Londoners Deserve Respect
12/05/2004


7 million people, 14 faiths, 300 languages
The very diversity of its people is what makes London a great city, and potentially a great place to live and work. Yet for far too many people that potential is blighted.
London is one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. Yet alongside the riches lies the very worst of poverty. A tiny few in the City grab salaries most of us can barely imagine. Meanwhile millions of Londoners struggle to get by on inadequate wages, and many work for a pittance that doesn’t even allow a basic civilised existence. Such inequalities scar every aspect of people’s lives in this city.

Take health. It is an appalling fact that a baby boy born in parts of London today is more likely to die before they reach the age of one than one born half a century ago. And over one in three children in this city still live today in households below the government’s official poverty line.

Or housing. Young people growing up in London now face having to move out of the city when they want to leave their parents’ home. There is also a growing shortage of workers in some key jobs in London because people simply cannot find anywhere affordable to live. Yet alongside this there are almost 100,000 empty homes in London, most kept empty by banks, building societies and speculators for purely financial reasons.

Isn’t it about time something was done? Isn’t it about time some of the wealth of this city was used to make life better for the people who live and work here?

Respect’s candidates for London’s mayor and the London Assembly are Londoners like you, living and working in the city, who know the problems people face. They are not the usual suited politicians who court your vote, then once in office turn their backs on you.

A Respect mayor and Respect representatives in the London Assembly will be your voice, fighting alongside you to win the changes we so desperately need to make London a better place to live for all of us. There are things that could be done, and done quickly, to bring about such change.

The government has placed severe restrictions on the mayor’s and London Assembly’s ability to raise money and be responsible for the main functions of the city. Respect will campaign to extend the powers of the London Assembly so that it can take decisive action on housing, transport and education policy, and is able to raise the funds to take the action needed.

If the government says the money isn’t there for the action we propose, we have a simple answer. Tony Blair and his New Labour government found the billions for their immoral, illegal and unjust war and bloody occupation of Iraq. Just think what that £6 billion could have done instead for our pensioners or our public services.

Reliable, cheap and safe public transport for all
We need an emergency plan for London’s transport. The East London Line extension, whose future once again looks uncertain, is on its own inadequate to cover the shortfall in tube provision.

Crossrail, which links the eastern and western rail networks, should be built, and there should be a programme for future tube lines to areas not currently served by the underground. Overground rail services need to be upgraded to match tube frequency and standards.

All fares on tubes and buses should be pegged at £1 maximum. Poorer people should not be priced off the tube. There should be free travel passes for pensioners, all disabled people, students and young people under 18, and the unemployed, valid 24 hours a day. All public transport in London should be made fully accessible to disabled people.

There should be conductors on all buses for reasons of speed and safety. There should be guards on all tube and overground rail trains, and all stations should be staffed for all the hours that they are open. We would work closely with the transport unions as part of a plan to move towards 24-hour transport on tube and rail as we have on the buses.

All transport should be publicly owned and administered, and run as a service, not for profit. The tube and buses should be renationalised.

There should be a major expansion of proper and safe cycle routes across London, segregated from traffic wherever possible.

One of London’s greatest assets, the Thames, is vastly underused. We fully support the development of public ‘river bus’ links.

We urgently need to cut the number of private cars on London’s roads. Simply building more roads will not cut traffic congestion. There should be a major expansion of ‘school bus’ schemes, with dedicated school buses to reduce school run congestion.

The congestion charge has shown that you can take action to cut traffic levels. We should take soundings on extending it westwards to the rest of Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea.

However, the charge works only by price, not need. A progressive element should be introduced in any charge, so the rich with their expensive cars pay more.

There should also be hefty taxes on company cars and on company parking spaces, with the money raised used for public transport. There should be a significant transport tax on large companies to raise the investment needed.

Housing: a crisis with solutions
There is, correctly, great outcry when the children of country dwellers are priced out of their local area, but nowhere is this problem more acute than in London. Only the children of the very rich or very fortunate can live near their families when they grow up.

Housing in London has now reached a full-blown state of crisis. But it is a crisis to which there are solutions. There should be an emergency programme of council home building by the Greater London Authority and local authorities to provide decent, secure and affordable accommodation.

The government is willing to give hundreds of millions to local authorities to get them to privatise their council housing. Why won’t it give the same money directly to councils to build much-needed social housing? And where are the receipts from past sales of council housing, which were promised for new housing but have not been released?

Fewer council houses are being built than at any time since the Second World War, and more council homes have been transferred or sold to the private sector by the present New Labour government than under 18 years of the Conservative government. We, along with the campaigning organisation Defend Council Housing, support the ‘fourth option’, which will allow councils to raise capital for building new homes.

It is a breathtaking scandal that alongside the housing crisis there were last year 99,781 homes officially empty in London. We believe that homes kept empty for over a year for purely financial gain should be taken into public ownership and used to house people in need.

Private rents should also be pegged at fair, not ‘market’, levels. And there should be an old-style rent tribunal for tenants to appeal to, with powers to adjust rents, and tenants should have proper security of tenure. Office building should be taxed to pay for affordable housing. There should be a tax on second homes and on ‘buy for rent’, which is pricing first time buyers out of the market.

We are firmly opposed to privatisation or sell-off of council estates whether under stock transfer, PFI, ALMO or any other such scheme.

Crime: rethinking the issue
Crime is a real issue for many Londoners. Understandably, there is a concern about violent crime and how it can be curtailed. But we need to think in new ways about crime. The reality is that much crime is actually falling, with recorded street crime in London down 33 percent in the last two years.

However, fear of crime is real. And any crime, especially violent and hate crime, is terrifying for the victim. How do we make our city safer for all?

The government’s only answer is to put more people in prison. But prison isn’t working – we only have to look to the US. It has one of the highest prison populations in the world and one of the most dangerous societies. Britain already has the highest prison population in Europe – simply putting more people in prison will not make our society any safer.

The much-ignored basic fact is that crime will not be properly tackled until the social conditions which give rise to much crime are dealt with. Poverty, deprivation and social exclusion are the main driving factors behind most crime.

For example, much of the crime that does take place is drug-related. We need proper drug rehabilitation programmes and sentencing policies which encourage entry into these programmes rather than prison.

Paying for more police is not going to solve the social problems that give rise to crime. We need a much broader approach which is pre-emptive rather than simply punitive. Tony Blair once said, ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ – what happened to the second part?

We need free and easily accessible youth facilities such as sports venues and youth clubs, activities for the holidays, and access to courses that are interesting and relevant to young people. We need to provide decent, secure jobs with decent pay and trade union rights. Decent homes and jobs, with a future to look forward to with hope, is the key to reducing crime.

While addressing the wider social issues is not something that can be done overnight, there are immediate steps that can be taken to make London a safer place in which to live, work and relax. We will ensure that there is proper street lighting in all parts of London to remove dangerous paths and alleyways. All housing estates need to be well-lit at night, with concierges employed to deal with visitors. We should also employ more transport staff, to make sure that stations are adequately staffed at all times. Guards and conductors on trains and buses would also help to cut crime. There should be caretakers on all estates, park-keepers, youth workers and education workers as a means of making the environment safer by stopping crime before it happens.

There should be an emphasis on prioritising the eradication and detection of violent crime, racial and minority ethnic hatred, and corporate crime. Why do we never hear anything about dealing with the vast sums of money that are swindled in the city and elsewhere, the evasion of taxes, and corporate fraud?

Making London a better place to live
London could be a much better place to live and work, and to bring up your family. For that to happen a serious strategy for change is needed.

Planning rules should be used to encourage companies to site work where people live, helping to reduce the need for hours spent travelling.

There should be 20mph speed limits, properly enforced, in residential areas. This will reduce deaths and injuries on the roads, especially to children.

Noise and pollution from airports is a serious and growing problem. Pollution from planes is also the fastest growing source of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause the climate change which threatens disaster globally, and catastrophic flooding in London.

We oppose any new runways or terminals at Heathrow, and support restrictions such as on night flights. We support the urgent development of cheaper and more extensive rail links to Europe to discourage air travel.

We believe the mayor and Greater London Authority should work with local councils to foster the development of more public parks and open spaces. We will also fight for the Royal Parks to be brought under the democratic control of the mayor and Greater London Authority.

Too many of the prime riverside sites in London have already been gobbled up by corporate HQs or developments for the rich. Planning rules should ensure that all future riverside developments should be of social buildings such as schools, theatres and art galleries, or of social housing.

We need development of and investment in safe walking routes to schools, with trained staff employed to accompany groups of children.

Waste is a growing problem everywhere. The government plans to increase the amount of incineration. Incinerators are associated with cancers and other health problems. We oppose the development of more incinerators, and instead back a strategy of waste reduction and recycling.

Supermarkets should be refused planning permission for new developments unless they commit to reduce wasteful packaging. They and other waste-producing corporations should be taxed to help fund local authority controlled recycling schemes, with door to door collections.

Making our communities safer and better for all means retaining and developing local services from a full range of shops to local post offices, libraries, health centres and chemists, as well as sports and cultural facilities. Such local services or activities should have preferential rents to help them resist being put out of business by supermarkets. We totally oppose the current closure programme by local post offices.

Education is a growing nightmare for too many families in London. The government talks of ‘parental choice’. The reality is often a horror story of a struggle to get your children into a nearby school, a struggle that often ends in defeat. There is a simple solution which will end this madness and build better communities – free mixed ability education at every level within walking distance for every child in London.

We also support free, nutritious school lunch and breakfast being available to every child as a measure to help tackle child poverty.

Work and jobs
Making people’s lives better includes tackling poverty pay and lack of rights at work. We are committed to ending low pay, and for a minimum living wage set at the European Decency Threshold of £7. 40 an hour. We support the demand for an immediate minimum £4,000 London weighting allowance, rising as soon as possible to £6,000.

We are totally committed to equal pay for women. We back full employment rights for all from the first day of employment, with proper health and safety checks at all workplaces. We also support a 35-hour week for all.

We will ensure that trade union rights are available to all workers in London, and will work with the trade unions to help with union recruitment.

The appalling level of provision and expense of childcare in Britain is a scandal. Urgent action is needed to develop a national childcare service which meets people’s needs. It should be free, and funded out of taxation.

We will campaign to win funds from central government to ensure that the free nursery place for three and four year olds promised by the government becomes a reality for all who want one. This would require extending or building childcare centres attached to schools or workplaces, or in communities. These centres could be used as focal points for child health and leisure services, and places where parents and carers could go for advice and help. We would have the aim that in the longer term these facilities would be available for all children.

We support the creation of ‘children’s zones’, as called for by groups such as 4children, that could act as focal points for all under-16s. These would enable a huge expansion of facilities for children in school holidays. At present there are far too few of these, and many parents have to take time off work to look after children in the school holidays. Paid maternity and paternity leave should be extended.

We support the demand to restore the link between pensions and earnings, rather than prices, and for a rise in the basic state pension to make up for the 26 percent reduction in real terms since the link was broken.

Real equality for all
We stand for an end to all discrimination. We will fight for full racial and gender equality, and for full rights for all oppressed groups. We are fully committed to working with groups representing all oppressed groups, to listen to their voices and develop practical action plans to move rapidly towards genuine equality. We oppose the scapegoating of immigrants and asylum seekers, and back full rights for all those who live, study or work in London regardless of origin, race or nationality.

Racism is still the daily experience for a large proportion of London-ers. We will work with minority ethic communities to eradicate all forms of discrimination, whether it is race hate on a housing estate, discrimination in employment or exclusion from education.

Institutional racism is still a major problem inside the Metropolitan Police and other government organisations. The police force in London has to be accountable to the elected representatives of those it is there to serve. Stop and search is still used disproportionately against black and Asian young men. This must end.

Respect would endeavour to stand for the rights and aspirations of the disabled population. We recognise that the disabled community face discrimination in their daily life and would address this kind of discrimination as a priority.

End the council tax: for a local service tax
The council tax is a growing burden that unfairly hits the poor and pen-sioners. We stand for its replacement with a progressive local income tax to fund local services, where people pay according to their ability to do so. To make that work fairly also means an equalisation of local taxes across London, so that the poorest boroughs are subsidised by the rich-est. The Greater London Authority should be the body which raises and administers the tax.

London is home to the headquarters of the wealthiest multinational companies, yet big business in Britain pays the lowest taxes in Europe, and some companies pay none at all. We will fight to ensure that business is taxed at a significantly higher level to fund transport and housing improvements.

Fighting for peace and security
The wars and occupation launched by this government, above all in Iraq, have made London a target and made it a more dangerous place.

That is just one more reason, alongside so many others, why we opposed that war, and why like so many others in London we marched against that war last year. It is also one more reason to continue to call for an end to the occupation of Iraq today.

More anti-terror laws and security measures will not make London safer. Ending Britain’s role in imperialist wars alongside George Bush will. A Respect mayor and Assembly members would campaign for that.

We would take steps to build links with others across the globe who share our desire for peace and international cooperation against war. We would not allow the biannual arms fair that takes place in London’s Docklands. London should be a city at peace with the world, not one that encourages the murderous arms trade.