Ken Livingstone: Bromley, Boris and crime

Ken Livingstone in Bromley 31/5/2011
Ken Livingstone campaigning in Boris country. Photograph: Dave Hill

"I think people should be rational," Ken Livingstone said when I asked him why the citizens of the borough of Bromley should prefer him as London Mayor to Boris Johnson. After all, he reasoned, what has Boris done for them? "His first act was to cancel the tramlink extension to Crystal Palace, which was really bad news for people in Bromley. And now they're going to be thirty police officers down. If that's their reward for giving Boris a large majority, they should give me one instead. I'd be a lot better."

Ken was re-fuelling in a cafe on a large slice of toffee cake. He'd been hobnobbing in the Walnuts Shopping Centre in Orpington, including with a woman wearing a T-shirt that bore a one-word slogan: "Sexy." It was the cheekiest bit of the day's trip by the Labour mayoral candidate to a part of London where people vote in luxurious quantities for members of the Tory Johnson family. More than three times as many of them went for Boris in 2008 as went for Ken, and Orpington's electors have since handed a landslide victory to Boris's younger brother Jo in the general election.

Bromley even resisted the pro-Labour swing in last May's borough polls, with the Conservatives gaining four council seats to top up its already vast majority. Apart from four delinquent years from 1998 spent under no overall control, Bromley Town Hall has been true blue since 1964. The present council leader Stephen Carr was waiting in ambush for Ken in a furniture shop doorway close to Bromley South station. Cheery banter ensued. After Ken had gone, Carr assured me that Boris was more popular than ever on his patch. And with a recent opinion poll indicating that Bromley voters were more likely to vote Johnson as a result of "Tory-led" spending cuts rather than less, who's to say he's wrong?

Yet a mere three-to-four percent swing towards Livingstone in a year's time would be bad news for Mayor Johnson if replicated London-wide. Ken is bent on delivering such news all over town. "From 1994 until last year, Labour's strategy was to target marginal seats," he said. "Vast swathes of the country were written off. The Labour Party lost touch with vast numbers of people. What we're committed to doing is rebuilding the Labour vote in areas where the party hasn't done anything for years."

Hence his ongoing tour of all 32 boroughs, complete with "Tell Ken" public meetings in the evenings. He'd hit Bromley town centre in the mid-morning, greeted by local party activists. The sun was out, but one of them unfurled a red umbrella anyway. A man pulling a shopping trolley stopped to say hello. Ken told him what he thinks of Boris: "He's just wants to get through this election then back into parliament and be prime minister."

The charge that Boris has only been playing at being Mayor was elaborated on in the Orpington cafe, this time in relation to his efforts to combat violent youth crime. It's already clear that his recent claim to have reduced "youth violence" by six percent in the last year becomes wobbly under scrutiny. There have been increases in the most serious kinds of such crimes and in knife crime, which is closely associated with young people. That said, Boris has given the issue a consistently high profile. How would Ken do better?

"He's recognised that this is an issue where there are votes or him, and he's going to say all the right things. The real issue is, are they driving through the changes you need to get an outcome at the end of it? That's his weakness. It's not mine."

Could his line on this be described as Boris-plus?

"No, no, no. I am not going to spend my mayoralty doing photo opportunities all over London. I'm going to make sure the bloody machine works."

Cops and crime was Ken's theme of the day. His visit included a "very good' private meeting with Pete Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation. His campaign has seized on Bromley borough commander Charles Griggs's telling the Bromley Times that he'll be losing 30 officers over the next year. City Hall has confirmed that this is so, but says that the reduction will occur through redeployment rather than redundancies. It said that those 30 officers were actually a surplus resulting from a previous recruitment drive, and that the borough will be left with the correct number of 476 once they have gone. Ken's view is that far worse is to come after next May: "This is before the election. What's going to happen after?"

I put it to him that police numbers should be only one part of the debate about crime in London, rather than devouring it completely. He at first demurred: "The more you've got police out on the beat, the less crime there is." I told him that one of his closest advisers had once described himself to me as, "A bit of a Tory on crime." Would Ken answer to the same description? He replied by taking me back in time in the late 1980s when was an MP and Jack Cunningham was Labour's campaign chief. He said Cunningham had told him that crime was "a Tory issue," so Labour should stick to the NHS. Ken said he'd disagreed: "It's usually working class people who live in the areas where crime is the highest."

Then he took up a favourite subject: New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crime policies in the 1990s. "There's been a big spate of burglaries here in Bromley," Ken said. "In some other parts of London there's been another spate of teenage knifings. So you need a very localised strategy. I don't know what form the government's policing bill will finally take, but I'm in favour of the Mayor having more power to make sure the police respond to things like that. Every Monday morning Giuliani sat down with [his police chief] Bill Bratton and his successors, analysing raw crime stats. And if there was suddenly a particular sort of crime in a particular area, Giuliani put the resources in. If the London Mayor had the power to intervene in that way, I would certainly use it."

Some would dub Ken "a bit of a Tory" on stop-and-search too. Though opposed to its use in combating terrorism - where he thinks it creates great resentment and produces few results - he regards its use against street crime as "an essential tool." He points out that Boris's Operation Blunt 2 is but an intensification of a policy he had introduced. He accepts, though - as does Boris's policing deputy Kit Malthouse, by the way - that the way the tool is used is critical: "An officer who's been on the beat for ten years will be very good at using it. An officer using it in their first or second year won't. But there isn't a manual. It just comes with experience."

He sounds more like an orthodox liberal on the policing of demonstrations (though kettling was once used on his watch), but his main criticism is not of the cops but of Boris. "I always made it absolutely clear to officers that people had the right to demonstrate peacefully and that that had to be protected. So when the president of China came, protestors were close enough so that he could hear them shouting."

And by contrast? "Boris, in the run-up to G20 [wrote about] how the Orks of Mordor were going to devastate London. He's giving out a line that protest is something we don't want. And this is not simply [about] Ian Tomlinson's killer. That was one angry officer lashing out. That isn't typical. Much more worrying in many ways was the decision to clear a peaceful protest of people sitting down in the street at seven o'clock at night, causing no great problem - and with really quite brutal force. Is that the sort of message that filters down? What police officers need coming from the Mayor's office is something that is about making sure crime is dealt with, but also respecting that community relationship."

He remains critical of the removal of Ian Blair - "it was massively disruptive at the top" - and repeated his view that Boris has been too interested in photo ops and not enough on the hard graft of making things work. That's why, according to Ken, the rate of decline in crime levels has slowed since he left City Hall. As for basic Boris strategy, "He just carried on from me." He grinned: "It's all in my autobiography. Lawyers are going over it as we speak."

The book will be published in November. Don't expect big policy detail before then, or even Christmas: "I'm not going to say things over the next 49 weeks that I can't deliver. That's why we're talking only about maintaining the numbers of frontline police and that we want to try and make certain fares don't go up more than inflation. I can't guarantee to do that, mainly cos I don't know how the government would respond to my election."

The comment about fares and inflation was intriguing - more specific than his usual carefully-worded pledge to "hold down" fares. Does it mean that the ongoing TfL budget assumption of RPI-plus-two-percent yearly increases would go?

"That's ridiculous," he replied. "There was no consultation about that."

I pointed out that it's what TfL wants.

"They've always wanted it. That's what transport officials always want. The issue in all this is that we can't know how the government would respond to my election. Is it going to be like Thatcher, who cut off all funding inside eighteen months? But Boris is probably the only Conservative who's still got a positive popularity rating in Britain. If defeating him destabilised their coalition, it might cause the sort of U-turn Edward Heath made. When I know how they're going to respond," he promised, generously, "I'll tell you my next move."

He did, though, talk a little more about transport priorities, including his recent policy shift away from re-instating the western extension of the congestion charge zone. "I'm not going to spend a hundred million on it. I've got better use for the money." He'd like to "massively expand the bike hire scheme," but thinks the price of buying the bikes and docking frames is far too high, indeed "just bizarre." He would also "have a look" at how the cycle superhighways are working: "The cyclists all seem to be complaining, and the cabbies have been complaining too. I'm not certain they've made much impact at all."

He's perfectly aware that there won't be too much cash floating about. But when Val Shawcross, his running mate and Labour's transport lead on the London Assembly, commented that transport secretary's Philip Hammond's briefing about how TfL's grant should be spent was "very prescriptive," he enigmatically remarked: "British judges on an almost daily basis are becoming more independent. I fear I may spend a bit of time in the courts."

For the Livingstone campaign it was now onwards to press flesh in Mottingham. "Nothing can help me more than angry voters in the suburbs, putting pressure on the home secretary to sustain police numbers, or on Philip Hammond to stop fares going up," Ken remarked. "If Boris gets re-elected, he'll be trying all he can to please the Tory grassroots, cos they're the one's who'll pick their next leader. That's why he's got the beast of Wandsworth unleashed. Eddie Lister: the Ratko Mladic of local government."

Lister is the king of the spending cutters. He won't be staying in his job if Ken wins. "I don't want to get elected to make cuts," the Labour candidate said. "I want to get elected to stop the cuts - and make plans for real expansion again." And off he went, full of cake and, I sensed, a measured quantity of optimism too.