Subir Roy: A postmodern sage

OFFBEAT

Ken Livingstone, the feisty mayor of London, was in India a couple of weeks ago to promote his city and its business. In between promotional spiels and polite words for his hosts, he slipped in a few thoughts on how to govern a city and make it both great and a good global centre. At a time when the need to combat global warming is uppermost in nearly everyone's mind, Livingstone is a sort of postmodern sage and a better role model than many.

The London-born Labour politician who has been mayor of his city twice has all the credentials to make him a hero of our times. From an appropriately humble beginning"" comprehensive school, health worker, training to become a teacher""he has gone on to make a high-profile career not in national but local government.

Earlier this year, he organised the second (the first was in 2005) meeting of mayors of cities across the world where over 400 million people live. At the meeting, 15 cities "" from New York to Tokyo to Karachi "" pledged to spend upto $5 billion to make older buildings more energy-efficient. Why? Cities account for three-fourths of the world's emission of greenhouse gases, their buildings (heating or cooling them) make up 40 per cent of this and the project has the potential to cut global carbon emissions by 10 per cent!

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the US federal government to adopt a national carbon tax and is pushing for congestion pricing in his city the way Livingstone began it all in London in 2003 by imposing a congestion charge on cars coming into central London. People who typically read business newspapers and work in the City, London's business district, hated it.

But the plan worked. The tax checked the number of cars and speeded up traffic, raising productivity. Folklore has it that buses now run so much faster that they have, at times, to stop in order not to reach destinations before time. Now Livingstone wants to refine the tax, impose a hefty £25 on the biggest gas guzzlers (Chelsea tractors, as they are called) and grade it down to zero for the smallest cars including the mini electric G-Wiz, which is none other than the Reva made by Bangalore's Maini group.

Despite being a political outsider, intensely disliked by Prime Ministers and his own party leaders, Livingstone has managed to grab power and exercise it to make a difference. When he could not get his Labour Party's nomination to contest for mayor the first time in 2000, he stood as a rebel, got expelled from his party and won. Then when 2004 came around and he was obviously going to win, his party readmitted him and made him its candidate.

Livingstone's real distinction lies in refusing to be typecast. He is broadly within the Labour Left but favours ideas like proportional representation at Westminster, which the Left does not like. He is in favour of Britain joining the euro regime which brings him closer to the financial crowd in the City.

What adds to his appeal is the list of friends and foes he has made. Britain's tabloids, probably the most cussed section of the western media, hate him, marking him out as a key figure of the "loony Left". He, in turn, hates George W Bush and his Iraq policy, straightforwardly labelling him the most corrupt American President since the twenties. You can't do better than that, can you?

All this makes Livingstone highly interesting, but what makes him relevant for India are his comments on governance. At a discussion in Mumbai, he said it is the elected representative who has to act against the lethargic bureaucracy to get the system to deliver better. He recalled that in the nineties, the private sector in London was expanding business but the infrastructure remained static.

He illustrated his belief that the bureaucracy does not move until its job is at stake by recalling that on taking over as mayor, he sacked 27 of the 30 managers of the London Underground. He said that the key to London's progress lay in breaking barriers. Insulating a country from outside competition will only cut it off from others. Investors have to be shown the high rate of return in putting their money in productive cities.

The irony of this could not have been lost on his Mumbai audience. The city has lost out to Bangalore because of the Shiv Sena's politics of exclusion. Both Mumbai and Bangalore, which are threatened by urban decline, have nameless faceless unelected mayors who come and go every one or two years.

subir.roy@bsmail.in