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Sadiq Khan asks Londoners to back his call for government to ‘do right’ by London

The Mayor has warned that Downing Street has "got it in" for the capital, which faces an "existential" threat
Charles Wright

Less “alpha male” politics, please – that was the call from Sadiq Khan to Downing Street last week, amid growing concerns that the government is intent on “dismantling” the 1999 devolution settlement which saw the creation of the mayoralty.

“If they want more power in London they need to win the election,” the Mayor said, speaking to reporters last week after an online “Speak to Sadiq” question and answer session organised by the London Labour Party at which Khan took questions from non-Labour and floating voters and from Londoners who had voted Conservative for the first time at last year’s general election.

Downing Street seems to have “got it in for London,” Khan said, nevertheless predicting that the Prime Minister’s team would “calm down after we’ve won a landslide victory”. While relations with some cabinet members are good, a more “collegiate” approach overall is needed, he added, calling on the capital’s residents to back him in urging the government to “do right” by London.

“London is the country’s economic engine. It is in all our interests to understand that London is crucial to our country’s wealth and prosperity”, he said, adding that the government needs to learn the lessons of its slow response to the Covid-19 pandemic and act quickly to avert an “existential” threat to the capital.

Action should include extending the business rates holiday for another year, targeted help for hard-pressed retail, culture, hospitality and leisure businesses, including further furlough support in those areas, and retraining for the 1.3 million Londoners currently furloughed and at risk of unemployment, Khan said.

His call came as figures released by Labour suggested that more than £72 million in emergency government grant funding earmarked for London businesses remained unallocated and at risk of being “clawed back”. £1.4 billion unallocated nationally should be redirected into a Hospitality and High Street Fightback Fund, the party said.

Khan also repeated his call for an immediate inquiry into the UK response to the pandemic, in order to learn lessons “in real time”. And he confirmed his intention to relocate the capital’s seat of government to Newham’s Royal Docks, saving £55 million against a background of up to £500 million shortfalls in Greater London Authority budgets over the coming two years.

The Mayor also confirmed that he expected his London Plan – the planning and development blueprint for the capital – to be signed off by the government “sooner rather than later”.

The draft Plan, in preparation since 2017, fell at its final hurdle in early March, when communities secretary Robert Jenrick refused to approve it. The intervention came just before the expected launch of hostilities ahead of the mayoral election, since postponed to next year. The last formal contact between Khan and Jenrick was on April 24.

The Plan was now more relevant than ever, Khan said, with its “good growth” focus on protecting open space, promoting active travel, work-life balance and high-quality design. The government’s recently-unveiled planning reform proposals, threatening to further undermine the strategic role of the Mayor according to some commentators, as well as reducing those of local councillors in determining planning applications, are a “pig’s ear”, he added, predicting a U-turn on the plans.

Transport for London will be introducing dedicated “school buses” as schools return after the summer, Khan said, with capacity increased to 60 rather than 30, and every other bus on key routes reserved for schoolchildren.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair and thorough coverage of the UK’s capital city. It depends greatly on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up London news, views and information from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

Categories: News
Tags: business rates, coronavirus, COVID-19 London, education, Greater London Authority, Labour Party, Robert Jenrick, Royal Docks, Sadiq Khan, schools, The London Plan, Transport for London

Dave Hill: Anti-London attitudes are part of government’s ‘red wall’ defence strategy

A tweet by a Tory Londoner who won a north of England seat from Labour was a window on the Johnson's administration's political soul
Dave Hill

Alexander Stafford, who became the MP for Rother Valley in Yorkshire on 12 December, has travelled quite a distance in his six years as an elected politician. Stafford, 33, is a suburban west Londoner, who grew up in Ealing and was educated at a local independent school. There, he attained the position of deputy head boy before going up to St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. In 2014 and again in 2018, Stafford was elected to Ealing Council. But do not be misled by this elite metropolitan upbringing. Stafford is a professional northerner.

By ‘eck, he’s authentic. Did you see him on that Twitter t’other day? Give it straight to some MP from Down South, ‘e did: “Maybe if you leave metropolitan London once in a while and speak to real voters you might get a little surprise.” That’s telling them, Alexander, lad!

Ah well. We should, perhaps, be gentle with young Stafford, who is the first Conservative ever to represent Rother Valley and will know as well as anyone that holding on to this prize brick in Labour’s shattered “red wall” might not be easy, even though he is a staunch backer of Brexit.

As his maiden Commons speech showed, he’s diligently prepped his local history and is working hard to overcome any threat to his parliamentary future that might be posed by his possession of a southern accent. And while his Twitter barb – directed at council house-raised East Ender Wes Streeting, by the way – was entirely absurd, it was useful for distilling much of the government’s “levelling up” spiel in a single sentence.

Stafford’s proposition that London’s registered electors are not “real”, should not, of course, be taken literally: he is presumably aware that the electors in the capital who have provided 73 of his parliamentary colleagues (most of them Labour) with their jobs are not phantoms. Rather, it is his tweet’s insinuation that London’s voters are, purely by being Londoners, living in some sort of artificial social construct that insulates them from, and makes them ignorant of, the honest-to-goodness, plain-spoken, everyday reality of everyone else in the country – especially the North of England – that merits closer inspection.

Being anti-London in some shape or form is all the rage of late, and politicians of more than one party have sought to profit from the sentiment in different ways. Nigel Farage’s “independence” pitch fed wistful depictions of London as overrun by immigrants and rendered un-British as a result. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, despite its upper ranks being dominated by London MPs, played a different anti-London card, sending forth John McDonnell to do his folksy scouser bit about the capital hogging all the investment during the election campaign. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, nurtures that same populist theme for his own parochial purposes.

And now, of course, Dominic Cummings, the man who runs the national government for Boris Johnson, is on a mission to liberate the nation from yet another version of “London”, the one that serves as shorthand for a mindset he believes explains the sclerotic aspects of the civil service. If only more of them lived in Mansfield, and so on.

Such are the message threads Alexander Stafford has cottoned on to, presumably calculating that “levelling up” rhetoric and promises to bring prosperity to “left behind” towns in the North (there are no such places in the South, you understand) will sound more credible if framed in opposition to a pampered “London” of alien values, gargantuan greed and undue economic dominance. Let “London” take the blame for things his constituents dislike. Farage hailed Brexit as “a victory for real people“, effectively dismissing Reamainers as, in the final analysis, treacherous, illegitimate and false. Stafford’s tweet mined much the same seam.

I’m not suggesting that this product of the Queen of the Suburbs and grandson of a man imprisoned in a Siberian gulag had sinister motives, or that he dreams of a Britain as misanthropic and pernicious as the one Farage would like to see. Rather, let’s regard his little tweet, a throwaway though it might have been, as opening a small window on the soul of not only his Rother Valley survival strategy but the mentality of the government whose majority his victory helped deliver – a government that treats London and much of what it is deemed to represent as its national project’s enemy.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair and thorough coverage of the UK’s capital city. It depends greatly on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up London news, views and information from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Alexander Stafford, Brexit, Dominic Cummings, Ealing, Ealing Council, General Election 2019, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Nigel Farage, Wes Streeting

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 157: The hero and the villain of King Charles Street

If any historical figure deserves a statue in his honour in this Whitehall avenue, it is surely Ignatius Sancho
Victor Keegan

The effigy of the frightful Robert Clive at the end of King Charles Street, facing St James’s Park, is a prime candidate for removal when Sadiq Khan’s review of London’s statues is completed. Clive’s presence also provides one of three “names” in a street that is otherwise devoid of anything to distract from an unending vista of Whitehall stone. The second is that of the street itself, christened in honour of Charles II, who was the monarch when it was built in 1682. The third, unlike the other two, is easily missed.

It appears on a plaque above most people’s line of sight on the wall of the Foreign Office. Similar in colour to the stone, it is so slight that it looks as though it might slip down at any moment. It refers to Ignatius Sancho, who escaped from a background of slavery to become a distinguished man of letters in 18th century England. Unlike Clive, he actually lived in the street. And there couldn’t be anyone less like him.

At a time of mass illiteracy, Sancho educated himself to compose music and to write to an exceptional standard. He was the first black person to vote, thanks to his ownership of a shop in the street (its position is marked by the small yellow circle is in the photo above). When his letters were published after his death – including an exchange with Laurence Stern, author of the hugely influential Tristram Shandy – they became best selling, attracting a distinguished list of subscribers, which included leading dukes, earls and duchesses, the Prime Minister, Lord North, and historian Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. If such success had happened to a white working-class lad, it would have been extraordinary. For it to happen to a black slave at a time when Britain was still the leading slave-trading nation is almost unbelievable.

More than 250 years before Black Lives Matter, Sancho was feted as an example of what black people were capable of if only they were given a chance. He was one of a number of  slaves who did well in Georgian London. Another was Oludah Equiano, who for a time lived locally and was baptised in nearby St Margaret’s Church, where Sancho was married and where his children were baptised. Equiano wrote a riveting page-turner of a book about his experiences as a slave. It too became a best seller, read by the Prince Regent among others on a distinguished list. Equiano, who had another name, Gustavus Vassa, given to him by a slave owner, soon became a leading light in the anti-slavery movement.

Sancho and his family lived above his shop thanks partly to a legacy given to him by the Duke of Montagu’s family, which had encouraged his education. He sold groceries – including, ironically, products of the slave trade like sugar, tea and tobacco – and received distinguished visitors, such as Whig politician Charles Fox, who would stop by for a gossip. It is even possible that Clive visited, as he was often in the area. Sancho’s neighbours were a motley collection of lower middle-class folk including victualers, bricklayers, sadlers, schoolmasters, bricklayers, surveyors and a “gentleman” or two.

The conclusion of all this is obvious. If the powers that be are looking for a new statue to replace that of Clive, what could be more appropriate than one of Sancho, who was actually a resident of King Charles Street. Or it could be of Sancho sitting back to back with Equiano. It is not known for certain if they actually met, though it would be curious if they hadn’t, as they both attended local churches and were among the initiators of a movement which, over 250 years later, has yet to reach its goal.

All previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair and thorough coverage of the UK’s capital city. It depends greatly on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up London news, views and information from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Black Lives Matter, Ignatius Sancho, King Charles Street, Oludah Equiano, Sadiq Khan, St James's Park, St Margaret's church, Whitehall

Corona City: A tale of two dinners

The capital's recovery might be slow, but every sign of it feels like a blessing
John Vane

Three weeks ago I ventured into a London restaurant for the first time since February. Things could have been much worse: the waiter might have been surly, the spinach might have been cold and my dining companion might not have been Dish of the Day. I still feel bad that it was she, rather than me, who crossed the road to see if the body lying face down on the forecourt of a church was alive or dead.

For all the charm of my company, it was Corona City evening. En route to meeting my date I saw that the shanty dwelling around the front door of a boarded-up house had become more elaborate since the last time I’d walked past it, suggesting that its occupant expected to sleep under cardboard and plastic sheeting for some time. The streets, though not deserted, had that vaguely feral, slightly overheated feel that’s made me watchful when out walking for some while. Masked shoppers outside a mini-market queued miserably.

The restaurant staff were pleased to see us – business was not exactly brisk – and the feeling was mutual, but the usual energy of the place was absent. Even the carnival of street life outside lacked its customary vim, with only a trio of vintage shop fashion victims catching the eye. And then I saw the body. It wore a bright green top and it appeared to be face down in the grass. Dish of the Day and I debated what to do. People outside just walked on by. Then, suddenly, she was out of the door and crossing the street and peering at the prostrate form.

“He’s sleeping,” she reported on her return. “He has his bottle near him.” Five minutes later, I saw him get up and continue on his way. Dish of the Day and I shared cheesecake for dessert.

Last Monday, we went to the same restaurant again, this time with three other, younger folk. Every table inside and outside was taken, encouraged by the Eat Out To Help Out scheme. The service wasn’t great and the spinach was slightly cold, but maybe that’s the price of recovery. The night was warm and the street life was livelier. There was no one lying face down before the church. And for an hour, it was almost like London.

John Vane writes word sketches of London. Sometimes he makes things up. Follow him on Twitter.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair and thorough coverage of the UK’s capital city. It depends on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information about London from a wide range of reliable sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

Categories: Culture
Tags: coronavirus, COVID-19 London

The London Legacy of Ealing Film Studios

New production facilities are opening in the capital, but will their output be as enduring and distinctive?
Dave Hill

Barking & Dagenham’s enterprising leader, Darren Rodwell, is excited by the now-approved plans for a big new film and TV studio in his borough, a project backed from their inception by Sadiq Khan. Meanwhile, with less fanfare so far, Enfield Council has ambitions to make its borough “the premier location for TV and film production in London” in the words of deputy leader Ian Barnes, himself a TV director.

There is, it appears, growing demand for such facilities in the capital, which has a long tradition in the field, including the often forgotten Teddington TV studios by the Thames locks in Richmond, recently demolished. But where film in particular is concerned, nothing really competes with the legacy of Ealing Studios.

Still providing production facilities today, Ealing opened in 1902 and became synonymous with a string of very British movies in the post-war years up until 1955, when the studios were bought by the BBC. Some of the most famous, such as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Passport to Pimlico (1949) were set in London, and captured the flavour of the city in those times. Here’s an excellent, nine-minute, British Film Institute video exploring Ealing’s history, character and importance.

Will Dagenham or Enfield one day create London movies as memorable as Ealing’s? What a glorious outcome that would be.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair, thorough and resolutely anti-populist news, comment and analysis about the UK’s capital city. It depends heavily on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information about London from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

 

 

Categories: Culture
Tags: Barking & Dagenham Council, Dagenham, Darren Rodwell, Ealing, Ealing Studios, Enfield Council, Ian Barnes, Teddington

Parts of Outer London seeing stronger local spending, says new report

Data gathered by Centre for London and King's College indicate some suburban areas have fared relatively well in the pandemic
Dave Hill

Some Outer London town centres have been benefiting from higher local spending during the coronavirus crisis at the same time as Central London has struggled to recover, a new report on the city’s economy has found.

Think tank Centre for London’s latest London Intelligence bulletin, compiled in partnership with King’s College, says that consumption patterns have altered during the pandemic, with some areas of the capital seeing significant increases in retail transactions during July compared with the beginning of the year.

The picture is uneven, with Stratford, Bromley, Orpington and Ealing all seeing falls of around a third compared with January, before the virus took hold. However, data have indicated that other places, including Southall and East Ham, have seen spending on groceries hold up and higher levels on clothing and in restaurants. And Outer London areas in general have been faring better than Central London, where spending across the board fell by between 60 and 80 per cent.

Centre for London deputy director Richard Brown confirmed that “lockdown meant more local spending as Londoners stayed home and shopped locally,” but warned that “London’s global centre is struggling, as are many of the capital’s lowest paid workers” with the numbers of commuters and domestic and foreign visitors a fraction of what it was.

Last week, Sadiq Khan met West End businesses and wrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeking targeted financial support and tax breaks to assist the area’s slow recovery and protect workers, including in the hard-hit arts and cultural sector.

The Heart of London Business Alliance, which represents around 500 businesses in the Piccadilly and Leicester Square areas, has made its own appeal for help, with its chief executive asking the government to produce “London-specific messaging” to build on an overall 10 per cent increase in footfall since employees began to be encouraged to return to offices.

Mark Kleinman, professor of public policy at King’s College’s policy institute, said: “The impact of the pandemic has been to accelerate some social and economic changes – such as remote working and online retail – that were already underway. We are now seeing some evidence of additional impacts, particularly on the balance of economic activity between the centre and other parts of the city, that are in part a consequence of these accelerated changes.”

The Centre for London and King’s report also finds that fears of a “car-led recovery” might prove to justified, with road traffic levels across the capital now only five per cent below pre-virus levels while public transport use has been very slow to recover, including by comparison with other international cities. An increase in bicycle use has been mostly noticeable at weekends, suggesting limited switching to cycling as a means of getting to work or shopping.

Transport for London’s chief technology officer, Shashi Verma, recently said the number of local journeys in London had gone up, especially in Outer London, although the number into Central London had also been increasing to some degree. Verma also stressed that any return by Central London to its previous levels of human and economic activity cannot be achieved without a major return to use of the Underground and other rail services.

Image from Wikipedia.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair, thorough and resolutely anti-populist news, comment and analysis about the UK’s capital city. It depends heavily on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information about London from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

 

Categories: News
Tags: Boris Johnson, Bromley, Centre For London, Ealing, East Ham, Heart of London Business Alliance, King's College, Leicester Square, Mark Kleinman, Orpington, Outer London, Piccadilly, public transport, Sadiq Khan, Shashi Verma, Stratford, Transport for London, West End

How Boris Johnson’s government is undermining London’s mayoralty

With Labour's grip on City Hall looking unbreakable, the former Mayor and several of his lieutenants seem intent on reducing the power of the Greater London Authority
Dave Hill

It is 20 years since Londoners first elected a Mayor and 21 since the legislation enabling it was passed by parliament. The Greater London Authority, comprising the Mayor and the London Assembly, was created by a Labour government, although the preceding Conservative one had also becoming persuaded of the need for a new form of London regional government to replace the Greater London Council, abolished by their party in 1986.

Now, in this anniversary year, another Tory national government appears intent on eroding the already limited powers of the Mayor, perhaps to such a degree that by the time next year’s delayed mayoral election is held, the importance of the office will be so diminished as to be hardly worth holding.

People who don’t like Sadiq Khan – and they include a number of influential people in and around 10 Downing Street – might think this a good thing. They should be careful what they wish for. Even shrewd observers who thought Boris Johnson was, at best, a four-out-of-ten Mayor believed City Hall should have had more powers devolved to it, not fewer, including the radical proposition Johnson himself endorsed that London government should control the use to which its share of property taxes raised in the city are put.

In short, the dismantling of the 1999 devolution settlement in one of the most hopelessly centralised countries in the western world would be a very bad thing for London, its people and the rest of the country, whose prosperity, like it or not, has long depended heavily on London’s economic productivity. A desire to lessen that dependence is reasonable. Denying its existence is a fashionable self-delusion among politicians and media alike.

So what are Prime Minister Johnson and his various colleagues playing at? There is no suggestion of a cunningly co-ordinated plot – after all, recent evidence suggests such a feat of organisation would be beyond the former Mayor’s national administration. But there does appear to be, at the very least, a cocksure indifference in various corridors of national power to the spirit of the 1999 Act (and its subsequent additions and modifications) and the principle of mayoral autonomy.

A personal theory, is that, although they dare not say so because of all the “levelling up” rhetoric, Johnson and company know only too well that London is vital to the UK’s recovery from the pandemic, know too that no Tory is likely to win the mayoralty in the foreseeable future and are so convinced they could make a better job of it than Khan that they just can’t stop themselves muscling in on his territory.

There are four main policy areas in which London Mayors have meaningful clout.

 

Transport

We’ve already seen the government use Transport for London’s Covid-created financial crisis to restrict TfL’s independence and its agents impose their own policy agenda. Conditions attached to the May bailout included a Department for Transport-led review of TfL’s finances, along with a larger and wider fares increase than the Mayor had committed to prior to the postponement of the 2020 mayoral election, the suspension of free travel for under-18s, an insistence that the level and operating hours of the congestion charge increase, and the provision of more dedicated road space for bicycles. The latter two measures are strongly favoured by the Prime Minister’s long-time media supporter turned transport adviser Andrew Gilligan, a cycling fanatic who has been made one of two “special representatives” of the government on the TfL board and two of its important committees.

TfL are hoping that a practical long-term funding agreement will eventually result, leaving it less dependent on fares revenue in future. But insiders are not ruling out the extreme outcome of an effective nationalisation of TfL, removing London’s transport networks from the mayoral portfolio. As London First’s Daniel Mahoney has observed “history suggests this would not lead to good outcomes”.

 

Planning and housing

Secretary of State Robert Jenrick was throwing central government’s weight about even before the pandemic took hold, with an overtly political attack on not just Khan’s proposed new London Plan – which, months later, he has yet to approve – but also his record on the related area of housing. There is a fundamental difference of attitude to these areas between Khan’s administration and those of various Johnson allies.

Khan’s predecessor’s deputy for planning Sir Edward Lister, now a Downing Street adviser, took a far more ad hoc, laissez faire approach to regulating development. Another of Johnson’s team, former Hammersmith & Fulham Council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, now a housing minister in the Lords, was a kindred spirit and follower of Lister and a prime mover behind the original, disastrous Earls Court regeneration scheme, which Johnson as Mayor enthusiastically endorsed.

Now, planning experts, boroughs and the influential influential Westminster Property Association among others have looked at Jenrick’s proposals for reforming the planning system and wondered where in the new system the capital’s Mayor is supposed to fit.

There is a mention of the “metro mayors” of other English cities, but no specific one of the Mayor of the UK’s capital city. One seasoned observer of London government dropped Jenrick’s department a line after the White Paper’s publication, pointing out this omission and wondering what it might signify. A reply thanked him for his interest and asked him if he had any ideas. Reassuring, isn’t it?

Khan and the two Mayors before him have increasingly been able to intervene in the planning system to influence the quantity, affordability and design of new housing. Is that ability to be by-passed or pegged back? London has also received funding from the government to contribute to the delivery of “affordable” homes of various kinds, with increasing amounts of control over how it is spent devolved to the Mayor. Khan and his team were pleased with the allocation they received in 2016 from the government of Theresa May. Is the government of Johnson and Jenrick likely to be as obliging? Is the government’s collective objective in both planning and housing effectively to by-pass or constrain London’s Mayor as much as possible?

 

Policing

The constitutional position is that the role of elected police and crime commissioner (PCC) for London comes with the job of London Mayor, who then sets the priorities of the Metropolitan Police through a statutory four-year police and crime plan. Those responsibilities are primarily discharged by his deputy mayor for policing and crime through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC).

The Mayor and MOPAC also set the Met’s budget, though most of the money for the Met, which also has national responsibilities, comes from national government. The Mayor can top it up by increasing his share of the Council Tax or allocating a larger proportion of the business rates he retains, both of which Khan has done in order to limit the impact of recent government spending cuts.

In other UK regions, PCCs are elected separately. The London situation is unique. There is speculation – I know nothing more than that – in City Hall circles that the government might seek to detach the London PCC role from the mayoralty. Last month, a government review of the PCC model, with a view to strengthening it, was launched by minister of state for crime, policing and the fire service, Kit Malthouse, who chaired the old Metropolitan Police Authority for Mayor Johnson before it was replaced by MOPAC and was his deputy for policing from 2008 until 2012 (his successor was Stephen Greenhalgh).

Malthouse often gives the impression of believing his boss’s self-publicity about driving down crime when they were occupants of City Hall. Criticising Khan, he recently told a credulous Times: “As deputy mayor for policing in London I successfully fought the last spike in knife crime, which grew under a Labour government, so attempts to politicise a complex and difficult problem seem cheap and unpleasant”. His expertise on that last point appears borne out. Johnson himself has pronounced through the Telegraph, his daily fanzine, that Khan is guilty of an “abject failure” to grip the problem.

Criminologist provide very different accounts of why the recorded levels of some types of crime in London, including violent crime among young people, rise and fall – accounts in which the effects of pronouncements and policies by London Mayors of any stripe are of marginal relevance at most. That’s a story for another day. But don’t rule out an attempt by the government to dilute or even remove the London Mayor’s role in the capital’s policing before too long.

It can be argued that Khan has been his own worst enemy in his attitude to Johnson’s government, by continually picking fights with it in public. While this might find favour with voters, they are fights he is unlikely to win. Would he not be better off using his hefty store of political capital to woo Johnson instead, perhaps with some big, UK recovery-linked ideas? On the other hand, you can see why he might think making overtures to a regime in which people convinced they made a great job of running the capital between 2008 and 2016 are so strongly represented would be a waste of time. But one point seems unarguable – if things keep going the way they are at present they are not going to end well.

Image from Mayor of London Facebook page.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair, thorough and resolutely anti-populist news, comment and analysis about the UK’s capital city. It depends heavily on donations from readers. Give £5 a month or £50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information about London from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

 

 

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19 London, Devolution, housing, Metropolitan Police, planning, policing, Sadiq Khan, transport, Transport for London

Rowenna Davis: The A-level fiasco has been regressive, unjust and totally avoidable

Many students will never forgive the government for its incompetence. Action must be taken before this week's GCSE result day
Rowenna Davis

Locked down, judged by an algorithm and spat out as failures. This is the reality of thousands of teenagers across our capital and our country. Six months ago, we asked young people to follow our rules, leave their schools and surrender their freedom. They obeyed, and we rewarded them with a brutal let down in results. The more a student worked above and beyond expectations, the harder this blow was likely to be. The faster a school improved, the deeper the punch was felt. This fiasco has been regressive, unjust and – perhaps most excruciatingly – totally avoidable.

I’ve struggled to make sense of the process, but here’s my understanding. Teachers submitted grades and the government then weighted these according to the previous school years’ results. So if, like Nina, you were a particularly high performing student in a relatively low performing school, you were weighted down – in her case, moving from predicted grades of ABB to DDD, leaving her rejected from all of the higher education institutions she applied to. In contrast, because relatively resource-rich private schools are more likely to get consistently higher results, they are less likely to be weighted down. In fact, some lower achieving private school students may now be surfing on higher grades than they would have if they’d actually sat the exams.

This algorithm also punishes schools that have made fast improvements. If you’ve had some bad results in the past, but you’ve really turned things around in the last few years, you are still going to be dragged down by the algorithm taking into account those previous, more difficult, years. Students sitting their exams in state schools in London which have seen great rises in results relatively quickly, are particularly likely to be stung.

But the problems don’t stop there. Students going to private schools have always been more likely to benefit from smaller class sizes, but now that gives them an added advantage. When class sizes get below a certain point, they become too small to apply the algorithm to. Instead, teachers’ predicted grades are simply accepted. Because teachers’ grades tend to be higher than those thrown out by government, those students are more likely to achieve a higher result based on an arbitrary bureaucratic process rather than on effort or talent.

What kind of message does this send? Society is underpinned by the basic, sacred assumption that if you work hard and do the right thing, it pays off. This link between effort and reward, between input and output, between talent and success, has always been under threat from inequality and absence of opportunity. This is the reciprocal deal that aligns our individual and collective interests. But to decouple it further, as this government has done, is not just brutally unfair, it’s also dangerous. If we don’t believe that hard work or talent mean anything under a government’s rules, what incentive do we have to play by them?

We must act to fix these basic errors before GCSE results day later this week. Some action may well be needed to standardise imbalances in teacher predictions, but it doesn’t have to be this. The algorithm could be upgraded to prevent these biases. It could take into account mock results. Ofsted or Ofqual could be used to check grades that seem out of line rather than an algorithm. Teachers could have a chance to challenge algorithm-generated anomalies before they are set. Longer term, it’s past time to develop a fairer system that depends less on one final set of exams and more on a mixture of coursework, exams and teacher assessment that would judge students in a fairer, more balanced way earlier.

As the government scrambles defensively in the face of these charges, ministers should remember that there is another type of exam coming. At the next general election, all of these young people will be able to grade this government on its performance. Their judgement is likely to be far more just – and more harsh – than the grades they have received.

Rowenna Davis is a London secondary school teacher, political activist and writer. Follower her on Twitter.

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Categories: Comment
Tags: education, inequality, schools