The trouble with mayors

What do they do and who are they doing it for?

For most of my life I’ve held what you could call a child’s view of mayors. The mayor first entered my consciousness through the children’s television programme Trumpton as a benign local dignitary who might open a fete or make a speech to commemorate an event in the life of the community. In the above photo the mayor is accepting a birthday gift from the people of Trumpton. Knowing his great love for the town, they thought he might like a picture of the town hall which, in this episode, has been elevated to the municipal balcony by the fire brigade.

It is all so beautifully unified and harmonious: the people love the mayor because, as a figurehead playing an important symbolic role, he represents them, is of them. In a sense, people and mayor are one, united by their shared love of place and sense of belonging to a community. How I loved Trumpton.

This month’s essay is about the journey from innocence to realism I’ve undergone with regard to mayors. It’s one that exemplifies a wider journey of understanding about democracy and what is required if it is to fulfil its promise of popular self-government. It’s a journey that many of us have been on in recent years and are still on. It’s one that involves moving from an unquestioning acceptance of things as they are to a more practical understanding of how humans organise themselves and ultimately a recognition of some harsh realities about the workings of power.

Only in the last year have mayors fully entered my consciousness as I’ve realised that they’ve somehow acquired the power to change my life quite radically, and not for the better.

In London, the campaign for the election of the next mayor on May 2^nd is well underway and the expansion of Ultra Low Emissions Zone is a key issue. I was born in London and currently live in the same area as my great-grandparents. Seeing the yellow cameras go up in the streets around me has elicited a strange mix of emotions – sadness, anger and a little fear – about a policy that is ushering in a new world of surveillance. A camera and ULEZ sign stands right outside my grandfather’s house and I wonder how my Edwardian and Victorian forebears would have felt about it.

Outside my own house is the vehicle I bought on returning to Britain. It’s newer than I needed and cost more than I could afford, but neither paying a hefty charge every time I used it nor renting a garage on the other side of the M25 seemed practical. So I made the decision to find the extra money for a ‘compliant’ vehicle on the clear internal understanding that, in the unlikely event I could afford to upgrade when the next set of requirements come in, I would not buy another new car in order to oblige the authorities. Instead, I started to prepare myself psychologically for having to leave London if I hadn’t already done so.

What happens in the capital often sets a template for other cities. Having grown up in the West country, I’d like to move to Bristol. But the mayor of Bristol has been up to all sorts, and now I’m not sure how – to use a much-abused word – liveable the city is going to be.

The rise of the mayor

The changing fortunes of Britain’s mayors came into my purview as a journalist covering public services in the early 2000s. To be honest, even with my pointiest policy nerd head on, I was always slightly bored by the mayors thing. But the information in this section is relevant to what follows, so bear with me.

It’s important to understand that I’m not talking about town or lord mayors, who tend to have ceremonial duties and chains of office, but not much power. The new generation of troublesome mayors are the elected mayors who entered Britain’s political system at the turn of the millennium on a wave of devolution. A New Labour government was splashing the cash on public services (relatively speaking) and the national mood was one of optimism. We were playing with our democracy in the belief that it was basically working well but could be improved by devolving power to the people and trying new models of governance.

In local government, subject to a successful referendum, a new mayoral system could replace council leader and cabinet system. Accordingly, the good people of Hartlepool elected a man in a monkey suit and Stuart Drummond, an independent candidate, became the executive mayor of Hartlepool Borough Council in 2002. A decade later, following the Localism Act, referendums were held in ten English cities to decide whether to change to the mayoral system. Only one – Bristol – voted to have a mayor.  

Once the public had tasted the mayoral system, it did not seem to like it. In 2012, Hartlepool voted to abolish the post and the monkey-mayor, having served three terms, was gone. A decade later, Bristol’s ‘Scrap the Mayor’ campaign resulted in the decision to revert to a traditional system committee system, ending the term of the current mayor Marvin Rees in May. In 2023, only 14 out of 317 local authorities in England had elected mayors.

Meanwhile, metro mayors were on the rise. They are central to the running of combined authorities – legal entities enabling two or more councils to work together which are able to get increased funding and power in areas such as transport and planning. Currently, there are ten combined authorities, nine of which have a directly elected mayor. While government doesn’t make the mayoral system a requirement for combined authorities, those which do have mayors tend to get the best devolution deals. If you include Greater London, 41 percent of England’s population now lives in an area with some form of mayoral governance.

England’s first directly elected mayor was Ken Livingstone who became Mayor of London in 2000, followed by Boris Johnson in 2008. London’s current mayor, Sadiq Khan, was elected in 2016 and won a second term in 2021. He has a budget of £17 billion. His role involves overseeing transport – he is chair of Transport for London – and includes some powers over the roads, with strategic oversight over the police and fire brigade. Since its establishment the London mayoralty has gained further powers in housing and planning.

Central government has a distinct appetite for mayors. In 2022, the government promised that ‘every part of England that wants one’ would have a devolution deal by 2030, with the Levelling Up legislation committing it to extending devolution across England. It favours the mayoral model, with the highest level of devolved powers given to areas with a single institution and a directly elected mayor.

Labour has promised that it will continue to foster devolution, and then some, if it wins the next election. Leader Keir Starmer told last year’s party conference that a Labour government would bring about ‘the biggest expansion of devolution since Labour was last in power’, giving combined authorities additional control over housing, planning, skills, transport and energy. 

How powerful mayors are becoming!

Let’s look a bit deeper at what modern mayors are doing with their new-found power.

A Tale of Two Mayors

In this section, I’m going to take a look at what two of my (least) favourite mayors have done in London and Bristol. Please understand that I’m not attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of their activities but rather a citizen’s account of how their preferences are most affecting me and potentially every citizen. Because of my historic lack of interest in mayors, you could say I’m Alex Public, someone not that bothered about what mayors do until their policies land on my doormat in the form of charges and fines.

First, the London mayor. The mayor has had the power to introduce ‘road user charging’ across Greater London since 1999 and successive occupants of City Hall have made the most of it. Livingstone introduced the congestion charge in 2003 and a Low Emissions Zone in 2008. The Ultra Low Emission Zone was approved under Boris Johnson, with the support of prime minister David Cameron. In 2019, Sadiq Khan implemented ULEZ a year earlier than planned, expanded it to the north and south circular roads in 2021 and to the whole of Greater London in 2023.

ULEZ rules are based on standards issued by the European Union, with the latest being Euro 6. Euro 7 will be introduced in 2025. It’s unclear whether the new standard will apply to London.

Londoners were generally accepting of road charging schemes until the latest ULEZ expansion which covers an area up to the M25 to the north of the capital and villages to the south. The expansion has been subject to legal challenges by a number of councils. Khan has been accused of manipulating the data used to justify the scheme and skewing the results of the public consultation. The Advertising Standards Authority recently ruled that adverts by Transport for London misled the public about the benefits of ULEZ.

But the money is rolling in – the ULEZ expansion generated £26 million in its first month – and so are the stories about the human costs. They include tales of bailiffs turning up outside people’s houses to collect the fines that double at alarming rates, and penalty notices being wrongly sent to exempt drivers. The more dramatic stories don’t cover the legions of people, especially in poorer suburban areas, sitting at home because they can no longer afford to do simple things such as visit relatives who don’t live near public transport or pick up heavy shopping by car. The streets of London are quieter, and every month I see more and more empty shops and closed-down eateries. There are doubtless many reasons for this, but limits on public mobility must be a factor.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of EU citizens have been wrongly fined – one French driver £25000 – for driving in London. They’re a result of what a Belgium MP has called ‘the biggest data and privacy breach in EU history’ in which the debt collection agency contracted by TFL has unlawfully shared information about drivers in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. And now a group of lorry firms in the Netherlands are bringing a legal challenge against Euro Parking Collection for issuing unlawful fines.

Oh dear. A mayor is supposed to act as ambassador, a figurehead that creates a nice warm feeling about their city and improves its standing in the world. Instead, Khan is pissing off our continental neighbours and damaging the capital’s tourist industry.

Khan has repeatedly denied claims that he is secretly planning an even more lucrative road charging scheme: pay-per-mile. A recent investigation by the Telegraph found that 157 staff members at TFL are working on Project Detroit, a new technology platform which would enable ‘other forms of charging based on distance, vehicle type, etc’ to be imposed ‘if a decision was made in future’.

Pay-per-mile, with the level of control over people’s movements it gives the authorities, is so controversial that it’s often dismissed as ‘something that couldn’t possibly happen’. But as Laura Dodsworth points out, it’s an obvious goal for Mayor Khan:

‘There are three reasons you should have seen this coming. First, he’s very clear about his ultimate goals. He has been so clear, he might as well have drawn you a map and put road signs up. Second, the process of changing our relationship with the private car is well underway; it is death by a thousand cuts, a foot in the door or, as the nudgers know it, ‘radical incrementalism’ … Third, our entire way of life and national identity is altering, not just private car ownership, everything.’

I have to confess that until I understood that Britain was in the grasp of a new, anti-mobility ideology, I did *not* see this coming. Partly it’s because I struggle with the electorate’s tolerance of bad character. I interviewed Khan early on in his career and was subsequently surprised at his rise through the political system. He was bizarrely unpersonable, responding to questions with a kind of New Labour word salad and walking off without the usual courtesies. These days, in a city that’s increasingly run-down and divided by ULEZ, it’s hard to over-state how unpopular Khan is. Since returning to London, I haven’t heard a good word about him. The mere thought of him tends to elicit a ‘yuk’ response from Londoners.

Yet according to the polls, Khan is set to win a third term as mayor, either by a narrow or a wide margin. How can we account for that? My working explanation has something to do ‘the ideology crowd’ who tend to vote along tribal lines and have either very strong convictions or a feeling there is no alternative. The result is that unpopular politicians get re-elected and use their accumulated power to steam-roller in divisive policies.

Now let’s go to Bristol and look at Mayoral Exhibit No 2.

Bristol’s Clean Air Scheme was launched in late 2022, generating £26 million in its first year after running costs. The council is trying to create the city’s first Low Traffic Neighbourhood, known in the local corporate jargon as the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme. According to Mayor Marvin Rees, the pilot would ‘set the blueprint for how Liveable Neighbourhoods could be introduced across the city in the future’.

I returned from Portugal to Bristol, hoping to soon start house-hunting. The curious thing was that, while LTNS were dividing communities in other parts of the country including nearby Bath, very few Bristolians seemed aware of the plans. A group of us went to the council meeting where Rees and cabinet members were approving the first tranche of funding for the EBLN. Three things struck me about that meeting. First, the mayor and councillors were clearly surprised at having any scrutiny from the public about the scheme; their verbal responses and body language suggested they believed they would get it straight through. Secondly, a couple of them seemed angry at having their plans questioned. Thirdly, they were unclear about the detail of what was being approved or the wider strategy of which the scheme was a part. But there was a giveaway moment when one councillor addressed the undesirability of placing physical obstacles across roads with a single, crisp word: ‘cameras’.

Indeed. Nearly a year on, the installation of cameras on street corners has invariably accompanied permanent LTN schemes.

Following a lively public meeting and claims that the consultation process was inadequate, plans for the Bristol LTN were put on hold. But not for long: another, three week consultation is about to close and the council will likely push ahead with the scheme. Meanwhile, Bristol’s ULEZ-style scheme has been causing plenty of unhappiness, with both locals and visitors to the city charged thousands in fines. The Facebook group that has sprung up in response is full of posts by distressed people asking for advice about how they might appeal their fines or what to do about the debt collectors harassing them.

Last November a crisis hit Bristol when four hundred people were suddenly evacuated from the council’s oldest tower block due to concerns about its structural safety. The council declared a major incident and told residents to go and stay with family and friends.

Where was the mayor during all this? Rwanda, attending a conference about climate change and migration. Three weeks later, he was off to Dubai for COP28. By now, his globe-trotting schedule was drawing comment, with the local press highlighting a number of trips including one to Vancouver in 2022 to give a 15-minute TED talk on climate change at a conference attended by Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Rees defends such trips as ‘part of the job’.

Khan’s schedule is also packed with international talks and conferences. Why is the new generation mayor so keen on international networking?

Talk local, act global

I’ll leave comment on the mayoral trips to UN and WEF gatherings to others as these are increasingly well-covered. But to get a better picture of the motivations and priorities of the globe-trotting mayor, I want to take a look at some of the organisations which bring mayors together outside the communities who elected them. Such bodies are part of the rise of political philanthropy in which large amounts of money from the world’s richest people is being used to shape the policies that affect us all.

A new game I sometimes play is called Follow The Funding. It can take you, depending on your point of view, to some surprising or rather predictable places.

C40 Cities

C40 Cities is basically the out-there, in-your-face Mayors Fighting Climate Change body. Its co-chair is Sadiq Khan.

The organisation began with the help of London mayor Ken Livingstone in 2005, with some big names – former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, President Clinton – getting on board in the following years. To join the network, cities must have a plan in line with the Paris Agreement to limit global heating to 1.5°C: ‘In 2018, C40 mayors made a series of bold pledges to reduce emissions and deliver on 2030 targets through green and healthy transport, zero waste, net zero carbon buildings, and equitable climate action.’

Its funders include include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Open Society Foundations*, ClimateWorks, the Clean Air Fund, IKEA*, L’Oreal* and the UK and Scottish governments.

With Covid, the network developed a plan to improve the world’s cities. They contacted Carlos Moreno, the urban planner at heart of the new approach to city life being pioneered in Oxford, to help them with it: ‘In July 2020, the C40 cities network published a framework for cities to “build back better” from the pandemic, and the 15-minute city was at the heart of it. Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan … explained the rationale in an article written in September 2020: “We will create ‘15-minute cities’, where residents can meet their needs via a short walk or bicycle ride. We will permanently reallocate road space to pedestrians and cyclists.’

I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel more informed about where some of the new policies playing out on Britain’s streets come from.

Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy

I was wrong before. This is the big one. The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy is, according to its website: ‘the largest global alliance for city climate leadership, built upon the commitment of over 12,500 cities and local governments’. It claims to represent more than a billion people.

It has three main initiatives to support ‘local policymakers to tackle sustainability challenges and contribute to a global climate solution.’ One is the development of data tools which ‘will tell us how and why climate change is happening, inform local climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and provide the evidence that governments, private sector partners, and citizens need to increase their support for local climate action … Data4Cities is GCoM’s evidence-based foundational initiative to measure and manage cities and local governments’ climate ambition and progress.’

As far as I can understand – I’m struggling with the jargon too – this means ways of assessing whether traffic management schemes such as ULEZ and LTNs are working and what changes might be needed. To you and me, this means who can drive where, and at what cost.

GCoM is also very keen on money. LOTS of it: ‘Trillions of dollars will be required to help cities build the low-emissions, resilient infrastructure necessary to combat and react to climate change … An estimated US$93 trillion of sustainable infrastructure needs to be built by 2030 to reach global climate and energy goals.’ 

Trillions of dollars! Imagine what services and facilities that kind of money could pay for: primary healthcare, public libraries, community centres … name your favourite component of the good society. Instead, it sounds as if trillions are to be spent on the monitoring and enforcement of climate-based policies.

Where will all this money come from? Apart from donations by the philanthropists who have made money out of selling things to us, it will come from governments who have raised money through taxes paid by us.

GCoM is co-funded by the European Union, while an adjacent logo suggests that Bloomberg Philanthropies might be the other main funder. It is co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg.

London is signed up to GcoM. The Bristol mayor’s diary for September 2023 records a round table meeting on Pipelines for Climate Progress at which GcoM is a key participant.

It’s worth adding that UK100, another network made up of local government leaders which includes mayors, works with C40 Cities and GcoM. In 2020 those leaders signed a pledge to meet Net Zero targets five years ahead of central government: ‘We will continue to lead the UK’s response to Net Zero, going ahead of the government goal and taking the first steps with urgency. We will make substantial progress within the next decade to deliver Net Zero. With greater powers, we would go further, faster.”

Interesting word, ‘covenant’.

Global Parliament of Mayors

The last time I checked, the word ‘parliament’ designated an elected body. In this case, it is hard to know exactly what the Global Parliament of Mayors is. Its website has some nice-sounding words about vision, mission and values, but nothing about where its funding comes from or its constitutional framework.

The website does say that the organisation was founded in 2016 largely due to the efforts of a man called Benjamin Barber, now deceased ‘as a global governance body that will be self-sustaining, self-funding, and self-governed’. Since then ‘the GPM has progressed rapidly connecting and sharing its idea with new mayors, intercity associations and leading philanthropic foundations’.

In 2018, Bristol was the host city for the Annual Summit of the Global Parliament of Mayors.

‘This year’s GPM summit will be a world-first in that we will operate as a ‘global parliament’, ensuring that participants are actively involved in debates before voting on the key priorities that GPM’s mayor membership should take forward in the coming year,’ said Rees.

That sounds a lot like the beginnings of policymaking to me. Why is it being made by this mysterious forum?

Clean Air Fund

The Clean Air Fund is one of the funders of C40 Cities. Newish and with an office in London Bridge, this organisation has a lot of money for its size: over $50m since 2019, according to its website. The funders include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation* and IKEA*.

At this point Follow The Funding really is like a board game, with the same funders appearing every few squares. Sometimes the same funders fund each other: if I take a look at ClimateWorks, a funder of C40 cities, for example, I find: Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation* and IKEA*.

The Clean Air Fund takes credit for ULEZ and Clean Air Zones in a number of British cities, including Bath, where the council is currently planning to install around forty LTNs.

I am feeling more and more informed by the minute.

On the website of the Clean Air Fund

What I am going to do about mayors

There is doubtless more to be discovered in terms of the funding, agendas and connections that make up the global mayoral network. Any investigative or citizen journalist with enough resources could doubtless turn up much more, but for now I have likely run out of your patience and my own time to dig deeper. (For an in-depth study of the money and institutions behind much of what is going on in our towns and cities, I recommend Ben Pile’s report ‘Clean Air, Dirty Money, Filthy Politics’.)

As a citizen, I have come to the conclusion that mayors are trouble, and a lot of it. They can make the difference between being able to live in the city of your choice or having to leave, whether your business will survive and the kind of social and community life you have. They have the power to impose life-changing taxes and to give personal data to foreign parties.

Increasingly, they are backed by organisations with significant money and power, organisations which, as far as I can tell from the patchy information their websites, seem to be the agents of a small number of wealthy individuals. In other words, mayors are becoming the regional agents of philanthro-capitalism, the new global force which has crept up on us over the past couple of decades.

With enthusiastic people on the ground, large amounts of money at their disposal and connections with weighty organisations such as the UN, these philanthropic individuals have acquired extraordinary levels of extra-democratic power. It’s a level of power that insulates mayors from the will of the local people they are supposed to represent.

It matters little if a mayor belongs to the left or the right. It doesn’t even seem to matter if s/he is voted out of power, since the new generation of mayors seem to use the role and connections they made while in post as a stepping stone to greater power. (You are reading the words of a woman who thought that Boris Johnson wouldn’t get very far.)

So, given the reality in which I find myself and with an election looming, I’ve been deciding what I AM GOING TO DO about the pesky mayor in my life.

I am not going to vote.

I did consider voting for Conservative candidate Susan Hall who has promised to abolish the ULEZ expansion on her first day in office. But then I learnt that she plans to repurpose them so that the police can surveil us all the better. That ties in a bit too nicely with the growing use of facial recognition for me.

While I won’t be voting, I will be talking to anyone who will listen about policies and the kind of society I want to live in. My own version of a political campaign at this time would be for the abolition of the London mayoralty. Scrap the mayor! Savvy up! We can do better than this! would be my election slogans.

I’m gradually working my way towards a kind of active citizenship. It starts from the recognition of the reality of where we are – in a kind of UniParty state – and seeks creative solutions that may lead us, however slowly, somewhere better. This applies to what to do about Western democracy more widely, but more of that in another Substack.

I haven’t entirely given up on the world of Trumpton, at least for future generations. Human societies are created by humans and a system in which people and their leaders work together for the common good is possible, if we make better choices than we are now. But getting there means relinquishing the innocence of the Trumpton-watching child, developing the ability to recognise when others are taking advantage and act accordingly.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that some funders of the global mayoral network have an asterisk* beside their names. This is the outcome of another game I sometimes play. When an organisation such as Octopus Energy*, for example, seems to be Trouble, I check to see whether it is a partner of the World Economic Forum.

In the meantime, green antidotes to the idea that ordinary people must pay endless amounts in cash and freedom to the powerful can be found in the work of Charles Eisenstein and Vandana Shiva.

***

On a brighter note, please meet the full-size version of the new logo for Ways of Seeing. It’s called ‘Kaleidoscope’ and comes to us from Carlos Borroni on Flickr. As a child, I remember being amazed in the way that makes adults laugh by the changes performed by kaleidoscopes. Turn one way and the colours and patterns are so. Turn another and the same elements reform into a completely different pattern. I also love this photo because it incorporates an eye and the outlines of what could be a bird or a fish, depending on your way of seeing.