As long ago as 1979, the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) told us that he thought that London should be run in that way. The people of London recognised unitary authorities as the best way to run London. That way, they know where the bills are coming from. The people of London feel that they get the most intimate and immediate administration of local areas from unitary authorities.It is a great tragedy that when the GLC was abolished, out of spite the Labour party decided to take its bat and ball home, pull out of the London Boroughs Association and form the Association of London Authorities. The LBA is the vehicle through which we should unify the voice of London, transmit it to the Government and, when necessary, bring it to the attention of the wider world. The Government should consider restoring the LBA as a body where the leaders of all 32 boroughs and the City of London come together.
I have spoken to my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department of Transport about transport in London. Travel and transport over the whole London conurbation should be overseen by a single Transport Minister, who would simply have the responsibility for travel and transport in London. In that way, we could move towards the kind of administration that our people desire for the smooth running of London. We certainly do not want our capital city to be run down, as the Labour party has run it down both in the debate and too regularly in recent weeks.
5.14 pm
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark and Bermondsey) : I welcome the opportunity for this debate. It has already shown evidence of the trouble caused when party politics overrides the views of Londoners. In his opening speech, the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) correctly stated the litany of complaints of Londoners about how degraded the city is. Ministers should not pretend that there are not abundant and regular complaints from Londoners about how awful it is to live and work here. But the hon. Member for Dagenham failed to deal with one of the chief complaints of Londoners-- the fact that, where the Labour party is in government, it governs badly, wastes resources and gives a bad service. A MORI opinion poll commissioned in Southwark revealed that 85 per cent. of people are dissatisfied with services in Southwark.
Mr. Robert G. Hughes : A Labour council.
Mr. Hughes : Exactly. London Labour councils are generally doing a bad job. If the hon. Member for Dagenham is to persuade Londoners that London would be better under Labour, he has a lot of persuading to do.
The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities says that it is terrible to run London down because London is wonderful and there are no problems, or if there are problems, they are all the fault of Labour boroughs. That is not true either. One of the obvious failings of the past decade or so has been the Government's failure to deal with strategic issues--a fact recognised not only by politicians but by many objective commentators, too.
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In common with other hon. Members, I received a document today from Hillier Parker, one of the largest London firms dealing with development. The covering letter said :"Over the last eighteen months, Hillier Parker have voiced the property industry's growing concern that the near critical absence of any strategic planning regime in the capital is the consequence of a lack of London-wide coordination in local government".
Both the Labour party and the Conservative party pretend that they have all the answers. The hon. Member for Surbiton (Mr. Tracey) fears that, if there is a new Londonwide body, the councillors will get on the gravy train and start taking trips round the world. They may or they may not, depending on who they are, but that accusation, coming from one of the Members of this House, so many of whom float around the world at public expense, is a bit rich.
London is a city where no party has the support of a majority of the people. At the moment, the city is balanced. The Londonwide bodies have no overall party control. There is not a majority of London boroughs run by Labour, by the Conservatives or by the Liberal Democrats. Opinion polls have been referred to, but when opinion polls ask people which party they would support, no party gets a majority of the support of Londoners, either.
The hon. Member for Dagenham was right when he said that the latest poll revealed that 43 per cent. would support Labour, 39 per cent. the Conservatives and 13 per cent. the Liberal Democrats. That represents the same sort of balance. There would be no overall control, because there is no overwhelming support for any one party in London, as is also evidenced by the votes cast in local elections. Last year's May elections in London followed the same pattern--the Tories had 37.7 per cent., Labour 38.7 per cent. and the Liberal Democrats 14.4 per cent. Let us be clear that no party can claim to speak for London.
Mr. Robert G. Hughes : The hon. Gentleman is making important points about representation in London. Does he agree that the people who voted Labour in London would be outraged and astonished if they knew that only three of the 23 Labour Members representing London would bother to be here for the debate, and to hear the hon. Gentleman's important speech?
Mr. Simon Hughes : I am grateful for that last comment. To be fair, I must add that more Labour Members were here earlier, although what the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Hughes) has said is on the record. It is surprising, as the Labour party has mounted such a big campaign to persuade people of their commitment to changing London, that, in a debate lasting only three hours, called by the Labour party, so few Labour Members are here.
Mr. Keith Vaz (Leicester, East) : Where are the Liberals?
Mr. Hughes : I shall come to where the London Liberal Members are in a moment.
The Labour party has come up with a list of proposals, the general thrust of which is correct. My party in its present form believes, and the Liberal party for many years previously believed, in regional government for London. I do not know whether hon. Members have noticed one interesting fact about Labour's document. It
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does not cite a single Labour authority in London as an example of good practice. Indeed, it cites only one council, the London borough of Sutton, and that is run by the Liberal Democrats. I have checked and double-checked, and I can find not one Labour borough cited as an example of good local government practice.Mr. Robert G. Hughes : The hon. Gentleman cannot blame Labour for that.
Mr. Hughes : No, I cannot blame Labour for that, because Labour examples of good local government practice are difficult to find. The London county council was generally well supported and well respected. The Greater London council, which was created by the Tories, was never appreciated as correctly designed. The hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) was correct to say that it was not the right size or shape and did not have the right powers. Like other colleagues, I opposed its abolition, because the Government did not produce an alternative. That is why we also opposed the abolition of the Inner London education authority.
Mr. John Marshall rose -- Mr. Hughes : No, I shall not give way. I should like to press on a little.
We now have the chance of a review. The Government have said that they wish to review local government, but not in London. Everywhere else can contemplate having a different form of local government, but not London. That is the wrong stance and the wrong approach, because Londoners, as much as anyone else, can hold the view that their area needs to be reformed. Opinion polls show that a substantial majority of people are in favour of London having a coherent voice. According to the last poll, 67 per cent. of Londoners said that, in one form or another, London should have a single coherent voice.
The case for a strategic authority is well supported by all objective commentators outside this House. London is almost unique among the world's large cities in not having that co-ordination. Obvious examples of that need are regularly apparent. It is needed, for example, for planning London's transport system, instead of discovering that the land that is needed has already been sold off, so that land for a new railway or tube must, belatedly, be found somewhere else. We have not integrated bus, train, underground and riverbus services or planned such services with interchangeable tickets, and the inability to ensure that docklands is developed for the benefit of all the people of docklands, with democratic accountability, has shown the folly of policies that many have come to regret.
We must decide where to go from here. There are several examples of the weakness of Labour's document. First, it is clearly not yet Labour policy to provide any new strategic London authority with a substantial sum of money. It is no good coming up with a new structure without the money to finance it. Secondly, there is no clear timetable in Labour's document. Labour says that it will produce a new London authority at the same time as introducing devolution in the rest of the country. However, there is a strong argument that London should have its authority earlier than that, before the others. That is what Liberal Democrats believe.
Mr. Dick Douglas (Dunfermline, West) : Before Scotland ?
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Mr. Hughes : No, before any other region in England.
Thirdly, Labour claims that the authority would be electorally accountable and, like me, supports the idea of annual elections. However, Labour fights shy of proportional representation and does not endorse the fundamental method of real accountability, which is to make the people who are elected reflect the views of the electorate.
Fourthly, the Labour document talks about boundaries, but it will be the Labour party that will decide the boundaries, not the people of London.
Labour's fifth proposal is the establishment of a quality commission. This is interesting, and it gives the game away. In 1990, Labour would have given the quality commission
"powers to require a council to invite alternative providers from the public, voluntary or private sector to deliver a customer contract"
if it was not working. However, the new document does not give any such powers. It states :
"In exceptional cases, the commission would have powers to send in a management advisory team to a particular authority if there was widespread public concern about the breakdown in the provision of a particular service."
Although people could complain to the quality commission, the commission would not have the power to do anything about it. Finally, Labour's document contains some wonderful double-talk about the City of London :
"Within London, we will meet the party's long standing commitment to abolish the local government powers of the Corporation of the City. We will consult with the Corporation and others to ensure the ceremonial duties now carried out by the Lord Mayor continue and that other institutions of value are maintained."
When launching the document, the hon. Member for Dagenham apparently said that the City corporation would remain to elect the lord mayor, although it would not have any power other than to elect the lord major--how ridiculous. Either there should be a Lord Mayor for the whole of London or the lord mayor should remain in the City. I support the lord mayor being elected from the whole metropolis, but the issue should not be fudged as it is in the Labour party's document.
Mr. John Marshall rose --
Mr. Shersby rose --
Mr. Hughes : I shall give way just once--to the hon. Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall), who rose earlier.
Mr. Marshall : I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Is he saying that he would do away with the City corporation and with the lord mayor who is elected by the City corporation?
Mr. Hughes : That is a perfectly reasonable question, and I shall answer it as I come to the end of my speech.
Mr. Shersby : Will the hon. Gentleman give way briefly on the question of the lord mayor?
Mr. Shersby : Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that there are two cities in what we know as London--the London borough of the city of Westminster, which has its own lord mayor, and on which body I served for several
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years, and the City of London? Do the Liberal Democrats propose to abolish the role of the lord mayor of the city of Westminster?Mr. Hughes : I shall deal with that quickly. Of course the city of Westminster should have its own lord mayor. Indeed, some of us in Southwark, where we have two cathedrals, believe that we should have a lord mayor and be a city ourselves, but that is another argument. I shall come to the wider issue of the lord mayor of London in a moment.
My colleagues and I believe that the principles that should govern local government include starting from the bottom up and ensuring that local government bodies reflect natural communities and that their boundaries reflect the boundaries of those communities. Government should be at the lowest tier possible. We should have parish and community councils in London. They are permitted everywhere else in England but not, for some reason, in our capital city. There should also be a strategic regional tier of government, devolved from Whitehall, with powers that should be exercised Londonwide but by a democratically accountable London body. Between those tiers--here I believe that I carry with me the right hon. Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson)--there is a strong view, which runs against the tight conspiracy of the Tory and Labour parties generally, that the present London boroughs are not the right size. At a pensioners' meeting in Bermondsey this morning, I put my view that, if we had a fixed regional authority, we could have much smaller boroughs, as used to be the case. That was met with overwhelming approval, because such boroughs would reflect the size of the local communities, whether in Holborn, Bermondsey, Camberwell or Southwark.
Finally, we must give local government the power to levy its own taxation. It is no good making local government dependent upon Government handouts, which is what Labour does, because, as the right hon. and learned Member for Monklands, East (Mr. Smith) is always telling us in debates about money, Government handouts depend on the economy being able to allow that money to be handed out, and there is no guarantee of that.
We should stop the dog fight. We should stop pretending that any of us had the right to impose our view about the government of London on Londoners. If hon. Members argue here that the people of Vilnius, Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania should have the right to
self-determination, why should not the people of London have the same right? Let them decide. Let them decide where their boundaries should be. I read that the mayor of Croydon would like Croydon to be regarded as Surrey, not a Greater London authority. Let the people of Croydon, or Bexley, or Bromley, decide for themselves. Let the people, not the politicians, decide.
If the people want London boroughs of the present size or much smaller boroughs such as the old metropolitan ones, let them decide. I think that they would decide for a smaller metropolitan borough, in which government is much closer to home. If they want parish and community councils, Londoners should, like those in the rest of England, decide. If they want a regional authority, let the people of London decide that, too.
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In answer to the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Shersby) and for Hendon, South, I and my party believe that the City of London corporation should be abolished. Then the lord mayor of London could be elected to represent the metropolis as it is eventually defined. Londoners should decide that matter as well. If Londoners think that the anomaly of an electorate made up of a few people in the City--business people and people such as myself still with a vote as a legacy of my days as a practitioner at the Bar in the Temple--is suitable to elect the lord mayor of London, so be it. Let all Londoners decide what the electorate should be. I think that they would decide that the present system is anomalous and out of date and ought to change.I hope that Londoners decide that London government should be based in county hall and that we should not lose county hall to the private sector, which is now the risk. They should also decide the question that the Secretary of State has placed on the agenda in his consultation paper which we await : how should local government be run? Should it be run as now, when councillors elect a local leader, or should we elect for each level of authority a small number of councillors either with an elected mayor or five or six people elected to carry out the tasks of running transport, housing and so on? I favour a move in that direction, but let Londoners decide. None of the political parties has the majority support of Londoners.
Ms. Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington) : Speak for yourself.
Mr. Hughes : I speak for the hon. Lady too. The Labour party does not have majority support in London.
Mr. Hughes : The Labour party does not have a majority in London ; neither do the Tories or the Liberal Democrats.
Any party which imposed its will on London would be unreasonable and would create the same hostility and anomaly, and thus the desire for change, for which we have fought for the past 20 years. Let us have a fair system for electing the type of government that the people want, and less arrogance from the politicians.
5.32 pm
Sir William Shelton (Streatham) : After the press conference of the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould), given while he was floating down the Thames, I was rung up by the press and asked if I thought that London was in crisis. I said that I did not think so ; that Lambeth was in crisis, not London. I entirely agree with my hon. Friends that the way in which the hon. Gentleman rubbished our capital city was disgraceful, yet he had the clear support of Labour Members. It was wrong and does no good. It is reasonable to criticise, but not to rubbish London as he did. He spoke for 30 minutes and spent 20 or 25 minutes criticising London, but only about seven or eight minutes suggesting solutions. I shall come to them later. I was a member for Wandsworth on the Greater London council in its glorious years from 1967 to 1970. They were glorious because the council was Tory- controlled. Even then I thought that the GLC and the Inner London education authority, of which I was chief
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whip, contributed little and cost a great deal. Today, we have heard of a possible son of the GLC--a new Greater London authority. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Tracey), I was taken aback by the words that the hon. Member for Dagenham chose when he spoke of a lean and hungry animal, or whatever it was. As my hon. Friend said, everything that is lean and hungry gets fattened up. If the hon. Gentleman had said that the new authority would be neutered, muzzled and on a lead, we might have been slightly reassured. I certainly was not reassured when the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) said that the Opposition would have the opportunity to set up this new tier of London government on true socialist principles. I just wish that every Londoner could have heard him. They would have shuddered at his remarks.It is unfortunate that my hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton spoke before me as much of my speech is along the same lines. I agree with him that the London Boroughs Association could become a forum for the discussion of Londonwide matters. I see no reason why that should not happen. There are occasions when such matters should be discussed and, presumably, that is the purpose of the LBA. Rather than build new layers of bureaucracy upwards, that forum seems to be the way forward. Conservative Members are trying to move decision making down to the people. For example, we have introduced local management of schools by governors and parents and have attempted to move decision making downwards on council estates so that residents take over their management. I am sure that that will be the trend for the next decade, rather than building tiers of government upwards at great cost. As I represent Lambeth, my hon. Friends will understand why I express dismay that a Greater London authority may one day be Labour- controlled. Lambeth is absolutely typical of Labour control. Lambeth is cutting education, although I must tell my hon. Friends that it is not closing youth clubs, as has been reported, but merely youth centres, which will re-open in September.
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