London isn't 'over', London hasn't fallen. London just has very bad government

No party, no national politician and few commentators, have done any thinking or developed any ideas as to how we can get a better government of London. This needs to change but probably won't

We went to London this weekend to see Carlos Santana in concert (which was, of course, quite brilliant, one of the very best live performers even at 77). And we were sort of aware of concerns, repeated often on social media and sometimes amplified by mainstream media, about London’s collapse into chaos and disorder. This narrative is illustrated perfectly by this post from nativist commenter, Matt Goodwin (I’ve added some order to the post but not changed the words):

“All these things happened to me in London today. I paid nearly £30 for a train ticket to take me into London from a town just 30 miles away —on a Saturday. The first person I sat next to, I think from India, decided to have a FaceTime conversation with his friend on speakerphone so we all had to listen to it. The train was late by 40 minutes due to unexplained “signalling issues”. It was also filthy.

I paid nearly £8 for a pint. I offered a woman my seat on the tube without realising she was with a man who intervened and said “no man”. He was not from the UK. I think he took my gesture as an insult. I was asked for money by homeless people 3 times in one day.

I noticed several people who are paid to give information to taxpayers and tourists over the tannoy on the London Tube cannot speak English properly. A cabbie told me “London is dead most nights”, unless you are the global high net worth set or top 1%.

Restaurants are visibly struggling and often hideously overpriced. I had dinner in a neighbourhood where the average rent is £3,663 per month while half of all local social housing has gone to people who were not even born in the UK. I was constantly aware I should not get my phone out on the street as 80,000 were stolen last year.

I also read on the way back while checking that stat that there were 90,000 shoplifting offences in London last year, up 54%. My train back —delayed—was suddenly changed at the last minute with all passengers on board. They were told it would no longer be stopping at all stops.

I bought a tin of instant coffee on the way home and it had a security tag on it.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood and perhaps it’s amusing to think how somebody of my political outlook is “triggered” but to me there is a deeper point here. London is over —it’s so over. It’s a city in visible decline with deteriorating standards and no real sense of identity or belonging

Going in and out of our capital city is a truly miserable experience. Infrastructure is falling apart, as is the social contract. I’ve been coming in and out of London since 1981. I simply cannot remember a time when it’s been this visibly dire and when so many things just do not work as they should.”

It strikes me that there are three themes to Goodwin’s analysis (if the rant deserves such an accolade): firstly that there’s a problem with foreigners - migrants, people with poor English skills and people who aren’t white; secondly that London is very expensive - sky high rents, expensive beer; and third that nobody is doing anything about these, and other problems. And it is possible to, in response, have a different view - I responded:

“Not saying London is great but:

1. Travelled from Bingley to London 1st class for around £200 for two. Price includes food and drink. Train was around 10 minutes late arriving

2. Went to a restaurant that was full, not obscenely priced and where service from largely immigrant workers was excellent

3. Lots of delays all over the tube but it was busy. Was offered a seat (how I feel old) by a young woman. Was clean but very crowded.

4. Went with thousands of others to see an amazing Mexican guitarist. Cheerful, buzzing, no sign of phone snatching or petty crime

The streets are littered and dirty, there are far more rough sleepers than I remember (although none directly asked for money) and the city's hollowed out because of affordability. But no worse than Paris, Barcelona or Berlin.”

It is easy to find simple scapegoats for the problems of London and Goodwin, like so many, focuses primarily on the immigration status, racial origin and skin colour of London’s residents. And there’s some truth in all this because immigration creates disjunction and affects community (interesting, however, to note that the Pakistani taxi driver who took us to Bingley station had the view that multiculturalism didn't work - “if they hate each other over there, they aren’t going to stop hating each other here”). But I don’t think race or skin colour is London’s main problem. The city’s big problem is bad government.

Goodwin’s concerns about rising levels of crime, he cites phone snatching and shoplifting, and poor behaviour are justified. We all see ill manners and slovenly behaviour and are understanding but disappointed about security tagged jars of coffee and caged off drinks aisles. But we need to balance this with a parallel truth, displayed by those young women who, seeing me as a knackered old man, offered their seat on the tube, and the young man who later that evening did likewise for my wife. What we owe these young men and women, and lots of others, is to make the case for better government not to rant about immigrants or people who, because they aren’t white, might be immigrants.

If “London is over” (and I fear Goodwin exaggerated for effect) then the reason isn’t those black and brown people but rather that the city is abysmally governed at every level. The dirty trains, the tatty seats, the poor behaviour are there because things only get fixed (as we saw recently with graffiti on some underground carriages) when someone shouts about it. And trains are expensive because, unlike other places, Britain tries to make them pay their way. If you want to pay Italian prices for train travel from Rochester to London (it costs £8 single from Lucca to Florence, for example) then you have to accept much higher levels of taxpayer subsidy.

London’s government is a mess (it isn’t alone in this condition). We have a mayor with powers limited and often controlled by officials in Whitehall offices. Yes the current mayor could have done more and prefers political grandstanding to the nitty-gritty of public administration, but this is a result as much of the system as it is of the man. So we get petty advertising bans, officious and ineffective air quality measures, and lots of calls for things - rent control, for example - entirely beyond Sadiq Khan’s powers.

In theory, London’s mayor has control of the Metropolitan Police but, in reality, this organisation is a huge bureaucracy administered under the terrible and corrupting idea of ‘operational independence’. Khan can set objectives, has a marginal influence over the police budget, and maybe (if the Home Secretary agrees) can hire and fire the Commissioner. What Khan can’t do is tell the police in London how to police on a day-to-day basis. So we’ll have a set of strategies around street crime, violence against women, gangs, and bad driving that only become operational if the police can be bothered.

Below Khan we have 32 boroughs, all unitary authorities and all, as a result, facing the same problems as local councils everywhere in England. The boroughs have no real control of their budgets or the means by which those budgets are funded. But, again like local government everywhere regardless of party control, the leadership of these councils don’t tell the public the truth. We aren’t told that the streets are dirty because litter picking isn’t a statutory service. We aren’t told that there’s more street homeless because budgets for drug and alcohol rehabilitation have been slashed and hostels closed. These aren’t, you see, statutory services.

A friend of mine, now chief executive of a large online and mail order retailer, once observed about marketing that it is 1% strategy and 99% boring routine. The same goes for government. Most of what we want from government, especially local government, is for things to work. We want the council to pick up litter, fix the park gates, empty our bins and generally make the place look neat and clean. The council doesn’t do this so much these days because all its money goes on social care, children’s services, homelessness and bailing out underfunded local government pensions.

We want the police to arrest shoplifters, bag snatchers and phone thieves. We’d rather like to see a police presence in neighbourhoods where we live and for those local police to take bad behaviour seriously. And we’d like other authorities like rail guards, council wardens to work in the same way, to enforce the multitudinous regulations introduced to support and promote order. Yet none of this seems to happen. Like local councils, police budgets are directed by national government priorities around things like equalities and the environment while the police leadership, like local council leaders, doesn’t tell the truth about why they don’t or can’t respond to the real concerns of residents and, in London’s case, visitors like Matt Goodwin.

The problem, however, is that holding meetings to discuss important policy and significant strategies is a lot less of a grind than doing that dull, everyday work needed to get good government. And, in Britain’s obscenely centralised public sector, these meetings are fruitless and pointless because the people sitting round the table have little or no real control over what happens in the everyday administration of government.

If we want to do something about the things Matt Goodwin ranted about then we need to start arguing for the reinvention of genuine local government, for the radical decentralising of much that public administration delivers, for police, health, social care and much else to face more democratic accountability, and for a system of local services that controls its own budgets and makes its own policy choices. London isn’t broken. London hasn’t ‘fallen’. London isn’t, as Matt Goodwin claims, “over”. London, like Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds and Bristol, is just very badly governed. And no party, no national politician, few commentators and only a handful of academics, have done any thinking or developed any ideas as to how we can get a better government of London. This needs to change but probably won’t.