The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is a professional man of the people. But early next year Livingstone’s popularity is going to be put to the test as never before, for February 2003 sees the introduction of Livingstone’s hugely controversial scheme: The congestion charge.
Its purpose is to reduce to manageable proportions the British capital’s monstrously swollen traffic. From Monday to Friday motorists will be obliged to pay a fee of £5 for the privilege of driving through central London.
The seriousness of London’s traffic crisis is impossible to exaggerate. Livingstone is hoping that — in conjunction with improved public transport — the congestion charge will induce a significant number of motorists to stay away from the centre of a city, where the average speed of vehicles is now less than it was a hundred years ago in the era of horse-drawn carriages.
It is not just the bosses of other British cities, contending with traffic problems of their own, who will be paying close attention to the congestion charge’s progress. After all, traffic congestion is now a global phenomenon, a scourge to which urban planners all over the world are looking for an antidote. And more specifically, with the introduction of the charge Livingstone is following the example of Singapore.
What makes his predicament especially interesting is that he is an elected leader who is consciously running the risk of provoking mass outrage on the part of London’s motorists. His counterparts elsewhere are more than happy to let London’s mayor play the part of guinea pig. The possibility that the charge could become a huge electoral liability needs no underlining.
Critics of Livingstone’s scheme insist that — apart from being vastly expensive to run — it will make no appreciable difference to the traffic that is choking London’s streets. The charge is particularly resented by many who live in central London and who, on account of work or having to drive children to school, have no choice but to enter the “congestion zone” every day.
For all the “expert” forecasts that he has commissioned, Livingstone himself confesses that it will be many months before the utility of the congestion charge can be assessed with any accuracy.
When it comes to winning public support for the scheme, the mayor can expect little assistance from Prime Minister Tony Blair. Britain’s business-friendly New Labour leader regards Livingstone as a left-wing dinosaur, one of those who helped to make his party unelectable for practically two decades (although to be fair ‘Red Ken’ has become business-friendly enough himself in recent times). Having granted Londoners an elected mayor when he took office in 1997, Blair went to considerable lengths to deprive them of the opportunity to vote for Livingstone by imposing on them a New Labour candidate of his own. Livingstone was forced to run as an independent. That he got elected was in no small part because Londoners were incensed by Blair’s high-handedness, his blatant attempt to flout the will of the people; at the same time, they warmed to Livingstone because he was committed to opposing plans by Tony Blair and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to semi-privatize the London tube network — a step viewed with great public alarm following a spate of appalling accidents on Britain’s privatized railways.
Despite taking the government to court, Livingstone has so far been foiled in his efforts to honor that commitment. If his plans to get London’s traffic moving also miscarry, he could end up with little to show for his 5 years in power. Not that this canny operator can have been under any illusion that he would be able to accomplish very much. For Tony Blair made sure that London’s mayor would have few actual powers at his disposal. Ever since he became mayor, Livingstone has been contending above all with the built-in handicaps of his office: The congestion charge is among the few significant initiatives that he has been able to introduce.
Livingstone now runs the risk of becoming the scapegoat not just for London’s traffic paralysis but for the capital’s numerous other ills: Rising street crime, homelessness, drug-addiction.
The charitable view is that the mayor is a politician more sinned against than sinning. But when he faces re-election in two years’ time, he is in danger of finding that the charity of Londoners is in short supply.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
