The Big Smoke

Michael Hodges has officially withdrawn from the race for London Mayor to concentrate on electoral reform. See how Time Out is taking the battle to Parliament, and sign our petition to make London more democratic.

The Olympics
Who are we to believe the Mayor when he says the Olympic infrastructure is on course to be finished on budget and on time, or the Evening Standard when it claims the whole endeavour is on the edge of disaster?

Are the Games fulfilling their brief to bring development to east London or are they destroying community assets? It's hard to be sure as long as we are not fully informed at all stages. These are our games; Londoners should be treated as adults and not children. This means being involved.

There must be a more open accounting and democratic framework and, more importantly, explanation of the ongoing work for London 2012 so Londoners can, at the click of a mouse, find out where we are.

We also want to vote on any proposed exhibition sports. Preferably ones we'll be good at.

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Public transport
Londoners who travel on foot – that is, most of us – on our way to work, gigs, restaurants and the cinema need protection from cars, motorcycles and cyclists. We demand a pedestrian charter for the capital – the pavement and pedestrian crossings should be inviolate.

Ban bicycles from riverside walks, canals and park pavements outside the morning and evening rush hours.

PPF has been a fiasco: the Mayor must take the case for full public ownership of this vital asset to the government. Failing that, embrace private finance properly and ask every FTSE 100 Company with an office in London to sponsor a tube station. They can do what they like with it, as long as it works and is kept clean.

Congestion charging should be extended, but rationalised: those with particular needs (such as mothers with young children) should be charged less than the congenitally lazy.

The whole of London should be a congestion-charging zone; only then will we really begin to address the baleful effects of the motorcar on our city. This revolutionary policy would change the nature of our city forever and in adopting it London would truly show itself as a world leader.

Extended running hours on the tube, especially from Thursday to Sunday, will help improve the experience of socialising in the capital, boosting bar and club revenue and, most importantly, improving safety for women and men who are otherwise forced to wander around the capital late at night in various states of intoxication. We have one of the largest underground networks in Europe and we’re still one of the earliest to shut down.

Reduce fares on the tube and force the Oyster card on train companies so south Londoners are no longer excluded from cheaper travel.

Once inside London rail space there should be temporary decommissioning of first class to end the ridiculous spectacle of packed trains pulling into London stations with one empty carriage.

Travellers without train tickets are fined £10 on the spot: fair enough, but if a Londoner buys a ticket and the train company doesn’t supply a (reasonable) train service, then the company should also be find £10 on the spot for each passenger.

Throw money at the tube to fix all points once and for all. There should never be messages like ‘points failure’, the most common cause of tube delays.

One Sunday a month all London within the M25 should be an enforced no-car zone.

It is outrageous that London’s cyclists are regularly injured and even killed by drivers Build proper cycling lanes and install more places to park motorcycles.

Launch a bike hire service as in Barcelona and Paris.

Replace bendy buses with a mixture of single-decker and double-decker buses – failing that, prevent bendy buses from stopping across pedestrian crossingsChange all traffic light bulbs to new LED ones and make huge savings.

Stop taxis using bus lanes. This is dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians and it slows down buses.

More pedestrianisation in the city centre supported by better and cheaper public transport.

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The environment
Caring about London's environment should not just be about cutting emissions and reducing our carbon footprints, important as those things are. It is a bigger issue that should address the numerous sources of discord and ill-health that Londoners encounter every day of the week.
The Mayor is right to curtail large lorries coming through the city but the traffic that remains will still create a fearsome amount of noise pollution, as will the constant unnecessary use of sirens by emergency vehicles that are not actually on emergency call.

We need greater efforts to clean up the capital’s waterways. Potential polluters like Thames Water, who discharge effluent into the Thames, should be subject to more punitive fines. Green space should be high on the capital's agenda.

We should be informed how much of the licence money paid by free newspaper publishers goes towards street cleaning. That proportion should then be doubled or we should force free newspaper companies to supply their own cleaners to go around picking those rags up off the streets and tube trains and recycle the paper. This works in Toronto.

Recycling in central London should not only be free but mandatory for businesses.

Impose penalties for people who spit, drop used gum, litter, and real enforcement of fines on dog owners who allow their pets to foul our streets and parks.

Provide public bins that are divided into recycled and non-recycles materials, as is the case in many German cites.

Ban plastic shopping bags in supermarkets/shops, or introduce pay-per-bag systems. Bring back the US-style heavy-duty brown paper bag.

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Policing
For whatever reasons Ken Livingstone has stood by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair no matter how poor the Met's performance has been. Although a good working relationship between Mayor and Commissioner is obviously desirable, the relationship between the two can become actively damaging to the good governance and policing of London if they are seen as political allies.

If the Mayor cannot express disquiet when Londoners are shot in the street or their homes are raided in the middle of the night on the strength of their skin colour or name he is not doing his job.

The Mayor should hold the Met Police to account to ensure that the force policing the worlds most ethnically diverse city fulfils its remit without fear or favour.

Crime is falling, but the perception of crime – the thing that actually has a huge effect on Londoners' quality of life – is not. There is no need to call for a bobby on every street; we cannot afford it and we don't have enough policemen. But when a member of the public reports a crime, the person at the other end of the phone should sound interested and should always respond by sending out an actual police officer.

We should replace the yellow ‘murder boards’ with signs saying how much crime has fallen in a borough. Replace the climate of fear with a climate of confidence.


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Foreign policy
We are yet to see the supposed full benefits of the Mayor's cheap-fuel-for-advice deal with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (and just where are those smaller bills for London’s poor and pensioners then?), so it is hard to come to a firm opinion as to whether it has been a success or failure, yet there are plenty of other foreign outreach policies the capital could and should be indulging in.

We propose a festival of capital cites – London is the most important city in the world, so what better location for a festival that celebrates and explores the very nature of being a capital city? Bring together Beijing, Washington, Hanoi, Canberra, Cairo and all the others in a festival of music, politics, arts and discussion.

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Social issues
The capital suffers from an excess of rude, angry and occasionally violent young men. It is a matter of urgency that this problem is addressed; some of the potential answers to the problem are relatively simple. For instance, give boys access to space and guitars and they are less likely to attack other Londoners (Billy Bragg is presently proving this is true of grown men through his 'Jail Guitar Doors' project).

Also, why don’t we stagger school leaving times so that whole areas of London – and most of its buses – don’t become a seething mass of aggressive boys?

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Planning
There should be special planning designation for the Thames riverside from Tilbury to Teddington. It’s too late in some cases (for instance the terrible stretch of post-modern blocks on the Wandsworth side of the river), but we can still save much of what should be the city's sparkling centrepiece, its riverfront.

Across London rapacious property developers are tearing down our world-famous pubs and closing our iconic music venues to build flats for quick profit. This could be the death knell for London's creative industries, as so much of our music, comedy, cabaret and theatre is produced in these venues.

The Mayor has the power to overrule planning permission given at borough level and should use it.

Or, if we are really serious, establish Grade 2 listing status for all Victorian pubs in the Greater London area; abolish the music licence for all London pubs, so that live music and new talent can flourish; provide refurbishment grants for struggling pubs that need to keep in line with Health and Safety legislation and, finally, scrap business tax on independent pubs.

We propose that existing homeowners cannot buy any new property built in London.

Make central London a truly 24-hour city – it is still impossible to get a civilised drink in the West End after 11pm and even if you could you wouldn't be able to get a train or tube home afterwards.

Preserve famous London shopping streets and areas to prevent them from being cloned by westernised capitalist retailers. For example, the Kings Road used to be unique; now it's full of the same shops found on every high street... Starbucks, Boots, Pret, Marks and Spencer. How long before they move into Brick Lane?

Reintroduce water fountains on street corners. This could be a new, exciting, modern design, which is cooled by solar power, self-cleans and becomes an iconic part of London street furniture. It would also advertise the deliciousness of London water to tourists and reduce the use of plastic bottles.

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Welfare
Paradoxically London is both a wealthy and an impoverished city. To his credit the Mayor has attempted to address this but measures such as affordable housing have targeted the low paid rather than the impoverished. And while he maintains such an expensive fare policy on public transport systems poor Londoners are stuck, both figuratively and literally, in their pockets of poverty.

Until we address this disparity between rich and poor Londoners this situation will not change, which is why Time Out is calling for a London-wide local income tax that shifts wealth from the richest areas to fund resources, opportunities and decent accommodation in the poorest.

More action to help young Londoners, saddled by student debt and in low-income graduate jobs, get on to the housing ladder.

Bring in free wi-fi across London. The internet is the greatest tool of knowledge – it should be free for everyone, not just coffee shop-dwellers.

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Diversity
Like so many problems they are best caught early. If we expose London schoolchildren to other Londoners and different ways of living they will not, when they are older, find them strange or threatening. As Mayor, our candidate would promote day exchange trips across London for the under-16s. What better education can there be: to travel around London is to travel around the world


Many of London’s communities are effectively cut off from the rest of the city, consequently diversity policy must go beyond well-meaning platitudes and make a real effort to introduce Londoners to those strange things – other Londoners.

Our Mayor would provide the funds to open up communities at the local, small-scale level – not mass parades through Trafalgar Square but the traditional English solution of opening up streets for fairs, markets and music – a showcase for the best of a culture in its specific locality that invites the rest of the city in.

To help promote art and history to our diverse residents, all London museums should be free to Londoners, with a nominal charge for tourists (we still need their money).

The Asbo should be replaced by community service, with kids working at museums and cultural institutions.

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