by Tom Watson MP

The election for London mayor will be of national significance, because despite Boris Johnson’s efforts to distance his personal brand from that of the Tory Party, the current London mayor is a class-war Conservative, and Cameron needs to hold London as a stepping stone to defending his government at the next general election. On Boris Johnson’s carefully cultivated maverick image, Dave Hill has spelled out how superficial this is:

Johnson is tightly aligned with the direction of Cameron’s Conservatives and the interest groups they are closest to. Look past his over-publicised sniping against the 50 pence tax rate or his dismissal of the prime minister’s “broken society” riff as “piffle” and focus instead on his achievements at City Hall and the connections that help sustain brand Boris. To do so is to meet a total Tory in the raw.

Like the party he represents, Johnson’s political machine has been fuelled by friendly powers in the rightwing media and the Square Mile. His hospitality history shows that the Telegraph group, which pays him £250,000 a year to write a weekly column, is not the only news organisation he’s on good terms with. Various Murdochs and their lieutenants feature among big media figures on his wining and dining freebie list. News Corp has offered him a handy platform, including for claims about youth crime and justice that are less scientific than they seem.

Scroll back to his 2008 mayoral election campaign and be reminded that its cost was mostly met by City money (search for “regulated donees published 2008“). Donors included hedge fund chiefs Michael Hintze, who has more recently backed the activities of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, and Edmund Lazarus, who gave £22,500 and was appointed by Johnson to the board of his London Development Agency shortly after his victory. The Party of European Socialists drew pointed attention to Johnson’s hedge fund backers when, in October 2009, he went to Brussels to lobby against European Union proposals to regulate them more tightly.

The media and money circles Johnson moves in overlap with each other and with mayoral initiatives. A recent example was his speech at the annual dinner of the Norwood charity at a Park Lane hotel. Norwood’s president is Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Express. Desmond, another big name on Johnson’s hospitality list, is also named as a “major funding partner”, giving more than £250,000 to the Mayor’s Fund for London, a philanthropic project Johnson set up (see page 46 of the Mayor’s Fund for London Annual Report 2010).

The Mayor’s Fund receives cash from several big City names or their charitable vehicles. Barclays Capital, the investment division of Barclays bank, is named as its “founding strategic partner”. The City AM newspaper has described a star-studded Savoy breakfast at which Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond “flipped open his chequebook” and gave £50,000 to the fund.

Barclays, of course, is the conspicuous sponsor of the most prominent of Johnson’s cycling policies: his “superhighways” and his so-called “Boris Bikes” hire scheme. BBC London has reported that some believe Barclays secured a very attractive deal. Critics observe that many of the scheme’s most frequent users are commuters making their daily way from Waterloo to the Square Mile for less than a pound a week with a large helping hand from the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, across the metropolis, the cost of travelling by underground or bus has risen steeply under Johnson, and the price of a single Oyster journey on a bus — the transport mode most favoured by London’s lowest-paid — will soon be 56% higher than when Johnson came to power in 2008. The “cycling mayor” is reluctant to let pedal power inconvenience his top priority, the motorist. Improving air quality has come second best to the polluting van.

Bedrock Tory instincts have informed all his other significant mayoral policies too. He’s backed street policing that can be presented as tough but seems of questionable worth, while knife and serious youth crime have risen during his term. In housing he has encouraged first steps towards home ownership, when London’s crying need is for far more homes for social rent. He hasn’t complained that the government’s new “affordable rent” product will produce homes whose rents most Londoners can’t afford. His famous pledge that there would be no “Kosovo-style social cleansing” as a result of reforms to housing benefit was seen as a rebuke to his allies in Westminster, but Johnson himself has set the record straight .

We may or may not be content with Johnson’s record in public office or his warm relationship with private wealth. But the point is that they confirm him to be truly, madly and deeply Conservative in every fragment of his being.

Labour’s campaign – as Simon Fletcher has correctly argued - needs to pin that blue Rosette on Johnson at every opportunity; and despite some superficially disappointing polls recently, this contest is there for laobour to win.

As Ken Livingstone recenty argued at Comment is Free:

Labour will make this [mayoral] election about a real alternative. Central to that is fares. The Tories are committed to raising fares above inflation for years to come. To tax so hard in this way when household finances are under such pressure is shameful. So I will introduce an emergency fares package in October that will wipe out this January’s rise, with a 7% cut. I will freeze fares throughout 2013 and then ensure they rise overall by no more than inflation after that. On the issue of fares it will be a referendum on the Tories’ rising prices.

Tomorrow is the first work day after Boris Johnson’s new fare rises take effect, and it will directly hit Londoner’s in the pocket, and make voters aware that the mayor, for all his clownish bon-homie, is not on the side of ordinary Londoners. Ken is, and that is why he can win.

In the spirit of Christmas (that is, feeling too lazy and bloated to do any real thinking), here are 5 fairly obvious predictions for 2012. What are your top predictions for the next year, and why? If you disagree with mine, what do you think will happen instead?

Don’t feel confined to politics – cultural and musical predictions are all good too.

• Greece to be out of the eurozone and pressure on others to do the same
• Military conflict with Iran
• Britain to sink into recession
• Obama to win presidential election
• More riots in Britain

Check out Michael Rosen’s new website. Looks very promising.

http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/

This is a new project from Michael, who already has a well established website. This is what he says:

Over time I will learn how to divvy up tasks between my website and this blog. What I’m intending is that the website will be primarily for schools, children and school students and this blog will be for articles, thoughts and news. In the meantime, there’ll be some overlap. Even a lot of overlap.

You might have noticed a few changes over the last week. We’ve performed some surgery on the database which will hopefully speed things up, but more importantly you can now subscribe to comments by email and edit & delete your own comments. We’re trying out a few ways of making it easier to preview and view comments.

The most important change for now is that if you use Socialist Unity on a mobile device, it’ll now be properly formatted to read on a small screen, and we’ll be adding various options to customise the way it looks.

If you subscribe to Socialist Unity articles or comments by RSS (a method of seeing website content without visiting the website, sort of like getting the latest articles by email), you might have to unsubscribe and resubscribe to take account of various changes we’ve made.

There are more changes to come; if you have any issues with the recent changes please do let me know. As simple a site as Socialist Unity is, the stuff that makes it work is really complicated.

The Morning Star carries an exclusive article by PCS leader Mark Serwotka, accusing the leaders of the Labour Party and some other unions of failing to take a credible stand against the government. This is certainly a breach of ettiquette, as unions usually respect the sovereign decision making processes of other unions, but it also indicates that the PCS is very serious about escalating the pensions dispute with the government. John Millington reports in the Star:

PCS union leader Mark Serwotka rallied Britain against the great pensions robbery today, hitting out at a “defeatist” mentality among some senior figures within the labour movement.

Writing exclusively in the Morning Star at the end of a tough year for public servants, Mr Serwotka heaped praise on millions of rank and file trade unionists who braved government threats of further anti-union legislation to stage two major strikes this year.

“The pensions dispute, following on from the huge March 26 demonstration and with fantastic days of action on June 30 and November 30 (N30), has become the first mass challenge to the coalition,” he said.

Insisting his union would stand firm on the issue, Mr Serwotka suggested that this “pivotal moment” could still be squandered by a hesitation among some leading trade unionists to fight back industrially.

“Danny Alexander crowed in Parliament at the end of December that the ‘heads of agreement’ deliver the government’s key objectives in full, and do so with no new money since our November offer,” he said.

“There is a deep-seated fatalism within parts of the leadership of the movement that says you can never win. That industrial action, even on the scale of N30, will never beat the government back. As one union has put it, ‘damage limitation’ was the best that was ever possible.

“People ask how can a coalition government of millionaires be still winning in the opinion polls despite its cuts and deeply hostile attitude to public services?

“In my view it is because of the failure of leaders in the Labour party and the trade unions to make a credible stand.

“Unions now have to make a decision of enormous significance: accept the government’s proposals on pension age, contributions and the value of pensions, or demand real negotiations on the real issues.”

The unprecedented comments by Mr Serwotka come after the government tried to exclude PCS from pensions discussions after the union’s executive rejected its proposals.

PCS confirmed today the union was considering legal challenge over the decision.

Unison and GMB have both signed “heads of agreement” which define the structure of negotiation, with a view to thrashing out details in the new year.

But Unite has not lifted its suspension of the local government agreement until the union’s national committee considers it in early 2012.

Asked whether the comments would be seen as divisive within the trade union movement, a PCS spokesman said: “We need an honest assessment of where we have got to and where we are going next.”

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Rob Griffiths added: “Unions need to meet urgently to draw up a strategy based on common objectives and which recognises the value of a bold and imaginative approach to various forms of popular and industrial action.”