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Mr. Livingstone: I suppose that I should start by declaring an interest, although I am not certain that I shall eventually have an interest--or whether I shall be allowed to have an interest--in the post under consideration. Being endorsed by the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) has not helped in any way, but my recollection of his diaries is that there will be a few good meals and the odd glass of good wine going around if he is interested in becoming my campaign manager.
I also have to say that I cannot support my party in the Lobby tonight because I have not heard a convincing argument to satisfy me and enable me to do so. I would, in the more liberal times that prevailed in my party before the election, have joined the Liberal Democrats in the Lobby in support of their amendment, which comes closest to my own views; but, as Labour Members know, shortly before the election, the standing orders of the Labour party were changed so that to vote against a Labour Government is now an offence against those standing orders and leads to withdrawal of the Whip and debarment from further candidature. One might think that an overreaction, given that we have the largest majority since 1935, but it might indicate that we did not expect to win so well.
I would have been prepared to be persuaded on the question before us if I had heard any convincing argument about why we need a separately elected mayor--why we are going to turn our backs on the best part of 1,000 years of painfully slowly constructed parliamentary tradition and run maniacally in the direction of a presidential system--but I have been unpersuaded of the case throughout, despite listening carefully in my office to the debate on Second Reading.
I did not vote against the Bill's Second Reading because it would have been madness to throw the whole Bill out and end up with nothing, but because I had not quite grasped the Government's argument I read Hansard
twice--the whole debate, every speech. I have to say that that was a hardship: it took several hours. I wanted to pin down the Government's detailed arguments in favour of a separately elected mayor and against the Liberal amendment, so I went through the debate and extracted all those arguments. Throughout the debate, Ministers said, "I am coming to that point shortly," so they will be glad to learn that I have analysed their argument, sentence by sentence.
The longest speech in support of a separately elected mayor and against the amendment came from my hon. Friend the Minister for Transport in London. She said:
My hon. Friend the Minister reached the crunch point when she said:
We then come to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), who said:
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East went on to state:
Next, I read the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck). She said:
To round off matters, my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Mr. Colman) rose and said that he had seen such a system at work. He said:
That was it--in an entire day's debate, that was the entire Back-Bench support for the Government's proposition. Pretty weedy, is it not? I do not want to undermine my own Front Benchers, so I have to say that my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill)--my dear old friend--supported the Government in an earlier debate. I remember clearly that he also uttered one sentence in support of the concept: when I questioned him on why we should not apply it nationally and have a directly elected Prime Minister, he replied:
Mr. Keith Hill (Streatham):
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for recalling earlier and distinguished contributions by the hon. Member for Streatham, but I feel slightly hurt than in his careful analysis of the Second Reading debate he has omitted my observation, in an intervention, about the benefits of an elected mayor.
"London needs the strategic leadership that can be provided only by a mayor who is directly elected by and speaks for the people, and who is capable of bringing all of London together. It also needs an assembly capable of scrutinising, questioning and holding the mayor to democratic account, creating a proper balance of accountability, but also capable of advising the mayor and contributing ideas and expertise in regular dialogue."
I can see nothing in that statement that cannot be fulfilled by the leader of a group, whether that person is called a mayor or a leader, in a normal parliamentary system. I agree with Ministers that an independently elected mayor without any assembly or check would be a nightmare and open the way for the most appalling abuse of power, so I do not find myself at all attracted by the Conservative amendment.
"The two proposals are inseparable."
She did not say why. She continued:
"Neither on its own would provide the mix of leadership and accountability that London needs. That was stressed in almost all the contributions of Labour Members."--[Official Report, 10 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 671.]
Thus stirred by my hon. Friend's words, I went back and read all of the Labour Members' contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Linton) said:
"We can have a hung Parliament or a hung council; we cannot have a hung president"--
that depends on how unpopular he gets with the public--
"or a hung mayor--at least not in the electoral sense."
He went on:
"An assembly without a mayor, as the Liberal Democrats advocate, is a recipe for inertia."--[Official Report, 10 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 603.]
That is one sentence in support of the Government's position.
8.15 pm
"I do not see the creation of an elected mayor and a Greater London assembly as a recipe for conflict, and most of the points made on that have been cliches."
Tell that to the American people who watched Clinton and Congress locked in mortal combat over a Budget; tell it to the hundreds of thousands of American civil servants who did not get paid, from the Defence Secretary to the park keepers at collecting tills at the gates of the national parks. Such deadlock is an endemic feature of the American system--it happened three times in California between the governor and the assembly and I am certain
that it has happened on many other occasions. That system is a recipe for deadlock and simply saying that it will not be will not make it not so.
"Similarly, we are told that a mayor will open things up to corruption. Why should that be the case any more than it is the case with the leader of a council in whom so much is vested?"--[Official Report, 10 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 618.]
I will tell him why. There is corruption--albeit not on the scale seen in America, which dwarfs anything we have here--but corruption is minimised because the leader of a council is like the Prime Minister in that his own party is scrutinising him every bit as much as the opposition. As leader of the Greater London council I never had any doubt that there were another 91 members of the council watching my every move. Labour members watched with the greatest dedication and concentration because, if they could catch me with my hand in the till, one of them might get my job. That is a powerful discipline. A separately elected mayor who is able to remain at a distance from the assembly and who receives a salary rumoured to be £100,000 will not suffer the same scrutiny from members of the assembly who are trying to get by on a loss of earnings allowance.
"It will be the different, but complementary, roles of the mayor and the Greater London authority that will deliver those aims;"--
achieving our policies for London--
"and it is because those roles are so complementary that it is necessary that we put a single, simple question to Londoners."
Unfortunately, her contribution in support of the Government was undermined when she went on to say:
"Without a single voice for London, we cannot tackle those problems effectively."--[Official Report, 10 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 637-38.]
We are not getting a single voice for London--we are getting two competing voices, locked into an institutionalised conflict.
"Such a system of checks and balances works; I have seen it working in Seattle, one of the most prosperous and fastest-expanding but civilised cities on this earth."--[Official Report, 10 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 652-53.]
I had the good fortune to go to Seattle for my holiday this year. No one would deny that it is a wonderful city, but there is the small matter of billions of dollars of investment from Asia--money out of Hong Kong--helping to boost the local economy. Nothing in Seattle's prosperity is inherently dependent on the structure of its government; it is especially well located for development on the Pacific rim.
"it is horses for courses."--[Official Report, 6 June 1997; Vol. 295, c. 726.]
When we marshal the arguments that the Labour party has mobilised behind a separately elected mayor--one sentence from my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, two from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East, one from my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North, one from my hon. Friend the Member for Putney and one earlier this summer from my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham--it is not exactly overwhelming; it makes six sentences in support.
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