BBC On The Record - Broadcast: 02.07.00

Interview: KEN LIVINGSTONE, Mayor of London.

Says he will be able to deliver for Londoners.



JOHN HUMPHRYS: Another one of your promises there you see Ken Livingstone - the sun's going to shine! I mean we heard there from Tony Travers that they'd been an amazing silence, that you weren't courting controversy. That's sort of gone by the board in the last twenty-four or forty-eight hours hasn't it? We've had another sort of long list of the things that Ken would like to do: relaxing drug laws, gay marriages, raising ethnic quotas in business, joining the..... I mean, a lot of this simply.. doesn't it, disguise the fact, disguises that fact that, that you don't have much that you actually can do, there isn't a lot the mayor really can do so you are making an awful lot of promises that you cannot do. Why? Why do that? KEN LIVINGSTONE: The one thing that most of my time is spent on is preparing for the London Transport issue and we have created a structure there. I brought in Steve Norris and Susan Kramer, very few politicians would bring their two major critics and likely future rivals right into centre of power. When I come to appoint the new directors of London's buses and underground over the coming months, they will be invited to join in that committee as well. I have a job which is to try and get London Transport running. I think that is the key number one priority. If I fail on that I won't be re-elected. The other things are important, I mean we have a huge lesbian and gay community in London, they want to be able to register their relationships to see that the city that they have chosen to live in, or grown up in, recognises and respects their choice. HUMPHRYS: But you don't have the power to make that happen? LIVINGSTONE: No, but you can lead the public debate, some borough councils have been happy to get involved with it, others will step back. But I can see no reason - many American and European cities now have civic registers where couples that wish to commit themselves to a loving relationship are able to get the acknowledgement of the city. It doesn't have any legal standing but gradually I'm sure it will. Insurance companies will change their policies and things like that. HUMPHRYS: What about this comment you had to make about drugs. I mean I'll quote for people who don't know what you said 'you shouldn't be bothering to arrest the girl with one E tab in her handbag on the way to a rave.' Now you do have some power here because of the police committee and all the rest of it and the influence you can bring to bear on the London police. Is that what you are going to say to them, say to them leave kids alone, if they are just carrying the odd drug because you know we are talking about 'A' Class drugs here. LIVINGSTONE: But this is effectively the policy that the Metropolitan Police has been operating long before I was elected. They target the drug dealer. It's an absolute waste of police time to concentrate on trying to pick a guy wandering down the street with a spliff in their pocket or a girl with an E tab. HUMPHRYS: ....one is you know a very serious drug and the other is a less serious drug and one regards that as being the case. LIVINGSTONE: And you spy hundreds of thousands of kids in London and that's the reality of it. HUMPHRYS: As a serious politician shouldn't you be trying to stop that rather than... LIVINGSTONE: No, you've got limited police resources, do you target the pushers, the people that actually recruit new kids into drug taking, or are you going to waste police resources which are stretched on pursuing a few kids which will then get a criminal record. I mean the police have already made that choice in London. They know the real danger comes from the pusher, that's where they concentrate their efforts and they've got my backing in that. HUMPHRYS: Talking of the police, two thousand extra police you want, we heard the cost, seventy to eighty million pounds a year. Well now, nobody is going to give you that money... LIVINGSTONE: ...you've got to get out there and fight for it. But let's be honest... HUMPHRYS: ...well fight for it, meaning what? LIVINGSTONE: ..you've got to persuade the government that that is required in London. We used to have six and a half million Londoners and we had twenty-six...twenty-eight thousand police, now we're down to under twenty-six and the population has gone up to over seven million. We are becoming a more dense, a more sort of pressured city. We most certainly need more policing. All I am saying is let's get back to the levels that we used to have and I can't see how a government can resist that demand. That seems to me only reasonable. We're not just asking for money. I mean one of the reasons I asked Toby Harris to chair the police committee is because he, of the twenty-five members of the assembly, is I think the person, with the best talents to actually get in control of the net budget- archaic old thing that has gone back to 1829, all sorts of oddities and Sir John Stevens the new commissioner and Toby Harris and myself will be looking - how we can turn that budget round so we shift away from bureaucracy and into more frontline policing. HUMPHRYS: But isn't it a bit na�ve to say they can't refuse us this, of course they can, Gordon Brown can refuse all sorts of people all sorts of things and does so every day of the week, he perfectly well can and what he calculates that you will not do, is say to the people of London, alright we can't get it from the Exchequer so I, the Mayor of London, will raise your taxes. LIVINGSTONE: Well I don't really have the power to do that. There's a very small amount of the council tax that comes to the mayor and you couldn't possibly, I mean the total budget of my GLA as opposed to the subsidiary budgets of police and transport and fire brigade is thirty-two million and you'd have to treble the budget. I mean it would have a devastating effect in terms of people's... what they would pay. You've got to make the case to Jack Straw. I mean in private the meetings I've been having with government ministers have been fine. I mean they all recognise London has particular problems, it's the most expensive city in Europe. I mean the cost of land because we are the key financial centre in this time zone, I mean has pushed the price of everything up so it isn't just police, it's doctors, it's nurses. We are going to have to do something around the issue of London Weighting or further subsidies for housing or we won't have the people in our city that make it run. HUMPHRYS: But you see that police commitment was just that. I mean it was a manifesto commitment and... LIVINGSTONE: And it stands... HUMPHRYS: .... But it doesn't though does it because what you're saying to me is that it will only stand if the government will let me. I can't do it without the government.... LIVINGSTONE: ...well Londoners aren't fools. They knew when they were voting for the mayor that the mayor had very limited powers: no separate power of taxation, the only extra stream of income I can get is from the congestion charge and by law all that has to be spent on Transport - we can't use it for anything else. So it is a question of persuading and arguing. I have no doubts about that. I just would to say that irrespective of what people are going to say in public, for consumption, the working relationships I've had with government ministers so far have been excellent. HUMPHRYS: Yeah but nonetheless you should really have said shouldn't you 'I've tried to get you twenty thousand extra police on the streets of London but I may not be able to because it rather depends on....' Two thousand rather...... LIVINGSTONE: Well twenty thousand would just take us up to the level of some cities like York (both speaking at once). We have a very small policing establishment in London, a largely peaceful city. HUMPHRYS: But .... Unless you believe the Americans who have a strange way of looking at these things, but nonetheless, what you should have said was - 'I'll try and get two thousand extra police if the government will let me but I can't promise you'. LIVINGSTONE: Yeah - but in my interviews with you before the election before all the speeches I said it's a question of mobilising support to say 'Government's ignored London for too long.' And the key thing here is if you neglect London, if central government doesn't give London the resources it needs then it becomes an unattractive city, firms won't go to Manchester or Birmingham instead, they will go to Paris or Frankfurt. We're not competing with other cities, we're competing with our most dangerous rivals in that sense and the jobs will go from here to there and with it that impact we make on the economy. The government's got an interest in making sure our capital city can compete with others. HUMPHRYS: Well here's another reason why they might go to Paris or somewhere else and that is your congestion charges. It's a manifesto commitment this was. The truth of this is that you're not actually going to be able to do it because the voters won't let you will they? They hate the idea. I mean they're already bowed under the pressure of high petrol prices which you don't object to so ...... LIVINGSTONE: No, I stated absolutely clearly that if people voted for me I would introduce the congestion charges - so did Susan Kramer, Steve Norris honestly said he wouldn't, Frank Dobson said he'd take a bit longer. There was a clear majority in terms of how the votes were cast. In the opinion polls public opinion was evenly split. I recognise this is going to be the most difficult task I face in my life to persuade people that this is actually in the interests of London and being able to get around London. HUMPHRYS: Well, you're going to have to persuade them. LIVINGSTONE: You've got to persuade. LIVINGSTONE: Well what if they say, what if you do a focus group or an opinion poll or whatever or stop people in the street who say -'No way! We're not going to have this'? Will you do it anyway? LIVINGSTONE: I've said I won't do it unless we can improve public transport. I've got two years to improve public transport and my intention is that then we should have congestion charge sometime between August 2002/January 2003. If I get it wrong I won't get a second term so I have a real interest in getting this right. HUMPHRYS: Yeah, but who makes that judgement as to whether you're going to improve public transport or not because that's the key thing because you could.... I mean it's your kind of fallback position or your opt out position isn't it. LIVINGSTONE: I'll be sitting here in two years' time and you'll be saying - 'There aren't any more busses being run.' I'm sure you'll be able to remind me at that stage. If I hadn't been able to improve public transport in two years, I would have failed as Mayor and my political career will be over. I've got to get that public transport improving then the congestion charge gives us the money, that extra two hundred and fifty million pounds we get from that to actually continue to expand it further as people switch. HUMPHRYS: Ah but you see, back to public transport, staying with the tubes, and that's something else you're not going to be able to do is it because you wanted to fund improvements in the tube by issuing bonds - you're not going to be able to do that, the government's going to go ahead with its own scheme. LIVINGSTONE: Well we're not yet certain. The government, by law, has to consult the Mayor. Now I've not said I need to see all these papers and documents because I know that will be a problem for them. I will ask Will Hutton, a very distinguished former editor and the Industrial Society to do an independent analysis. I'm asking the government now to give them the information, they will make a recommendation in the Autumn. If they were to recommend that this is a bad scheme for London and Londoners saw the government going ahead and pressing on with that, that is a price that Labour will pay when it comes to the general election. HUMPHRYS: It's a funny old business this isn't it? Here you were elected as Old Labour as opposed to New Labour, you're not able to govern London except in co-operation with New Labour so you're elected as Old Labour and now you're going to have to govern as New Labour? LIVINGSTONE Well no, I'm not governing as New Labour, I'm doing what, issue by issue, I believe to be right and that's the only way I can go forward on this. If I sit and calculate, 'will the government like this or that?' the issue at the end of the day is 'am I going to do what's in Londoners' interests?' and if I don't - Londoners will get a new mayor. HUMPHRYS: Ken Livingstone - thank you very much indeed. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
NB. This transcript was typed from a transcription unit recording and not copied from an original script. Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy.