Senate Member
Posts: 6,144 
April 21st, 2007, 07:10 AM
Campaigning to become the new Mayor of London in 2008 is starting soon, with one of the candidates being Richard Fairbrass, former member of pop group Right Said Fred who sang "I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt" in 1991.
Charles Moore says it's time to make London part of Britain again....
Make London part of Britain again
By Charles Moore
21/04/2007
Trafalgar Square, London: The giant Metropolis, which has a metropolitan population of 14 million people, has been more prominent in the history of the world for so long than any other city on Earth with the possible exception of Rome.
On Tuesday, in the course of what policemen call routine investigations, I discovered that the Conservatives were planning to make Greg Dyke, the former director-general of the BBC, their candidate for Mayor of London. No sooner did the story appear the following day than the plan collapsed.
Most people could see at once that Mr Dyke, though proud of being "the boy from Hayes", was not otherwise qualified for the job. His main contribution to the BBC was to describe it as "hideously white" and to handle the affair of the death of Dr David Kelly so naively that Tony Blair got the better of him. He is no good at politics, and he is not in any sense a Conservative.
But, fiasco though the Dyke scheme was, there was a tiny germ of a good idea behind it. It was an attempt to address the fact that London is different.
With the exception of Rome, no city has been so prominent in the history of the world for so long, but in the past 20 years something new has happened. The capital has become more important than the country. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, London is the greatest city on the planet, with a fairly unimportant country attached.
Because of its financial liberalisation in the 1980s, its geographical position, its English language, its cultural variety, London matters all over the world. Its markets now rival and even outclass New York's. Its property is a store of value for the world's rich. It has more political salience than New York, more buzz than Paris. It is even alleged to have good restaurants, though I find they are better at emptying your wallet than filling your stomach.
One consequence of all this is that London is not very English. More than 30 per cent of its inhabitants were not born in this country. It is a haven for entrepreneurial young people stifled by Continental sclerosis, a Constantinople to the Rome of American capitalism, a rite of passage for Commonwealth citizens, black and white, a home for refugees, a bolthole for Russian oligarchs, an adventure-playground for Islamist terrorists.
Most of these people have very little experience of the wider Britain. Whether or not they are British citizens in a formal sense, in reality they are London citizens. London has almost become a city state. This concept is familiar - Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence. But in our country's history, it is little known, and we aren't quite sure what to do about it.
One person, unfortunately, who has had an idea is Ken Livingstone. He is the only truly successful Left-wing British politician of modern times. From the early 1980s, he has understood how to exploit the ethnic resentments, pose as the champion of the oppressed, run against whatever has seemed to be the establishment of the time.
London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone: Too Left-Wing for most people's liking
Ken has combined hardline Left-wing politics - supporting the IRA and Castro, criticising Jews and attacking mainstream British culture - with a post-modern way of riding the latest trend.
Right Said Fred's Richard Fairbrass (centre), who is gay, is running for Mayor of London in 2008. Let's hope he'll not be as Left-Wing as "Red" Ken Livingstone. Britain is traditionally a Right-Wing, Tory nation
In the 1980s, Ken was the champion of absurdly cheap Tube fares. Today, he is the champion of absurdly expensive ones. He is adroit at grabbing the money - more than £10 billion a year - much of which originates from the international free markets that he loathes, and pushing it towards his client voters.
He has defined London in a certain way, gaining political advantage that eluded both the Tories and his own party. The Tories are right to think that the person who can beat him will be someone who can reach beyond their own ghetto of support.
And now Mr Livingstone is vulnerable. Partly this is because of the passage of time. Like Mr Blair, he has been around long enough for people to have noticed certain failings - the fact, for example, that the congestion charge has not solved the city's traffic problem.
Londoners feel underwhelmed by the real-life prospect of Mr Livingstone's Olympic dreams. Believing his own propaganda, he now says he wants to be Mayor until 2016, and expects us all to be pleased. The uneasiness of Ken's "rainbow coalition" has become apparent. Many gay men, much more numerous in London than in the rest of the country, once regarded Ken as their champion against straight persecution. Today, they detest his closeness to Islamist extremists who preach that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs.
The mayoral red carpet was laid out for Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. This gentleman is the leading theological apologist for suicide bombings. Even tolerant, multicultural London finds that a bit much, now that we have had suicide bombings of our own.
Partly, too, a lot of Londoners are suffering from the hangover that follows success. London is cripplingly expensive. Property prices are excluding the next generation from home ownership. People forced to move out to Zone 5 pay a fortune in transport costs, and the journey delays are depressing. A shortish taxi journey costs the same as a Ryanair flight to Bratislava.
And the place is not safe. If you do not feel that you own the streets, your life in a city is uncivilised, however great the cultural attractions. As the recent stabbings of black teenagers have shown, whole areas are not so much uncivilised as barbarous.
Crime, costs, noise, roads, bad schools, litter, terrorism, racial tensions, police too politically correct to patrol the streets - the place is a struggle. It makes a great subject for a film-maker, but is not so much fun for a couple trying to bring up children.
London's great allure is the promise it gives - the sense of possibility. But for more and more young people, and for families, it is becoming impossible. You can live on benefits, or you can live on £500,000 a year. But most have to manage between those two extremes, and they find it ever harder to do so.
The Mayor of London has nothing like the powers of the Mayor of New York, but he can give direction to the police, make the transport system work, control major aspects of planning (Ken's inhuman answer to the growing overcrowding is to build upwards into the sky). He can also set the tone.
A successful Mayor of London will adopt a tone unknown in the years of Ken - modesty. He will not staff up a huge personal office. He will not see London as a stage for his ideological fantasies. He will be more attentive to what living in the capital is actually like. At Policy Exchange, the think tank of which I am the chairman, we did a poll about the old Routemaster buses that Ken once promised to save and later decided to abolish. It showed 90 per cent in favour of keeping them, great dislike of Ken's "bendy" buses, and 53 per cent who said that the issue was one on which they might switch their vote.
Professional politicians, especially Tory ones, were amazed. "It's only a bus," said one shadow cabinet member. It was as if they had not had the sort of conversations that Londoners have every day.
The next Mayor of London will be part of that conversation. He will be happy with the good side of "diversity" - a relaxed attitude to people's differing pleasures, customs and origins. He will know the difference between being metropolitan and being provincial.
But he will hate the idea that the capital should be engaged in a cultural war with the rest of the country. His first gesture of London's reconciliation with its national hinterland should be something which for Ken Livingstone is blasphemy - a St George's Day parade.
telegraph.co.uk
Campaigning to become the new Mayor of London in 2008 is starting soon, with one of the candidates being Richard Fairbrass, former member of pop group Right Said Fred who sang "I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt" in 1991.
Charles Moore says it's time to make London part of Britain again....
Make London part of Britain again
By Charles Moore
21/04/2007
Trafalgar Square, London: The giant Metropolis, which has a metropolitan population of 14 million people, has been more prominent in the history of the world for so long than any other city on Earth with the possible exception of Rome.
On Tuesday, in the course of what policemen call routine investigations, I discovered that the Conservatives were planning to make Greg Dyke, the former director-general of the BBC, their candidate for Mayor of London. No sooner did the story appear the following day than the plan collapsed.
Most people could see at once that Mr Dyke, though proud of being "the boy from Hayes", was not otherwise qualified for the job. His main contribution to the BBC was to describe it as "hideously white" and to handle the affair of the death of Dr David Kelly so naively that Tony Blair got the better of him. He is no good at politics, and he is not in any sense a Conservative.
But, fiasco though the Dyke scheme was, there was a tiny germ of a good idea behind it. It was an attempt to address the fact that London is different.
With the exception of Rome, no city has been so prominent in the history of the world for so long, but in the past 20 years something new has happened. The capital has become more important than the country. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, London is the greatest city on the planet, with a fairly unimportant country attached.
Because of its financial liberalisation in the 1980s, its geographical position, its English language, its cultural variety, London matters all over the world. Its markets now rival and even outclass New York's. Its property is a store of value for the world's rich. It has more political salience than New York, more buzz than Paris. It is even alleged to have good restaurants, though I find they are better at emptying your wallet than filling your stomach.
One consequence of all this is that London is not very English. More than 30 per cent of its inhabitants were not born in this country. It is a haven for entrepreneurial young people stifled by Continental sclerosis, a Constantinople to the Rome of American capitalism, a rite of passage for Commonwealth citizens, black and white, a home for refugees, a bolthole for Russian oligarchs, an adventure-playground for Islamist terrorists.
Most of these people have very little experience of the wider Britain. Whether or not they are British citizens in a formal sense, in reality they are London citizens. London has almost become a city state. This concept is familiar - Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence. But in our country's history, it is little known, and we aren't quite sure what to do about it.
One person, unfortunately, who has had an idea is Ken Livingstone. He is the only truly successful Left-wing British politician of modern times. From the early 1980s, he has understood how to exploit the ethnic resentments, pose as the champion of the oppressed, run against whatever has seemed to be the establishment of the time.
London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone: Too Left-Wing for most people's liking
Ken has combined hardline Left-wing politics - supporting the IRA and Castro, criticising Jews and attacking mainstream British culture - with a post-modern way of riding the latest trend.
Right Said Fred's Richard Fairbrass (centre), who is gay, is running for Mayor of London in 2008. Let's hope he'll not be as Left-Wing as "Red" Ken Livingstone. Britain is traditionally a Right-Wing, Tory nation
In the 1980s, Ken was the champion of absurdly cheap Tube fares. Today, he is the champion of absurdly expensive ones. He is adroit at grabbing the money - more than £10 billion a year - much of which originates from the international free markets that he loathes, and pushing it towards his client voters.
He has defined London in a certain way, gaining political advantage that eluded both the Tories and his own party. The Tories are right to think that the person who can beat him will be someone who can reach beyond their own ghetto of support.
And now Mr Livingstone is vulnerable. Partly this is because of the passage of time. Like Mr Blair, he has been around long enough for people to have noticed certain failings - the fact, for example, that the congestion charge has not solved the city's traffic problem.
Londoners feel underwhelmed by the real-life prospect of Mr Livingstone's Olympic dreams. Believing his own propaganda, he now says he wants to be Mayor until 2016, and expects us all to be pleased. The uneasiness of Ken's "rainbow coalition" has become apparent. Many gay men, much more numerous in London than in the rest of the country, once regarded Ken as their champion against straight persecution. Today, they detest his closeness to Islamist extremists who preach that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs.
The mayoral red carpet was laid out for Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. This gentleman is the leading theological apologist for suicide bombings. Even tolerant, multicultural London finds that a bit much, now that we have had suicide bombings of our own.
Partly, too, a lot of Londoners are suffering from the hangover that follows success. London is cripplingly expensive. Property prices are excluding the next generation from home ownership. People forced to move out to Zone 5 pay a fortune in transport costs, and the journey delays are depressing. A shortish taxi journey costs the same as a Ryanair flight to Bratislava.
And the place is not safe. If you do not feel that you own the streets, your life in a city is uncivilised, however great the cultural attractions. As the recent stabbings of black teenagers have shown, whole areas are not so much uncivilised as barbarous.
Crime, costs, noise, roads, bad schools, litter, terrorism, racial tensions, police too politically correct to patrol the streets - the place is a struggle. It makes a great subject for a film-maker, but is not so much fun for a couple trying to bring up children.
London's great allure is the promise it gives - the sense of possibility. But for more and more young people, and for families, it is becoming impossible. You can live on benefits, or you can live on £500,000 a year. But most have to manage between those two extremes, and they find it ever harder to do so.
The Mayor of London has nothing like the powers of the Mayor of New York, but he can give direction to the police, make the transport system work, control major aspects of planning (Ken's inhuman answer to the growing overcrowding is to build upwards into the sky). He can also set the tone.
A successful Mayor of London will adopt a tone unknown in the years of Ken - modesty. He will not staff up a huge personal office. He will not see London as a stage for his ideological fantasies. He will be more attentive to what living in the capital is actually like. At Policy Exchange, the think tank of which I am the chairman, we did a poll about the old Routemaster buses that Ken once promised to save and later decided to abolish. It showed 90 per cent in favour of keeping them, great dislike of Ken's "bendy" buses, and 53 per cent who said that the issue was one on which they might switch their vote.
Professional politicians, especially Tory ones, were amazed. "It's only a bus," said one shadow cabinet member. It was as if they had not had the sort of conversations that Londoners have every day.
The next Mayor of London will be part of that conversation. He will be happy with the good side of "diversity" - a relaxed attitude to people's differing pleasures, customs and origins. He will know the difference between being metropolitan and being provincial.
But he will hate the idea that the capital should be engaged in a cultural war with the rest of the country. His first gesture of London's reconciliation with its national hinterland should be something which for Ken Livingstone is blasphemy - a St George's Day parade.
telegraph.co.uk
