Tonight:
4°c
After Boris's speech in Birmingham yesterday, it finally seems to be dawning on the brighter members of the Ken Livingstone Fan Club that they were wrong about him.
As I kept trying to point out during the election campaign, Boris is not a “member of the Tory hard Right”, a “racist”, a “sociopath” or any of the other idiotic charges with which the Labour Party discredited itself.
Personally, Boris is Ronald Reagan with a brain: underestimated by his opponents, to their great cost; scorned by prigs but able to make ordinary people like him, and feel good about themselves; possessing that same sunny optimism and magic Teflon coating which has, so far at least, got him through any number of scrapes.
Politically, however, he is a world away from the Gipper. At the core of his speech was an artful, and successful, bid to join “fairly crusty” Tory means, such as competitive sport, to that newer Tory end, social justice. He spoke of the “huge inequalities of urban Britain”, of creating a “fairer city”, of dealing not just with crime but with its “breeding-grounds”, of “our moral duty” to start fixing fractured society.
It's very different to the approach taken by many other Tories with power — such as Stephen Greenhalgh, leader of the flagship Hammersmith and Fulham council, who says bluntly: “I don't believe in the equality agenda.”
It's similar, of course, to what David Cameron has been saying since his election as leader. But Cameron cannot put it into practice — and there are doubts as to how far he intends to, and how far it is just murmurings to sugar the Tory brand.
With Boris, he's talked about it more after the election than before, which tells me he's sincere. One of his traits, for good and for ill, is intellectual receptivity — or, if you want to be unkind, a tendency to agree with the last person he met. He was, I think, shocked by the inequality he met in London during the election campaign, and recognises it for the major factor it is in the city's problems.
“Red Boris” has already raised the London living wage (the-higher-than-the-legal-minimum paid to all GLA staff) and kept half-price transport for people on income support. His bagman, Simon Milton, speaks of training disadvantaged Londoners to take up jobs, rather than giving them to new waves of East European migrants.
So far, so good. But at a fringe meeting at Labour's conference, Len Duvall, the Labour leader on the London Assembly, described Red Boris as keeping “95 per cent” of what Ken did. If that's true, and it may have been merely mischievous, it's far too high.
Because Labour, and Livingstone, failed to tackle inequality. During their time in power, it didn't budge. They didn't liberate people — they ended up locking them into dependency, so they could continue to count on their votes. They confused spending money with getting results. They wasted fortunes on flabby agencies and ridiculous vanity projects.
How many Tory votes are there in relieving social injustice? Not many. But it is central to issues that Tory voters do care about, above all crime. It's going to be hard to make a difference, but it's got to be worth a try.
Reader views (6)
Nobody ever thought Boris was part of the Tory hard right. He was very clearly a liberal Tory, and better than most of them, but a Tory nonetheless. Another straw man argument from Gilligan. Why is he still writing about Ken? It's over, dude. Move on!
- Tim, London, UK, 02/10/2008 17:33
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Mark Lee - It seems to me that most of the things you are complaining about, Boris hasn't actually done (as yet?)and are just your presumptions. Why don't you hang back for a while and wait and see or are you steadfastly and unreasonably unable to see past your red tinted glasses. Ken and Labour are gone from power in London. Get used to it. If you want to return to a socialist panacea go and live in Havana.
- Simon, Kent, England, 30/09/2008 14:41
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Another RED KEN. No surprise there. Nothing to chnage but more of the same.
- Anthony Campbell, MANCHESTER England., 30/09/2008 09:11
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"Red Boris"? Really?
Last time I checked, he'd scrapped the congestion charge for the most polluting vehicles, and was consulting on removing it from Kensington and Chelsea. In the same stroke, he's jacked up public transport fares by 5-10%, whilst will offer a materially worse service if he scraps bendy buses. He's also looking likely to scrap / postponse both the Cross River Tram, and Phase 2 of the East London Line Extension, obliterating all transport enhancements that would have served some of the most deprived areas of South London, and would have enhanced residents' access to the city's employment market.
The less affluent are reliant on a daily basis on London's public transport network, and so far Boris has done nothing but damage to this.
"Retaining" the existing 50% discount on bus travel those on income support is hardly an achievement, is it? Shall we also congratulate him on retaining an order that was placed over a year ago for air conditioned trains, and for retaining agreements signed in the similarly distant past for Oyster PAYG acceptance on the trains? Oh wait, we already have...
- Mark Lee, Vauxhall, 30/09/2008 08:56
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I too was wrong about Boris,he is an even bigger waffling posh twit than i thought.
- Colin, barking essex, 29/09/2008 17:29
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I, too, have seen a great many of my labour voting friends admitting, quietly, that they got Boris totally wrong. Hardly surprising, given the relentless, negative campaigns waged by Livingstone and people like David Lammy up in Tottenham. Glad to hear that the “average” Labour voter is starting to come round to Boris.
- St, London, 29/09/2008 12:45
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