Examination of Witness (Questions 720-731)
KEN LIVINGSTONE
8 JULY 2008
Q720 Jessica Morden: Can I ask you
what you think of the new Local Government Network idea that the
Mayor be scrutinised by the 32 leaders of the London boroughs
rather than by the Assembly?
Ken Livingstone: I was actually
in favour of that, because I think the cost of the Assembly, which
I think is the best part of six or eight million pounds a year,
the borough leaders would have done it for virtually nothing,
and because the borough leaders represent a degree of executive
power in their own right, there are the deals that politicians
are always going to do at that level. At one point, when the Government
was reviewing the powers of the GLA, I was quite keen and said
perhaps one saving we could make would be to get rid of the Assembly
and just have a committee of the 32 borough leaders. It might
have given the Mayor more problems but it would have represented
a real balance of the power in London.
Q721 Julie Morgan: What do you think
would be the advantages and disadvantages for having City mayors
throughout England, throughout the country?
Ken Livingstone: Whether you have
mayors or whatever, for me it is about devolution. All my life
politically I have been in favour of a proper federal structure
like you have in Germany or in the United States of America, and
Spain is moving in that direction, where the bulk of the spending
of the state is done at a regional and local level. I have watched
every government of my lifetime fail to get control of the Home
Office. Prisoners are always escaping, whoever is in power. The
Ministry of Defence budget is always grossly overrun. There is
so much being managed from Whitehall, and not very well, and I
think it is better to break it down into manageable chunks where
the lines of accountability are much clearer. Whether you call
them mayors, I broadly would just say, whether it was the German
constitution or the American, impose it, because I think Whitehall
is getting worse at delivering, not better.
Q722 Julie Morgan: Do you think if
you had city mayors throughout England that this would in some
way address the problems of devolution?
Ken Livingstone: If Government
gives some real powers and financial independence. When I met
the Mayor of Moscow the first time round, when he told me that
he would not dare introduce the congestion charge in Moscow and
doubted whether I would survive if we did it here, we were discussing
his requisite powers and the range of taxes he can use, which
is more extensive than the Mayor of New York. When I pointed out
to him that in Britain 97% of all tax is raised and collected
by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he simply said, "That
is worse than Russia under Stalin", and this is true. Where
else in the Western world is all the money funnelled into one
pot with the result that council leaders and everyone else is
constantly on a pilgrimage to Whitehall to ask for a bit of this
and a bit of that. When I was Housing Chairman in Lambeth in the
early 1970s, I would come up to the DoE to discuss with Peter
Walker, or whoever his housing minister was at the time, the cost
of modernising six terrace properties in Vauxhall. This is bizarre.
I sometimes think Civil Servants like this because it keeps ministers
busy, too busy to actually take real charge of their departments.
Q723 Julie Morgan: We have now got
devolution to Scotland and Wales. Do you think greater powers
and city mayors would make that a more satisfactory system all
round?
Ken Livingstone: It is. If you
go to somewhere like Newcastle or Birmingham, there are huge cultural
differences with London. If you go to the south-west or the north-west
of Britain, because of the concentration of power in Whitehall
and media power here, there has been a suffocation of the regional
diversity and the strong distinctive differences within England,
and I think that is regrettable and I would like to see it flourish.
You hear ministers and shadow ministers on the radio talking about
a postcode lottery. If you want devolution and decentralisation,
things will happen differently. It may be nobody else in Britain
ever does a congestion charge, but why is that a problem? People
should be able to get what they want locally. If we were to break
up the NHS and make it accountable to regional government in the
first instance, we would take different decisions about how to
spend the money and what the priorities are. There is a real disease
in British politics: the idea that everything must be absolutely
uniform. If we were to impose that economically, it would be very
deadening. We accept that different parts of the economy grow
differently, regions rise and fall, and yet to decide to have
an absolutely universal code that is absolutely identical wherever
you are in the country, I think, damages all the dynamism that
comes from strong regional and city identities.
Q724 Mr Turner: Can I just slip in
8A before I go on to nine. City mayors are fine, but what about
the areas without cities, like the Isle of Wight, like Somerset,
like Devon? Are you ruling them in the same way, or do you have
ideas as to how else they might be ruled?
Ken Livingstone: I have always
been in favour of regional government because, clearly, in the
way that organised crime now is, there is a regional dimension.
If there had been a regional government of Yorkshire over the
last 40 years as its traditional industries declined, the primary
role of the people leading itI suppose it would be David
Blunkettwould have been to modernise and rebuild their
economy locally, but too much of that got stymied in Whitehall.
In actual fact, if you go back to the Maud Report on local government,
there was a minority report by Derek Senior, which I still have,
where he talks about having unitary local authorities, the city
with its rural surroundings and also regions, and I think that
is the best structure. People come from around the region to get
the services of what is their major local city. I think there
was a reluctance to go down that route from the Labour Party side
because they saw those cities perhaps being controlled by the
Tory surrounding hinterland. I think if you are going to go down
this route, it requires proportional representation so that everyone
feels they have a stake in what emerges.
Q725 Mr Turner: What are your views
on the English question and how it should be resolved?
Ken Livingstone: If the Labour
Government had gone for full regional devolution, it would not
be a problem. As we have not, I think. I know I felt real
anger when I watched a Labour Government using the votes of Scottish
MP's to drive through policies in areas where they had opted out,
such as student grants and foundation hospitals. I thought it
was outrageous and, I should imagine, had I still been an MP,
I would have had really unpleasant rows watching Scottish MP's,
who have been spared these horrors in their own areas, being dragooned
to override their English colleagues. I think it is completely
unacceptable, and the failure to resolve that leaves the Labour
Party vulnerable to a real Tory onslaught in this area.
Q726 Mr Turner: But your problem
is actually that regional schemes are not terribly popular, it
would appear anyway.
Ken Livingstone: Yes, but then
there are the people who campaign for an English Parliament. It
should be as large and bureaucratic and unmanageable as our present
structure of government. If you look at the Spanish post Franco,
there were the strong Catalan and Basque identities and they had
really good, strong devolved government, and there was the rest
of Spain, pretty much like our south-east, it was never quite
clear where it was or which region they were in, but when they
saw what the Catalans and Basques had got, they started.
Different parts of Spain have moved at different speeds towards
devolution, but all of them, having started off on the journey,
want more, and that might be the way here. There are several ways
you could redraw south-east England, but there are very strong
and distinct identities for everything north of Birmingham. That
is not so difficult.
Q727 Mr Sharma: What lessons can
be learnt from the process of devolving power to London which
could be applied to a scheme of devolution within England?
Ken Livingstone: It was easy to
do this in London because Mrs Thatcher had abolished the GLC.
If there had been something there, all the vested interests of
the politicians and the Civil Servants would have been hostile
to it. Everyone recognised, after 14 years, there was a real gap.
We were underperforming, we were not getting investment, there
was no-one speaking for London, and even in Bromley at the referendum
there was a majority, I think, of 54% in favour. Everybody recognised,
after they had nothing, that this was not working and, therefore,
there was a real problem. If I was a councillor, if I was the
leader of a Labour group on a city somewhere outside London, unless
I could be fairly certain I was going to be the new mayor, I would
personally be very hostile to the idea. There is no way of doing
this without offending a lot of colleagues in your own party.
Mind you, this is the best possible chance for Labour to do it.
They have almost got nobody left to offend in our party's on this.
This must be the ideal time for a Labour Government to impose
directly elected mayors.
Q728 Dr Palmer: It is probably true
to say that there are only two politicians, in principle, who
are instantly recognisable by their first name, and they are the
current and former Mayor of London. Is that not a general feature
of direct election and does it not worry you that, despite the
advantages that you have described, as a paid up member of the
amalgamated union of grey politicians, I do have concerns that
the effect of direct election is to focus attention on the personalities
of the candidates rather than on what they are going to do? It
depoliticises politics in a way that we have seen much more developed
in the United States. Should we not pause for thought before we
start generalising it to cities all over Britain?
Ken Livingstone: But we have drifted
into exactly that problem in our national politics as well. It
is all personality driven. I think this is the absence of the
Cold War. During the Cold War, if it went wrong we were going
to be dead: the question of who got elected was a life and death
matter. We had been through a long period of time when it did
not seem to matter and when you did change governments not very
much changed. It might be, with climate change, we will be moving
into a situation where politics is much more important about what
people really stand for. I agree with you: I abhor the fact that
people voted for Boris Johnson because they think he was nice
rather than what the policies were. I do not think that is the
fault of the devolved structure, I think that is the fault of
our media's obsession on trivia.
Q729 Mr Tyrie: Coming back to the
England/Scotland relationship again for a moment, you have stood
up for the London taxpayer on many occasions, pointing out that
London taxpayers provide a disproportionate share to the Exchequer,
and, of course, Scotland collects a disproportionate share. Do
you have a view about how to reform that?
Ken Livingstone: I think transparency
would be a good start, because I have no idea what the real figure
is. At the beginning of my mayoral period, the general presumption
was that the subsidy London gave to the rest of the country was
somewhere between 10 billion and 20. As we hit the downturn in
the economy, those figures moved down to somewhere between two
and 10. I suspect they are back up somewhere between 10 and 20,
but when you are having an argument where the range of figures
is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion, we are not seriously in
a position where. There are so many ways of cutting this
cake up. Clearly, the dynamism of London's economy and the fact
we are still one nation means there has to be some element of
redistribution from the richest part of Britain to the poorer
parts. The weakness of the mayoral system in London was I had
no power to redistribute wealth from the richest parts of London
to the poorer parts, I had to come back to Government and argue
for that. That is the weakness. I always said I thought London
put a bit too much in, and I think in terms of what we have done
in getting the Government to pick up the tab for the Olympics
and making a big contribution to Crossrail we have done a lot
to redress that, but I am much more concerned that Government
should be putting investment in rather than revenue support, getting
that long-term investment going in. I have always honestly said
to London it is right that we make some contribution to the rest
of the country, we will always argue about how much, but our real
problem is we are all talking about figures that are so imprecise.
Q730 Mr Tyrie: The Barnett Formula
and Scotland?
Ken Livingstone: I seem to recall
being told the Barnett Formula was set up to slowly reduce that
subsidy. Unfortunately, it then hit Mrs Thatcher, who was cutting
back everything so dramatically I do not think the effect worked.
I am saying I think there is a real danger of demagoguery in English
politics, that you have a really nasty anti-Scottish campaign,
but I honestly do not know what the real figures are and I am
not certain anybody does. Tony Travers may have a more objective
view on this when he follows me here, but I honestly cannot tell
you whether it is 10 billion or 20, but I know it is something
big.
Q731 Chairman: Did you feel, by the
way, that you had any real capacity to divert resources within
the budget available to you or had a greater ability to do that
than, let us say, a local council leader would have had?
Ken Livingstone: No. One of the
reasons that the Greater London Council was abolished was because
the business rate meant that 60% of the GLC's expenditure came
from Westminster, Kensington and the businesses in the City of
London, overwhelmingly. They must have put up about half the business
rate between them, if not more. Therefore, for a socialist like
me, the Greater London Council was a marvellous mechanism of redistribution
of wealth because you had the business rate, this really expensive
core at the centre. Therefore, when you cut the fares, you could
actually see a real benefit for individual Londoners: even though
their domestic rates went up, their fares came down dramatically
more. With the removal of the commercial business rate, there
is really nothing. I abolished fares for under-eighteens on the
buses, and given that 40% of London's children live below the
poverty line, that was some small help (about £300 per child)
for parents, but it was a very crude redistribution of wealth.
I would be much happier to be in the position of, say, the Mayor
of New York or Moscow. The Mayor of Moscow has a supplement on
the national state pension for Muscovite pensioners because in
Moscow is the most expensive place in Russia. If I had that power,
I would have done the same in London. We have a London living
wage. We calculate that you need to earn £7.20 an hour in
London not to be in poverty. That is two pounds difference from
the national minimum wage. Given the differences between London
and the rest of the national economy, I am sure the national minimum
wage may provide a decent standard of living in Newcastle, but
it does not in London, and the Mayor needs to be able to reflect
this.
Chairman: Mr Livingstone, thank you very
much indeed. I think Mr Travers will want to take up your invitation
to follow you, or, indeed, our invitation.
|