Kenneth Robert Livingstone is an English politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of London from the creation of the office in 2000 until 2008. He also served as the Member of Parliament for Brent East from 1987 to 2001.
This interview was conducted on 9 June 2022.
Q: Could you briefly summarise your role in growth policy over the past few decades?
I joined the Labour Party in 1969 and started studying everything. I realised in the 1970s, when I was a Lambeth councillor and then a member of the Greater London Council (“GLC”) that investment is the single most important factor in driving a national economy. The problem for Britain had been that our level of investment, both public and private, had not been equal to our clear rivals like France and Germany. We’d always lagged behind, and I suspect largely because the British government, Labour or Tory, was always spending far too much on nuclear weapons and colonial wars.
We never matched France and Germany, which is why France and Germany overtook us in terms of economic power. When I had an influence on Lambeth council and the GLC, it was always to get investment, public sector investment for the projects that would modernise our city. In my discussions with the business community, they all said, ‘you’ve got to sort out the transport problems in London’. I remember being told that firms were thinking of leaving London. Only because the transport situation was so bad. The congestion was so bad.
So that’s one of the main reasons I brought in the congestion charge, and traffic went down by about 12 per cent in Central London. It was all moving around a lot better. Air pollution went down, by 12 per cent as well. I realised that investment in infrastructure, we had 5000 old buses and I got 8000 new ones. We started extending tube lines. We set up a project for the Elizabeth Line. So, I realised very early on, that investment is the key to economic success. If the public sector is doing the investment in infrastructure to make your city modern, it will then mean you attract private sector investment to locate to the city.
Q: What were you thinking was the goal behind that?
Britain was slipping behind France and Germany, and therefore I thought, “we’ve got to get that public sector investment, that will attract more private sector investment”. Which it did, and that’s the key to sorting out our problem. Britain had been in economic decline relative to our major competitors for decades and decades after the war.
Q: You were the first mayor of London. Could you talk about what the role was created for and what the intention of the role was?
London used to have a GLC until Thatcher abolished it in 1986 because she thought it was a dangerous lefty. Then for the next 14 years, London had no administration. I don’t think there was any other major city in the Western world that didn’t have an administration of some kind or other. When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party, he recognised we had to get a London administration. Blair was in love with all things American. So instead of going back and creating a typical Western-European council, he brought in the American system of the directly elected mayor.
I was opposed to that because you put all the power in the hands of one individual and you will eventually get a mayor who is corrupt. If you look at America at any one time, there are always 50 former mayors in prison for corruption. I could easily have said to all the property developers, “I’ll agree to this, but I just want half a million pounds in my secret Swiss bank account”. I think that’s why I was totally opposed to having a directly elected mayor. I think, when I was the leader of the GLC, I was held accountable, not by just the opposition, but my own backbenchers and so that’s a good safeguard.
Q: How did those discussions take place in order to work out what the safeguards would be?
Tony Blair as Prime Minister asked me to come and see him. I told him what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t speak to me again until I’d actually become the Mayor. He just ignored me and did everything possible to rig the election so that I couldn’t get the Labour nomination. It was only once I’d been elected Mayor, he realised he had to work with me. The good thing I had with him was that I was able to persuade him to put billions of pounds into the City Hall administration so I could fund lots of infrastructure projects. The problem is, the current mayor, he can’t get a penny out of Boris Johnson.
Q: What did having City Hall and having the mayoral powers allow that the previous arrangement didn’t?
When I was leader the GLC I was managing the 50 Labour members on the council — out of the 92. What I found amazing, from the moment I was elected mayor, was that all power was in my hands. All decisions were made by me. So officers would come into my room and spell out an issue. I’d take a decision, and that was it. I didn’t have to go and consult the Assembly or the Government or anything else. Putting all power in the hands of one person will eventually lead to corruption.
Q: What do you think about the extension of the mayoral model to other cities in the UK?
I’m opposed to the mayoral system. I mean, Blair was in love with all things America. I think he really resented the fact he hadn’t been born and brought up in America, so he could run for President. I would always say: “don’t have a directly elected mayor, you should have an elected council, so it’s more democratic, more open and accountable”.
Q: When you’re having those conversations with leaders of the other cities, was there a sense that London was different? Why were those councils not lobbying as hard for their own mayoralty or re-established authority?
I have no idea because once the GLC was abolished, I didn’t have any remaining contact with other city authorities in Britain. I was being depicted as a mad old Marxist, and so, I was excluded from anything. I just became a backbench MP sitting next to Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.
Q: Was the establishment of the GLA sitting alongside Welsh and Scottish devolution never part of the conversation?
No. I was never asked by Blair’s government for advice about how the GLA should be set up or how it should work. The one meeting I had with Blair before the election was just sounding out whether I was going to stand as an independent. After that, he didn’t speak to me again until I was elected as Mayor, and then he had to deal with me.
Q: In retrospect, do you think that it was a weakness that there weren’t mayoralties established in the other major cities of the UK?
I would be totally opposed to having a mayoral system anywhere. I don’t want the American system. You look at it, it’s so much more corrupt than ours. Ours isn’t perfect, but it hasn’t got the levels of corruption that you’ve got in the USA.
Q: If you were to devise a system that helped deal with the problem of disparities in regional growth, what would be your priority areas from your experience as mayor?
If you look at the economic history of Britain since the Second World War, overwhelmingly, London and the Southeast got more investment, more spending. Conservative governments largely ignored the North, and that was a very unfair system. I think that is a problem. In our parliamentary system, all the power is in the hands of the prime minister, and that’s a big mistake. You needed a much more open and democratic system, much more accountability.
Q: In terms of the accountability that you received as London Mayor, how effective do you think that was?
There wasn’t really anything going on. I was elected Mayor, and I ran it from City Hall. The central government, if I applied for any money so that we could build the Elizabeth Line, there would be discussions on that. But there was very little connection between City Hall and central government. About the only time we really got into quite a lot was when we decided to bid for the Olympic Games, and then we had to work together. That was about the only time I really had a good working relationship with Tony Blair.
Q: Within London, was the accountability that you were feeling within London coming from the assembly?
The London Assembly had the right to question me, but they had no real power. They could only amend my budget with a two-thirds majority, and that was clearly never going to happen. Borough leaders weren’t terribly interested. Occasionally, they’d come to me, and they’d say they wanted financial help to get some infrastructure done, and I’d deal with that, but very, very few meetings with borough leaders. Most borough leaders I never met during my entire eight years as Mayor.
Q: The advantage of the mayoral combined authority model is that it means that you have to have the other borough or district authorities as deputy mayors, and you have to proceed through them as the accountability mechanism. Do you think that model would have worked or has advantages?
If the legislation had said that the 32 London boroughs could elect one or two deputy mayors to work with me, that would have made a quite different situation. But all the power was in my hands. I thought it was mad, frankly. Even the 25 members of the London Assembly, they could only question me. The chance that there’d be a 60 per cent majority, that could change my budget. It just never happened.
Q: What was your relationship like with other Whitehall departments?
No, there was very little contact at all. Blair created a mayor that had, you know, the complete power to run City Hall and do and take things. I didn’t have to go to a government department to get permission to do something. I occasionally had to go to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown to get more money for investment, but that was the only real contact.
Q: The London turnaround of education, was that the mayoralty?
The mayor had no educational powers, so there was never any discussion about how the boroughs were running the school or the system or anything like that. Because all the power was in the hands of the mayor, I was incredibly busy all the time, so I couldn’t go wandering around having general chats about how we might reform and most of the borough leaders didn’t want to meet me because I’d stood as an independent and a lot of labour members were appalled that I’d done that and defeated the Labour candidate, Frank Dobson. So basically, my only contacts were with Blair and Brown.
Q: How effective do you think you were at attracting private investment and public investment?
If you look from the abolition of the GLC in ’86 until the creation of the Mayor, investment in London went down really dramatically. I remember the business community was really worried. Firms were talking about leaving London. By being able to get a real programme of investment and modernising, upgrading our transport system and so on, it did transform London, and London’s dramatically more successful now because of that. Although Boris Johnson didn’t really initiate anything, he broadly let most of my programmes go on. He couldn’t cancel them because the contracts had already been let. The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, is doing a lot better than Boris Johnson. But sadly for Sadiq, he can’t get the vast amount of money out of government that I was able to get out of Blair and Brown.
Q: Were you able to get that money just because that was in the air at the time?
The Treasury, Blair and Brown knew London had to be successful, or it would drag down the whole British economy. London is the most significant and powerful part of the whole British economy, so it’s got to work.
Q: What do you think the success of London has done to the rest of the country?
I haven’t seen any economic analysis of it, but I assume the dramatic growth of London over these last 20 years has had an impact on the rest of the British economy. I’ve been out of power since 2008, I don’t have any access to data – only what I can read in the papers.
Q: How do you think we can make sure that the kind of wider regional economy doesn’t get lost in the focus on core cities?
Boris Johnson in his eight years, he did virtually nothing. He opened the project I’d started, but the only project he initiated in eight years was the cable car to nowhere, which has been a financial disaster. I’d examined that when I was there and realised it was an economic disaster and decided not to build it. That was the only thing that Boris decided to go ahead with in his eight years.
Q: How did you think about the different parts of London?
London had been very successful throughout most of it. My real problem was to focus on the East End of London. That had been in massive decline since the collapse of the international trade system and the industries that were all there. The worst poverty in London was all in the East End. That was my focus on winning the Olympics in the East End, so we could rebuild the economy there and so on. The main reason I bid for the Olympics was to rebuild the East End of London after decades of neglect and decline. We also had to extend the tube line there, which was a big improvement.
Q: What do you think about the balance between investing in skills and investing in infrastructure?
They should all be at the centre of getting investment. They all need to be successful. It’s not just about building infrastructure. We actually do need to dramatically increase the abilities of our workforce because there had been real areas left neglected and people only getting crappy jobs. So all those levels of investment are important and should be at the front line of what the Mayor is doing.
Q: Do you think there’s anything that’s missing?
We should get massive investment in all areas. Britain generally, and also in London had been falling way behind our rivals like France and Germany and other economies.
Q: Is culture-led investment and investment in adult social care or public health a viable economic intervention in your view, rather than just things that are worth doing in their own right?
I didn’t have really any powers in those areas, but I think it’s important to drive that forward. The powers of the mayor were incredibly limited. I mean, the mayor of London’s powers are about one-tenth of the mayors’ of New York, that’s a real problem. When Blair created it, he didn’t really have any great understanding, so it was very small. Powers in the hands of the mayor, and I campaigned to get Blair to give the mayor more powers, which he did, but just as those came in, I lost to Boris. I would prefer to see a Britain in which there’s massive devolution from Whitehall down to all the regions and the cities. We are the most centralised of all the Western democracies. Almost everything was run from Whitehall. It was awful.
Q: Of the powers that were devolved to you as mayor, do you think they were the right ones?
Well, the powers the Mayor was given were right, but there should have been many more. I had no power over housing. I couldn’t build council housing. All I could do was meet with private developers and encourage them to build more homes and also more homes for rent, not just for sale.
Q: Do you know why they withheld the ability to make decisions on housing?
I’ve no idea because this was all done around Blair in Downing Street. I was never involved in any of that in the run up to the creation of the office. I was never consulted. I was never asked for advice. I do think that it is rather ridiculous that having been leader of the GLC for five years, Blair didn’t bother to get my advice about what powers the Mayor should have.
Q: How did you manage the borough outside of Greater London, how did you think about those places when you were Mayor?
Whenever the leader of the London Council came to me to ask for support, I always gave it, but I didn’t have any real powers over it. It was just a question about getting me to try and encourage Blair to get them the money to do what they wanted to do in the various boroughs. The imbalance of power between local councils, the Mayor and central government, we are the most undemocratic democracy in Europe. I remember when the Mayor of Moscow came and we had discussions, he was really shocked about how all the power was concentrated in the hands of the central government. He said, “this is worse than Russia under Stalin”.
Q: What do you think the additional layer of having a mayor did to the local council’s ability to influence central government?
It didn’t make it harder, but it didn’t make a great deal of difference, either. Local councils could seek a meeting with the minister to try and get investments for some projects. But they didn’t need my systems to do that. They would just have their one-to-one meetings with the various ministers.
Q: Did they ever try and use you as well?
Not very much, because, the powers of the Mayor of London are just one-tenth the powers of the Mayor of New York. There was very little I could actually do. I can have a big influence on transport, and no influence over housing. I could try and persuade private developers to build more. When Blair created the mayoral system initially I had no intention of standing because I thought, the powers are pathetic compared with the powers I had when I was leader of the GLC. The only reason I ended up standing was huge public pressure for everyone urging me to stand. I couldn’t walk down the street without being stopped.
Q: What would you describe as being the main difference between your role within the GLC and your role as Mayor?
They were completely different jobs. My job was to manage a Labour majority and work with the chairs of the committees that were delivering things. Whereas as Mayor, I just sat in the office and took the decisions all on my own. When the Olympic Association came to say, Will you support us bidding for the Olympic Games? I just said, Yes. Just took ten seconds. Whereas when I was leader of the GLC, I’d have to go to the head Labour Group and take a vote.
Q: Do you think that the reforms cumulatively over the past 20 years have been a step forward?
It’s been a step forward, it’s been in the right direction, but it’s not been enough. Because I should imagine, around government ministers, the civil servants are desperate not to devolve their powers down to local authorities and regions because then they won’t have a job.
Q: Did you feel that when you were in London, or do you think that London has a privileged position in that system because it’s where Whitehall is physically based?
Yeah. I had to persuade Whitehall civil servants that we should bid for the Elizabeth Line. I mean, that’s ridiculous. If you’re in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, you take that decision, you don’t have to go and lobby government ministers or civil servants.
Q: What is your assessment of the root cause of why that is the case?
Well, it’s historic. We were the global superpower for well over a century. Controlling a quarter or a third of the world’s population, everything was being run from London. That was endemic in the historic legacy of all our institutions. Massive power, all centralised in Whitehall, and it was a very undemocratic system. When you actually think, politicians in India had to actually get the permission of Whitehall to do anything.
Q: Did you ever engage with leaders of the UK’s other big cities and share ideas for city regeneration?
I can’t remember the details, but there were some local authorities that would ask for a meeting and talk about what I was doing and what I thought they should be doing, but not very much. Don’t forget, for those first few years, I’d been expelled from the Labour Party, so they couldn’t be seen talking to me. It was only after the congestion charge came in and worked that Blair brought me back in. But for the first three years I was the mayor, I was totally excluded.
Q: Do you kind of think that the party politics of regional growth is a blocker to trying to get things devolved?
I think we should have a major devolution of power from Whitehall down to all our regions and our cities. Boris Johnson isn’t going to take on a big conflict with his civil servants to do that. I have a lot of respect for Keir Starmer, I think if he becomes prime minister, he may do something quite good. Ever since I was accused of being anti-Semitic back in 2016, I’ve been totally excluded from politics. So I’ve had no contact with anybody.
Q: When you became Mayor, how did you think about building up the GLA as an organisation?
The simple fact was, the day I was elected, that afternoon, I went to the headquarters and set up. There was no permanent member of staff there. There were a few civil servants waiting to welcome them in and say, “get on with it”. When you’re elected as the leader of a council, you inherit something that’s been there for a century or longer, and it’s all institutional. I walked into the building, there was nothing. I brought in my key advisors that I’d worked with over decades and gave them jobs, and so I had a really good team of people. That we set it up and basically got it working.
Q: What were the priorities when you came in, early days?
When I set that organisation up and then lost to Boris, he broadly carried on with it. I’d spent 20 years in local government. I knew how local government worked. I set it up, and it did work from day one. I was really lucky. I did have some really good key advisors that knew how to run things.
Q: What are the biggest things that you’ve learned about how to properly regenerate and grow areas?
The key is investment in infrastructure. If the public sector is investing in modernising your infrastructure, it makes the city more attractive for private sector investment, and that was the dialogue I had with London’s business communities. That’s what they wanted. They were saying, “if you can’t sort out our transport system, firms are going to start leaving London”. That was my top priority to get the transport system working.
Q: It must be good to finally see Crossrail open, even if the credit claimed for it isn’t going where it’s due.
Yeah, I mean, I’m really looking forward to it, but it should have opened two or three years ago, but Boris just never was on top of his job.
ENDS