Left to right, Ken Livingstone, Bienvenida Buck, Gisela Stuart, Siôn Simon and London Mayor, Boris Johnson. Background: Leeds Town Hall
The bosses of a dozen British construction firms, gathered in a room at a restaurant in the centre of Birmingham, are voluble about the “inferiority complex” of “Britain’s second city.” After a lunch of salmon and roast beef, they listen to Siôn Simon, the former Labour minister, explain how he could transform the city as its first directly elected mayor. Every questioner is critical of the city council, which employs 50,000 people in Birmingham, and is described by Simon as “a broken institution.” When someone quotes the council’s motto, “Forwards,” everyone laughs. Challenged by Simon, not one can name its leader, who was chosen by 35 Conservative councillors eight years ago. “He is not elected, not visible and not accountable,” says Simon. “He needs to be replaced by a leader who can say ‘the buck stops here.’”
Birmingham is one of 11 cities, including Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, which will hold polls on 3rd May over whether to have directly elected mayors. The electoral commission has approved the following question on the ballot: “How would you like Birmingham to be run? By a leader who is an elected councillor chosen by a vote of the other elected councillors? This is how the council is run now. Or by a mayor who is elected by voters? This would be a change from how the council is run now.”
Those cities that vote “yes” will conduct elections for the high-profile posts on 15th November. On that date, for the first time, elections will also take place for 40 regional police commissioners—an even more controversial move (see box, p36).
The likely advent of more big city mayors will bring a new kind of politics to Britain. For a start, it will create an alternative career away from Westminster for politicians. More substantially, it marks a devolution of power. There will be problems; the mayors’ powers have not been well defined, and there is likely to be an immediate tussle between them and local councillors, perhaps followed by one with Westminster. Wyn Grant, who chairs the Warwick Commission on elected mayors, set up by Warwick University, has warned that voters “won’t know what the mayor is going to do, or if it goes beyond being a figurehead with relatively limited powers.”
But the reward for those cities that get it right is more money from Whitehall—and better government by accountable politicians. Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer and former Cabinet minister, says “Most countries have elected mayors to run their cities, full stop.” For the new occupants of City Hall, it could prove to be the best job in politics, with more independence, a greater ability to reach across party lines, and a better chance to leave a legacy than in Westminster. Boris Johnson told Prospect last year that the job of mayor of London was “the most engrossing I’ve had,” and speculation continues that it would serve him well as a stepping stone to the premiership.
For centuries, British democracy has concentrated power in the centre. In recent decades, Whitehall has gained yet more power, even under Margaret Thatcher, who preached de-centralisation. In contrast, around the world, City Hall has long attracted top talent. Last year, Rahm Emanuel left his post as President Obama’s chief of staff to become mayor of Chicago. Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995 after his first term as prime minister, and went on to be president.
The drive for elected mayors in Britain had its roots in a visit in the 1980s by Michael Heseltine to Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. “It is under permafrost from November to March,” explains Heseltine, who has championed local governance throughout his career. “You can’t have a bleaker environment than that. I was there and the mayor—a directly elected mayor—presented to me his agenda to turn Sapporo into a world competitive city. And so I kept all the documents that he’d given me and I presented them to my colleagues in 1990.”
Heseltine had just returned to government under John Major after the fall of Thatcher. He argued to the Cabinet that elected mayors would revive faith in politics. “I’d just seen more and more power taken away from the provinces and centralised in London,” he says. “It was a profound shock to me in 1979 when I became secretary of state for environment to find that in order for a local authority to build a council house, they had to fill in forms with 80 different questions for my department’s approval. It made a complete mockery of any talk of local government. I actually pinned these forms up in the wall on my office.”
For Heseltine, the introduction of elected mayors would have been a natural modernisation of British politics. “Every advanced economy has the same model of directly elected executives, who advocate policies relevant to their community and then compete with other communities for central government funding,” he says. “American presidents come from being governors of states. And we all know about the Länder system in Germany and the départements in France. It is the model that people use.” But Major did not press ahead, a decision the former prime minister tells friends he now regrets.
It was left to Labour to pick up the torch. By the mid-1990s Tony Blair, as the new opposition leader, was convinced of the case. He floated the idea in an interview in the Independent in 1995, arguing that elected mayors would be “a modern symbol of local government,” adding, “I want to change the political culture of Britain. It is old-fashioned and out of date.” Adonis, a longtime ally of the former prime minister, explains that Blair wanted a mayor for the capital “to deal with the catastrophe of London’s public transport and planning. TB was impressed by the ability of city mayors in the US—and Jacques Chirac when he was mayor of Paris—to get things done.”
In giving London its first elected mayor with a greater direct mandate than any politician at Westminster, Blair must take much of the credit for the higher profile of mayors. Ken Livingstone and then Johnson showed that there is more to politics than the green and red benches of parliament, and the fight between them for the May election feels more exciting than that between the opposition and government. As Adonis puts it: “Twelve years ago, you had to look abroad, which is a very dangerous thing to do if you’re an English politician making the case. But now you just need to look at London.”
But it wasn’t until David Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005 that the plan for more elected mayors outside London was revived. “It’s no accident that the two strongest proponents of mayors in the last 20 years are Blair and Cameron,” says Adonis. “It takes a strong, charismatic leader to understand the importance and potential of strong, charismatic leadership to transform a city.” Adonis adds: “Only one in four electors in authorities that don’t have elected mayors can name the leader of their council. That’s a terrible indictment of our democracy. When you have mayoral authorities, more than half know the name of the mayor of their authority. Have you met a Londoner who doesn’t know who Boris is?”
A few cities have stolen a march on the rest, using last year’s Localism Act. After public consultation, Leicester council decided to create a post of mayor and one was elected in May 2011. Following a “yes” vote in a referendum, Salford will elect a mayor on 3rd May, as will Liverpool, which controversially scrapped its planned vote on the issue. Those holding referendums in May on whether to have a directly elected mayor are Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Leeds, Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield. Since 2001, under the legislation that created a mayor of London, some smaller towns have also had referendums.
Cities will receive millions in extra funding from Whitehall if they vote “yes.” Liverpool has already gained £130m a year, and Simon believes the Birmingham mayoral budget would rise from £4bn this year to £8bn in eight years’ time.
Birmingham illustrates the pros and cons of the proposition better than most. It still owes much to Joseph Chamberlain, mayor in the 1870s, who radically reformed water and gas supplies and cleared the slums. “It is a great manufacturing city,” says Siôn Simon, who notes it is the home of Jaguar, Land Rover and Range Rover, and makes 40 per cent of Britain’s jewellery. But among its 2.9m people, unemployment runs at 10.6 per cent, and it ranks as Britain’s ninth most deprived city, according to the Office of National Statistics. Many blue-collar workers don’t seem to know about the vote, but in business, politics and manufacturing it is causing a buzz. Oliver Dove, a town planner with Malcolm Scott Consultants, says: “I think it would address decades of over-reliance on London.”
Birmingham is currently run by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition council, but if people vote “yes,” polls suggest it would elect a Labour mayor in November. In 2010, Siôn Simon stood down as minister for innovation and skills, and as MP for Birmingham Erdington, a safe Labour seat he had held since 2001. Since then, he has campaigned for the city to have a mayor and to win that post. He faces a challenge from Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, while Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary who may lose his Birmingham Hodge Hill seat in boundary changes, is also said to be considering a bid.
“I grew up here, this is my city,” Simon points out. “I want to be an elected mayor of Birmingham, to do stuff, not just sit in a big office feeling pleased with myself.” His campaign headquarters consist of a room, a small kitchen and a lavatory. On the walls are several big maps of the city; a cheap radio plays Punjabi music; several young Asian men are volunteering, including a 21-year-old who “came to a meeting and got stuck in.” It feels a long way from Westminster, where Labour and the Tories try to outflank one another with tough stances on immigration. “This is the most successful multicultural city in the world,” says Simon. But while Birmingham is 45 per cent non-white, all of its Conservative councillors are white, he notes.
An elected mayor, he says, “will face infinitely more media scrutiny than the council. It is important for someone to take total responsibility. And that is why the mayor has to be the chief executive.” At present, that post is held by a civil servant. Gisela Stuart argues, too, that “Investors and government need to be able to pick up the phone to Birmingham’s mayor and know that there is someone there they can do business with.”
But Simon’s pledge to take over the powers of chief executive is controversial. There was no response from Birmingham’s council leader, Mike Whitby, to repeated requests for comment from Prospect about Simon’s remarks. Stephen Hughes, the current chief executive, also declined to comment, but a senior official defended Hughes’s £180,000-a-year role, disputing that it would technically be possible to abolish it. “I would point out that the elected mayor does not have the power to appoint or dismiss staff. That remains the responsibility of the council as a whole,” said the official. “It is of course possible for the mayor to persuade the council to either make the chief executive post redundant or restructure to downgrade the position. Chief executives have statutory protection from arbitrary dismissal.”
These remarks indicate, however, why the arrival of the new mayors may be messy. Many think a clash is almost inevitable; the new mayors, whose powers are still poorly defined, will be imposed on top of the existing councils, which outside London, already have executive powers (see Vernon Bogdanor, right).
There is general agreement that the new mayors will have some powers to determine transport, apprenticeships and infrastructure, but the government is still consulting the cities. In Adonis’s view: “It’ll be evolution as it has been proved in London,” he says. As Bogdanor argues, there will be pressure for mayors to assume greater powers over time, because voters expect those they elect to have power. “Where mayors succeed, they will accrete power, both informally and also formally,” says Adonis. “I believe that will include tax-raising powers too.”
However, Wyn Grant of the Warwick Commission warns that this could bring an eventual clash too with Westminster. “Governments are reluctant to give local authorities any more powers,” he said. “The government wants to control how much money is spent.” Others also argue that mayors will jeopardise the careful balance of Britain’s centralised constitution.
Among other objections, councillors in some cities, including Salford, have complained about the costs of referendums, which councils have to pay upfront although they will reclaim this money from Whitehall; Bristol’s is the most expensive, at £475,000. In Birmingham, John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Yardley and Roger Godsiff, the Labour MP for Small Heath, put aside party differences to unite against an office they describe as a “gimmick.” Traditionalists warn the elections are vulnerable to mavericks candidates, such as the “monkey mascot” elected in Hartlepool in 2002, or Bienvenida Buck, the Spanish socialite who intends to stand in Liverpool.
Nor, in previous tests, has the public always been keen. Of 37 smaller towns that have held mayoral referendums since 2001, only 12 voted “yes.” Stoke-on-Trent voted for a mayor in 2002; six years later, after the “Democracy4Stoke” petition, it voted to restore the council and Cabinet system (see Bogdanor, right).
Judging by the record since 2001, far from all of the cities voting in May will choose to have elected mayors. But all the same, the number of mayors is likely to swell over coming years. Their powers will evolve and they will gain bigger budgets; support for the notion may then grow even further. In Salford in January, 17,344 people voted for an elected mayor and 13,653 against, but only 18.1 per cent of the 171,000 eligible voters turned out. Yet in London in 2000, the turnout for the mayoral contest was 33.4 per cent; by 2008 it was 45 per cent.
In time, elected mayors will bring enhanced accountability and with it better government. They will face far greater public and media scrutiny than their unelected counterparts in other cities.
Mayors in big, multicultural cities must also appeal beyond their party’s core vote, in contrast to Westminster, and pursue agendas that may be very different from their party bosses’. There is much work to be done to improve the sometimes decrepit states of inner cities. Elected mayors in Britain represent a maturing of the political system that is overdue.
Choosing our cops
On 15th November, at the same time as the mayoral contests, the first ever elections for 40 new local police commissioners will be held, with responsibility for setting crime-fighting priorities. John Prescott (right), a critic of police forces after revelations about their closeness to Murdoch’s News International, has said he will run in Humberside.
Critics say elected commissioners will politicise the police. Angela Harris, the Lib Dem peer who is leading opposition to the plans, has said the proposals posed “great risks to policing,” and Philip Hunt, the shadow home affairs spokesman in the Lords, has predicted “disaster.”
Yet it is arguable that top police officers—who, unlike councillors, cannot at the moment be removed by the public—need accountability more urgently than city leaders. Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Tony Blair took on the vested interests of the police when prime minister; for decades, politicians have tended to praise the forces and give them new powers instead.
Before the arrival of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in 2004, local police authorities had responsibility for scrutinising performance. Since 2004, the IPCC has taken charge of internal investigations. But it is rare for the police to charge one of their own. Not one officer faced charges over the 2005 fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician wrongly suspected of terrorism (the Metropolitan police paid an undisclosed sum to the family in compensation). Allegations of racism have also dogged the use of stop-and-search tactics by police. According to a study by the LSE, in 2011 a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be searched than a white person.
“The government has accepted the police authorities are not adequate to do that job of scrutiny,” Prescott tells Prospect. “So now we are going to have elected commissioners who have the right to fire the chief constable if necessary.”
The two reforms go hand in hand. Elected mayors may, in time, acquire authority, as Boris Johnson has done, with the power to hire and fire the Met chief.
—Read more: Edward Glaeser's lesson from America
The bosses of a dozen British construction firms, gathered in a room at a restaurant in the centre of Birmingham, are voluble about the “inferiority complex” of “Britain’s second city.” After a lunch of salmon and roast beef, they listen to Siôn Simon, the former Labour minister, explain how he could transform the city as its first directly elected mayor. Every questioner is critical of the city council, which employs 50,000 people in Birmingham, and is described by Simon as “a broken institution.” When someone quotes the council’s motto, “Forwards,” everyone laughs. Challenged by Simon, not one can name its leader, who was chosen by 35 Conservative councillors eight years ago. “He is not elected, not visible and not accountable,” says Simon. “He needs to be replaced by a leader who can say ‘the buck stops here.’”
Birmingham is one of 11 cities, including Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, which will hold polls on 3rd May over whether to have directly elected mayors. The electoral commission has approved the following question on the ballot: “How would you like Birmingham to be run? By a leader who is an elected councillor chosen by a vote of the other elected councillors? This is how the council is run now. Or by a mayor who is elected by voters? This would be a change from how the council is run now.”
Those cities that vote “yes” will conduct elections for the high-profile posts on 15th November. On that date, for the first time, elections will also take place for 40 regional police commissioners—an even more controversial move (see box, p36).
The likely advent of more big city mayors will bring a new kind of politics to Britain. For a start, it will create an alternative career away from Westminster for politicians. More substantially, it marks a devolution of power. There will be problems; the mayors’ powers have not been well defined, and there is likely to be an immediate tussle between them and local councillors, perhaps followed by one with Westminster. Wyn Grant, who chairs the Warwick Commission on elected mayors, set up by Warwick University, has warned that voters “won’t know what the mayor is going to do, or if it goes beyond being a figurehead with relatively limited powers.”
But the reward for those cities that get it right is more money from Whitehall—and better government by accountable politicians. Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer and former Cabinet minister, says “Most countries have elected mayors to run their cities, full stop.” For the new occupants of City Hall, it could prove to be the best job in politics, with more independence, a greater ability to reach across party lines, and a better chance to leave a legacy than in Westminster. Boris Johnson told Prospect last year that the job of mayor of London was “the most engrossing I’ve had,” and speculation continues that it would serve him well as a stepping stone to the premiership.
For centuries, British democracy has concentrated power in the centre. In recent decades, Whitehall has gained yet more power, even under Margaret Thatcher, who preached de-centralisation. In contrast, around the world, City Hall has long attracted top talent. Last year, Rahm Emanuel left his post as President Obama’s chief of staff to become mayor of Chicago. Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995 after his first term as prime minister, and went on to be president.
The drive for elected mayors in Britain had its roots in a visit in the 1980s by Michael Heseltine to Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. “It is under permafrost from November to March,” explains Heseltine, who has championed local governance throughout his career. “You can’t have a bleaker environment than that. I was there and the mayor—a directly elected mayor—presented to me his agenda to turn Sapporo into a world competitive city. And so I kept all the documents that he’d given me and I presented them to my colleagues in 1990.”
Heseltine had just returned to government under John Major after the fall of Thatcher. He argued to the Cabinet that elected mayors would revive faith in politics. “I’d just seen more and more power taken away from the provinces and centralised in London,” he says. “It was a profound shock to me in 1979 when I became secretary of state for environment to find that in order for a local authority to build a council house, they had to fill in forms with 80 different questions for my department’s approval. It made a complete mockery of any talk of local government. I actually pinned these forms up in the wall on my office.”
For Heseltine, the introduction of elected mayors would have been a natural modernisation of British politics. “Every advanced economy has the same model of directly elected executives, who advocate policies relevant to their community and then compete with other communities for central government funding,” he says. “American presidents come from being governors of states. And we all know about the Länder system in Germany and the départements in France. It is the model that people use.” But Major did not press ahead, a decision the former prime minister tells friends he now regrets.
It was left to Labour to pick up the torch. By the mid-1990s Tony Blair, as the new opposition leader, was convinced of the case. He floated the idea in an interview in the Independent in 1995, arguing that elected mayors would be “a modern symbol of local government,” adding, “I want to change the political culture of Britain. It is old-fashioned and out of date.” Adonis, a longtime ally of the former prime minister, explains that Blair wanted a mayor for the capital “to deal with the catastrophe of London’s public transport and planning. TB was impressed by the ability of city mayors in the US—and Jacques Chirac when he was mayor of Paris—to get things done.”
In giving London its first elected mayor with a greater direct mandate than any politician at Westminster, Blair must take much of the credit for the higher profile of mayors. Ken Livingstone and then Johnson showed that there is more to politics than the green and red benches of parliament, and the fight between them for the May election feels more exciting than that between the opposition and government. As Adonis puts it: “Twelve years ago, you had to look abroad, which is a very dangerous thing to do if you’re an English politician making the case. But now you just need to look at London.”
But it wasn’t until David Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005 that the plan for more elected mayors outside London was revived. “It’s no accident that the two strongest proponents of mayors in the last 20 years are Blair and Cameron,” says Adonis. “It takes a strong, charismatic leader to understand the importance and potential of strong, charismatic leadership to transform a city.” Adonis adds: “Only one in four electors in authorities that don’t have elected mayors can name the leader of their council. That’s a terrible indictment of our democracy. When you have mayoral authorities, more than half know the name of the mayor of their authority. Have you met a Londoner who doesn’t know who Boris is?”
A few cities have stolen a march on the rest, using last year’s Localism Act. After public consultation, Leicester council decided to create a post of mayor and one was elected in May 2011. Following a “yes” vote in a referendum, Salford will elect a mayor on 3rd May, as will Liverpool, which controversially scrapped its planned vote on the issue. Those holding referendums in May on whether to have a directly elected mayor are Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Leeds, Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield. Since 2001, under the legislation that created a mayor of London, some smaller towns have also had referendums.
Cities will receive millions in extra funding from Whitehall if they vote “yes.” Liverpool has already gained £130m a year, and Simon believes the Birmingham mayoral budget would rise from £4bn this year to £8bn in eight years’ time.
Birmingham illustrates the pros and cons of the proposition better than most. It still owes much to Joseph Chamberlain, mayor in the 1870s, who radically reformed water and gas supplies and cleared the slums. “It is a great manufacturing city,” says Siôn Simon, who notes it is the home of Jaguar, Land Rover and Range Rover, and makes 40 per cent of Britain’s jewellery. But among its 2.9m people, unemployment runs at 10.6 per cent, and it ranks as Britain’s ninth most deprived city, according to the Office of National Statistics. Many blue-collar workers don’t seem to know about the vote, but in business, politics and manufacturing it is causing a buzz. Oliver Dove, a town planner with Malcolm Scott Consultants, says: “I think it would address decades of over-reliance on London.”
Birmingham is currently run by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition council, but if people vote “yes,” polls suggest it would elect a Labour mayor in November. In 2010, Siôn Simon stood down as minister for innovation and skills, and as MP for Birmingham Erdington, a safe Labour seat he had held since 2001. Since then, he has campaigned for the city to have a mayor and to win that post. He faces a challenge from Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, while Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary who may lose his Birmingham Hodge Hill seat in boundary changes, is also said to be considering a bid.
“I grew up here, this is my city,” Simon points out. “I want to be an elected mayor of Birmingham, to do stuff, not just sit in a big office feeling pleased with myself.” His campaign headquarters consist of a room, a small kitchen and a lavatory. On the walls are several big maps of the city; a cheap radio plays Punjabi music; several young Asian men are volunteering, including a 21-year-old who “came to a meeting and got stuck in.” It feels a long way from Westminster, where Labour and the Tories try to outflank one another with tough stances on immigration. “This is the most successful multicultural city in the world,” says Simon. But while Birmingham is 45 per cent non-white, all of its Conservative councillors are white, he notes.
An elected mayor, he says, “will face infinitely more media scrutiny than the council. It is important for someone to take total responsibility. And that is why the mayor has to be the chief executive.” At present, that post is held by a civil servant. Gisela Stuart argues, too, that “Investors and government need to be able to pick up the phone to Birmingham’s mayor and know that there is someone there they can do business with.”
But Simon’s pledge to take over the powers of chief executive is controversial. There was no response from Birmingham’s council leader, Mike Whitby, to repeated requests for comment from Prospect about Simon’s remarks. Stephen Hughes, the current chief executive, also declined to comment, but a senior official defended Hughes’s £180,000-a-year role, disputing that it would technically be possible to abolish it. “I would point out that the elected mayor does not have the power to appoint or dismiss staff. That remains the responsibility of the council as a whole,” said the official. “It is of course possible for the mayor to persuade the council to either make the chief executive post redundant or restructure to downgrade the position. Chief executives have statutory protection from arbitrary dismissal.”
These remarks indicate, however, why the arrival of the new mayors may be messy. Many think a clash is almost inevitable; the new mayors, whose powers are still poorly defined, will be imposed on top of the existing councils, which outside London, already have executive powers (see Vernon Bogdanor, right).
There is general agreement that the new mayors will have some powers to determine transport, apprenticeships and infrastructure, but the government is still consulting the cities. In Adonis’s view: “It’ll be evolution as it has been proved in London,” he says. As Bogdanor argues, there will be pressure for mayors to assume greater powers over time, because voters expect those they elect to have power. “Where mayors succeed, they will accrete power, both informally and also formally,” says Adonis. “I believe that will include tax-raising powers too.”
However, Wyn Grant of the Warwick Commission warns that this could bring an eventual clash too with Westminster. “Governments are reluctant to give local authorities any more powers,” he said. “The government wants to control how much money is spent.” Others also argue that mayors will jeopardise the careful balance of Britain’s centralised constitution.
Among other objections, councillors in some cities, including Salford, have complained about the costs of referendums, which councils have to pay upfront although they will reclaim this money from Whitehall; Bristol’s is the most expensive, at £475,000. In Birmingham, John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Yardley and Roger Godsiff, the Labour MP for Small Heath, put aside party differences to unite against an office they describe as a “gimmick.” Traditionalists warn the elections are vulnerable to mavericks candidates, such as the “monkey mascot” elected in Hartlepool in 2002, or Bienvenida Buck, the Spanish socialite who intends to stand in Liverpool.
Nor, in previous tests, has the public always been keen. Of 37 smaller towns that have held mayoral referendums since 2001, only 12 voted “yes.” Stoke-on-Trent voted for a mayor in 2002; six years later, after the “Democracy4Stoke” petition, it voted to restore the council and Cabinet system (see Bogdanor, right).
Judging by the record since 2001, far from all of the cities voting in May will choose to have elected mayors. But all the same, the number of mayors is likely to swell over coming years. Their powers will evolve and they will gain bigger budgets; support for the notion may then grow even further. In Salford in January, 17,344 people voted for an elected mayor and 13,653 against, but only 18.1 per cent of the 171,000 eligible voters turned out. Yet in London in 2000, the turnout for the mayoral contest was 33.4 per cent; by 2008 it was 45 per cent.
In time, elected mayors will bring enhanced accountability and with it better government. They will face far greater public and media scrutiny than their unelected counterparts in other cities.
Mayors in big, multicultural cities must also appeal beyond their party’s core vote, in contrast to Westminster, and pursue agendas that may be very different from their party bosses’. There is much work to be done to improve the sometimes decrepit states of inner cities. Elected mayors in Britain represent a maturing of the political system that is overdue.
Choosing our cops
On 15th November, at the same time as the mayoral contests, the first ever elections for 40 new local police commissioners will be held, with responsibility for setting crime-fighting priorities. John Prescott (right), a critic of police forces after revelations about their closeness to Murdoch’s News International, has said he will run in Humberside.
Critics say elected commissioners will politicise the police. Angela Harris, the Lib Dem peer who is leading opposition to the plans, has said the proposals posed “great risks to policing,” and Philip Hunt, the shadow home affairs spokesman in the Lords, has predicted “disaster.”
Yet it is arguable that top police officers—who, unlike councillors, cannot at the moment be removed by the public—need accountability more urgently than city leaders. Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Tony Blair took on the vested interests of the police when prime minister; for decades, politicians have tended to praise the forces and give them new powers instead.
Before the arrival of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in 2004, local police authorities had responsibility for scrutinising performance. Since 2004, the IPCC has taken charge of internal investigations. But it is rare for the police to charge one of their own. Not one officer faced charges over the 2005 fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician wrongly suspected of terrorism (the Metropolitan police paid an undisclosed sum to the family in compensation). Allegations of racism have also dogged the use of stop-and-search tactics by police. According to a study by the LSE, in 2011 a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be searched than a white person.
“The government has accepted the police authorities are not adequate to do that job of scrutiny,” Prescott tells Prospect. “So now we are going to have elected commissioners who have the right to fire the chief constable if necessary.”
The two reforms go hand in hand. Elected mayors may, in time, acquire authority, as Boris Johnson has done, with the power to hire and fire the Met chief.
—Read more: Edward Glaeser's lesson from America
