Why Boris Johnson wants to clip London’s wings

HAMMERSMITH BRIDGE has been closed to all traffic for the past nine months. The fine Victorian structure in west London is cracking and could collapse at any moment; the borough that owns the bridge cannot afford to fix it. In a rational world, the government would shell out for repairs, says Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. But Hammersmith Bridge happens to connect one wealthy part of London with another part, and the government is loth to be seen spending money for their benefit.

From a great height, London has fallen hard in the past year. Covid-19 hit the capital first, killing people before doctors understood the disease. Commuters and tourists have vanished, hobbling the city’s large service economy—no British region has suffered a sharper rise in unemployment. Yet the capital’s biggest problem is political. The government of London has badly fallen out with the national government. That is already harming the city; eventually, the entire country will suffer.

On May 6th, as The Economist went to press, London was going to the polls. Bookies had been offering odds on the re-election of Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor, at 1/100—if you put £100 on him and he won, you would make £1. Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate, ran a poor campaign, and the government appeared to have abandoned the city to Labour. Mr Khan spent much time attacking not his opponents but his predecessor, now the prime minister, Boris Johnson.

His manifesto claimed that Mr Johnson leads “the most anti-London government in recent history”. The prime minister bashes the mayor whenever possible; in early April he even criticised Mr Khan’s transport policies during a press conference about covid-19. Mayors and prime ministers have tussled before. But “the tension has never been quite as visible or quite as vocal,” says Jack Brown, who studies the city at King’s College London.

The row began soon after the Brexit vote in 2016, when the newly elected Mr Khan tried to position himself as a champion of business-friendly internationalism. He argued that the then-prime minister, Theresa May, was “a disaster” for London because she was neglecting infrastructure, impoverishing public services and pursuing a hard Brexit that would harm the city.

That was a crude caricature of Mrs May, but a fairer analysis of Mr Johnson. The current prime minister personally dislikes the mayor, who he believes is inexplicably popular, and has long wanted him cut down to size. The covid-19 pandemic and a change in Britain’s political geography have given him the means and the incentive to do just that.

Covid-19 has scared Londoners off trains and buses, forcing Transport for London (TfL) to beg the Treasury for money. The government has extracted a heavy price for its support. It has forced the mayor to raise the congestion charge paid by drivers entering central London, insisted on fare increases on public transport, and allowed itself to appoint two special representatives to TfL’s board. Since the mayor has more power over transport than anything else, this clips his wings. And it certainly looks as though that is the government’s aim. Railway and bus companies outside London were given longer-term bail-outs, with fewer conditions.

The other big thing that the mayor controls is strategic planning. There, too, the government has crimped his power. In March 2020 the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, rejected the London Plan—a document that sets priorities for development. Mr Khan was forced to rewrite parts of it. He had wanted the London green belt to be off limits to new housing, for example. Building there will now be allowed in “very special circumstances”.

The changes to the London Plan are not hugely consequential. But Mr Jenrick’s argument that he had to intervene because London’s record on homebuilding under Mr Khan was “deeply disappointing” is dubious. In the 2019-20 fiscal year London added 42,000 net dwelling units—more than any other English region and the highest figure since the turn of the century. The point of the intervention seems to have been simply to demonstrate that the government could overrule the mayor and hold up his plan for a year.

In March the government announced that it would introduce a “first past the post” voting system in London and other metropolises for future elections. At present Londoners can cast two votes for mayor. If a voter’s first preference is not among the front-runners, his or her second-preference vote is counted. Moving from that “supplementary vote” system to first-past-the-post is unlikely to produce different winners, says Patrick Dunleavy, a political scientist who helped create London’s voting system two decades ago. But it will reduce mayors’ personal mandates and their legitimacy. Mr Khan is usually said to have won 57% of the vote at the last election in 2016, not the 44% he got before second-preference votes were tallied.

That change will endure even in the unlikely event that Mr Khan fails to win a second term. So will another one. The government used to assess bids for large infrastructure projects largely by using benefit-cost ratios. That suited the capital: because it is so productive, dealing with a travel bottleneck there often seems like excellent value for money. But last year the Treasury rules changed. The government will now conduct “place-based” analyses. It might, for example, consider that boosting incomes in a poor area would make a bigger difference to people’s lives than boosting incomes in a richer area. The changes will make it easier to justify funnelling money to parts of Britain that are poorer than London—which is to say, almost everywhere.

Not surprisingly, the current mayor has accused the government of doing London down, and the government has not exactly denied it. It is more interested in courting voters in the former industrial heartlands of the north and Midlands, some of whom resent London’s power. “It plays well to Boris’s base to be seen to be tough on London, and it plays well with Sadiq’s base to be seen to be standing up to the government,” says a former London Tory MP.

But the fracas is not at all good for London. When the mayor blames the central government for the capital’s problems, and the government retorts that London is badly run, the overall effect is to tarnish the city in the eyes of potential investors and immigrants. “Everyone can have policy differences, but being engaged in a tribal war is not helpful,” says Richard Burge, head of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a lobby group.

What harms London is likely to harm the entire country in the long run. The capital funds the rest of Britain: in 2018-19 its net fiscal surplus amounted to £4,350 per person, far more than any other region. And together with Manchester and Scotland, London is one of the engines of devolution. Responsibilities and powers are handed out to them first, then handed to other regions. If Westminster grabs power back from London, the engine is thrown into reverse.

“Cities can turn,” says Rory Stewart, a former Tory minister who ran for mayor as an independent but dropped out of the race a year ago. London has been badly damaged by covid-19; parts of it, such as the West End, might not recover for years. And if the capital struggles, Britain will lose one of its remaining claims to global greatness. Mr Stewart says that many people would laugh at the idea that Britain has one of the world’s greatest armed forces. But Britain can reasonably claim to have one of the world’s greatest cities.■