We need better paid and fewer MPs rather than preening power-hungry mayors
It's that most dangerous of political schemes, a legacy moment. Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London since 2016, is steam-rolling through his passion project to pedestrianise a large part of Oxford Street, a mile-long section of that ancient thoroughfare known in Roman times as Via Trinobantina. Once you could travel from Fishguard in Pembrokeshire to central London. Now, for the first time in some 1,500 years, your caravan, donkey or bike must stop at Marble Arch.
At which point you can join a massive queue of traffic heading down Park Lane as taxis and buses on new, permanent diversion try to figure out how the hell to get to Tottenham Court Road.
Sir Sadiq's renderings, his fantasy drawings doubtless etched at vast expense by one of a dozen architect firms commissioned to consult on this project, show a vast avenue of greenery. There are young trees in enormous plant pots and the old tarmac covered in triangles of different shades of green. And along this glorious, unpolluted thoroughfare walk Khan's happy, devoted people. Needless to say, moving down the street are the diverse multitude; men holding hands, people in wheelchairs and the blind.
What is not rendered is the view of the surrounding streets, where it's a technical car park of buses, taxis, juggernauts and cyclists, the fuming hot air of the riders, drivers and passengers able to power a small city district.
Yet here is Sir Sadiq's legacy. Not a reduction in knife crime nor an increase in arrests for burglary, but a dreamy, long walkway. Meanwhile, Soho, the area that could be successfully pedestrianised (if you insist on such things) becomes further blocked and clogged. Soho's alleyways and narrow streets, its cafes, restaurants and clubs would make a marvellous, local economy-generating island of wandering, mooching, dining and drinking.
But no, it's the one straight road, a key artery of London through which buses and taxis and bicycles can freely flow (normal traffic having been banned during daylight hours and Saturdays since the 1970s) that is kiboshed.
The opposition has been vociferous. Tim Lord, the chair of the Soho Society, says nothing came from the Mayor but a shoulder shrug when he raised concerns about 'the impact of moving 16 bus routes into narrow, congested one-way streets in Marylebone and Fitzrovia'. The Labour leader of Westminster city council has said, politely, that the plan 'was not the council's preferred outcome'. Yet Sir Sadiq says he's 'proud'. Indeed, releasing the results of a local consultation, he joked that he had received 'North Korean' levels of support from London, or from those who bothered to respond to his survey, doubtless hustled by the mayor's savvy electioneering team.
Because the London Mayor appears to love power, and this is manifested in the mechanism that he has used to steamroll this process through, there is a magic lever in his office, deployed sparingly, (think, 'Break glass in case of emergency'), called the Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC).
Originally developed to accelerate housebuilding after the Second World War, if you can argue the need for regeneration, it gives you the power to ignore local decisionmakers and accelerate your plans. Hence it being used, obviously, to implement the HS2 Crossrail intersection at Old Oak Common (where white elephant meets gazelle).
Sir Sadiq revels in his power, imagining the high-fives he'll be getting from passersby as he sips his beloved flat white on his traffic-free Oxford Street.
And quite why he loves Oxford Street is beyond me for, save the likes of Selfridges, it is actually, when it comes to retail brands, one of the grottiest streets in the capital. Perhaps he has a penchant for candy, the street being littered with those dodgy American-style sweet shops as well as homogenous global retail brands, the ubiquitous vape stores, not to mention the hoards of pickpockets and that new scourge, the electric bike-driven phone thieves.
And if one makes the strange choice to shop on Sir Sadiq's Oxford Street of the future, how do you cope with lugging your purchases a mile up the road to the nearest bus stop?
Yet Sir Sadiq's power-hungry zeal is not unique to London. We have become a nation in thrall to the powers of over-paid council officials.
Reforms to local authorities over the decades have been what Sophie Stowers, of think tank More in Common calls, 'piecemeal [and] incoherent', so much so that most voters wishing to moan about a missing bin collection have no idea whether to moan to a councillor, local mayor, police and crime commissioner, metro mayor or MP. A letter of complaint, doubtless, being passed from one to another while they, eagerly, exercise what powers they have.
And, as George Jones, emeritus professor of government at the LSE, has argued, this so-called innovation of George Osborne to introduce regional mayors concentrates power in a single person, which is 'unlikely to represent the diverse complexities of a large urban, metropolitan or county region area better than collective leadership'.
There was the preening mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees (2016 to 2024) who paraded his plans for an unaffordable underground mass transit system, a £132 million refit for the Colston Hall music venue, and who flew to Vancouver to deliver a 14-minute Ted Talk on the climate crisis. The people of Bristol saw sense and in 2022 voted to replace the mayoral system with a committee.
Or there's the power-mad mayor of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby. He called for the abolition of the city's chief executive, flouted the Covid lockdown by visiting his girlfriend (he publicly apologised later), has been linked to accusations of bullying, intimidation and harassment (he denied knowledge of such behaviour and said he would never condone such an approach) and has faced criticism for plans to demolish a central car park and replace it with a public square. One local described the plan as 'delusional, considering that it rains 178 days a year'.
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