Morning:
3°c
I FEEL faintly soiled to admit this, but I agree with Ken Livingstone. In his interesting recent interview with Total Politics magazine, the legendary socialist talked about how important it was to sack people. "The civil service is a malignant conspiracy against the national interest," he said. "When I took over, we removed 27 of the top 30 people in London Transport ... the civil service has its own agenda. In the end most ministers and prime ministers go native and get sucked in by it."
For Mr Livingstone there are of course two quite distinct types of sacking: those carried out by himself (good) and those carried out, this week, by Boris Johnson (very, very bad). In the words of Ken's "Progressive London" blog, the cutting of 120 City Hall posts by Boris is an exercise in "slash and burn" which will decimate Londoners' "prosperity and quality of life".
I feel great sympathy for anyone who loses their job in the current economic climate. My own industry, the media, has recently suffered a spate of redundancies, including on this newspaper, and it is never pleasant. But the truth is that for the sake of the mayoralty's very future and independence, this must be only the beginning of Boris's economy drive.
Tuesday's announcement was really as much an exercise in spin as in slash-and-burn. The actual reduction in the number of staff at City Hall will be nearer 50, about a 16th of the total, than 120 (most of the posts to be eliminated were already vacant). There are two purposes in cutting jobs: to save money, and to concentrate minds. Boris's Night Of The Short Knives will achieve relatively little of either.
Although the core City Hall staff is bloated, almost doubling in size since 2000, it accounts for only a fraction of the Mayor's overall budget. And this week's redundancies seem mainly to be happening in the middle ranks - when it is only, as Livingstone says, senior sackings that get the machine's attention.
The core problem is this. Taxes that Boris controls for himself - the council tax precept and the congestion charge - raise very little of the mayoral budget. The entire edifice of the mayoralty floats on a giant Jacuzzi of cash from central government.
At the moment, that Jacuzzi is gushing very generously indeed. One of Ken's greatest achievements was getting money out of Whitehall for his schemes. But times have changed. There is no more money. Gordon has spent it all.
After the next election any government, whether Labour or Tory, will be faced with a terrifying public spending deficit. It will desperately need things to cut. The £7 billion or so that it pays each year to Mr Johnson will make an extremely tempting target.
A Tory government, frankly, would be even more tempted than a Labour one. George Osborne might calculate that Boris couldn't make too much of a fuss lest he be accused of ruining David Cameron's honeymoon, or causing a Tory split.
Boris's relations with the Tory leadership are not always smooth. In the last week alone, he has gone off-message on tax. He has sometimes seemed less than keen to damp down speculation about running for the top job himself. He and Cameron are, indirectly, rivals. Shafting him might not cause Dave too much grief.
For sure, the Tories won't want to lose London in 2012. That might stay their hands. But Boris has to help, too. He has to pre-empt any talk of cutting his budget by showing far more serious intent to deliver value for money.
That needn't mean cuts overall, but doing more with the same. And it must mean not just savings of cash but a complete change of culture. The rest of the globe may have moved on its axis but GLA-world is still partying like it was 2007, operating on the assumption that the money will keep rolling in for ever.
The same Ken-era officials continue with the same extravagant and ludicrous projects. TfL's latest is providing wheelchair access to around a quarter of its stations - a scheme which will involve digging new lift shafts and passages through the earth, causing vast disruption to passengers, and costing up to £100 million per station.
It would quite literally be cheaper, as well as far more useful to the recipients, to give every wheelchair user in London a free car. But the madness does not end there, since the scheme won't actually make the Tube accessible anyway. In most cases, it will provide wheelchair access only to the station's platforms. Boarding the actual train will still mostly involve, as it does now, a step insurmountable to wheelchairs. It is the most expensive subsidy for disabled trainspotters ever devised.
Every other question at the London Assembly is a demand for some new subsidy or new bus route. Boris always promises to consider them. Talking of buses, TfL is also proposing to spend £46 million on a single eight-mile bus route in south-east London. That is more than the annual bus subsidy for the whole of Wales.
The LDA's continued dalliance with the chums of Lee Jasper, and City Hall's recent indulgence towards Islamist radicals such as Azad Ali of the Muslim Safety Forum, which we reported a few weeks ago, symbolise the fact that Boris has not yet succeeded, as Ken did, in getting a grip on the machine. Could he be "going native"?
And as well as the political and cultural case for economies, there is also a powerful moral one. It is simply wrong that a kind of apartheid appears to be growing up between the insecure employment, crumbling pensions and frozen pay of private enterprise and the ever-growing headcount, gold-plated retirement packages and sometimes fat-cat salaries of the public sector.
Of course most public-sector workers are not fat cats. Of course they do essential, often selfless work. But it is precisely to protect the jobs of the police officers and bus drivers, and the vital services they provide, that Boris must act.
Reader views (8)
Hyped up knife crime - guess you dont have any kids then?
- Thiscoe, Shrewsbury.
I agree wif Gilligan, it's all Ken's fault.
- Jj, London
Boris wants to look at the usefulness of the Traffic Commisioner and his big salary package and the £1M a year to the new head of Crossrail. Why has no one asked why these people deserve such high salaries and why the senior managers on of Transport for London and Crossrail get six figure salaries plus bonuses for under performace and huge pensions and travel benefits while junior people get the sack.
- Phil, London
Boris has had his own personal agenda, in particular anything done by Ken that was good he wants to get rid of simply because Ken came up for it. The main example is the Venezuelan oil deal Ken did to buy cheaper oil for London buses. What's wrong with that? Oil is Oil, who cares who sells it? What did Venezuela get out of it? Expert advice on planning transport in congested and polluted Caracas. It was a win-win situation and the people of Venezuela evidently felt they were getting a good deal from TFL/London's expert advice. If they hadn't thought it was worth it, the deal wouldn't have gone ahead.
Boris' excuse? The 'poor' people of Venezuela and 'poverty' in Caracas couldn't justify them helping out Londoners. What he forgets to mention is that they were in turn getting help in a deal mutually agreed. Lots of countries have poverty, including the UK and a significant amount of Londoners live in poverty too. Is there no poverty in Malaysia or Nigeria? Oil producing nations in general have enough money to look after their own and if they chose not to that's their own affair and another issue.
Boris should concentrate on the environment and transport instead of what's popular at the moment, ie the hyped up 'knife crime' he's always on about
- D Close, London
So, if I want a government that's going to cut government spending who do I vote for? Not Labour, and now it appears, not the tories! I had hope Boris would come in, dramatically cut the city hall's wastage and reduce my tax bill. Now it seems he was all talk (and don't mention Ken's offices in China and abroad! Boris promised to get rid of them during the election, then suddenly realised they were useful! that alone should have shown us that the new maor is weak!)
- Jonathan, greenwich
The best thing Boris could do is abolish the whole Mayor's office; it's a complete waste of time and money - a plague on all their houses.
- Thomas, London
Once again Gilligan proves his 'doesn't have a clue about anything.
Saying that you need to get rid of (civil service) leaders and managers - without offering any practical alternative - is easy.
Yes we need more police, more youth workers, more teachers and more social workers - but how do you ensure those people are delivering the right work, to the right people and are receiving the right levels of support? (and they need support - they are tough jobs - considerably tougher than working in a newspaper office). And those gold plated pensions - as was proved yesterday - most of these people will have given 40 years of their lives to community service in one way or another and may be the only ones keeping the economy going during a recession, so don't be too quick to criticise.
Come up with an alternative and we might listen.
- Liberal And Proud, London, UK
I read with interest this piece - TfL is also proposing to spend £46 million on a single eight-mile bus route in south-east London. That is more than the annual bus subsidy for the whole of Wales.
Which route is this - that works out at over £5m a mile!!
- Td, UK
