On a number of fronts, it has become all too clear what the environment strategy Boris Johnson is offering to Londoners actually consists of: a bit of charm with a lot of hot air, bluster and the hope that no one looks too closely at the details.

At a recent conference on eco-vehicles, London’s Tory Mayor declared that the capital’s car owners had responded enthusiastically to his personal appeal to “go electric”. In reality, many had already committed themselves to the introduction of electric vehicles in response to the congestion charge and the low emission zone, which penalise polluting lorries and vans. Both these initiatives were introduced by Johnson’s Labour predecessor, Ken Livingstone.

Next it was revealed that a report Boris commissioned from consultants Ernst & Young on the potential of London’s low-carbon economy had cost £85,000. This expensive report says nothing new. It is no more than a re-hash of information already in the public domain. It could easily have been produced in-house by the Mayor’s environment team – which he is now proposing to cut by half. Evidently, Boris prefers outsourcing to private companies, irrespective of the additional cost to Londoners.

This was followed by the publication of the Mayor’s Annual Report for 2008-9, in which he confirmed what many had suspected was his motive for suspending the third phase of the low emission zone, despite the disastrous impact of this on Londoners’ health. In his view, it was an “onerous environmental regulation” on small vans and businesses – in other words, on “white van man” in the London suburbs and the core supporters of Boris Johnson.

Then came the results of an investigation by the London Assembly into the Mayor’s environmental spending. This found that less than a third of the total will be spent on tackling climate change and less than 4 per cent on reducing waste. Most of the money will be used to fund initiatives which Boris claims will “make London a greener and more pleasant city”. Unfortunately, the environmental benefits of these initiatives are questionable.

For example, the Mayor’s cycling programme has a budget of £111 million and accounts for half of the Greater London Authority’s total environmental spending. Yet the scheme is likely to have only a minimal effect on car usage and consequently carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution levels.

Boris was in his element at the Green500 awards, where even Chelsea Football Club received recognition for its environment efforts. The Mayor charmed his audience with warm words about “London’s top organisations truly grasping the nettle to become greener”. This easy-going affability is one of Boris’s great skills as a politician. But problems as profound as those concerning the urban and global environment require something more serious. Such “greenstanding” at an awards ceremony is no substitute for an effective programme aimed at combating poor air quality and climate change.

First published in Tribune, 3rd July 2009

Last Sunday, on a glorious evening at Lords, with its new floodlights and its immediate neighbourhood brought alive in manner that is not customary in St John’s Wood, we saw the successful conclusion of the ICC Twenty20 cricket World Cup, with Pakistan beating the Sri Lankans. Half of the tournament had been staged in London, with matches divided between the Oval and Lords, and it was fitting that it should close at the ground where it had opened less than three weeks earlier, with the unexpected victory of Holland over England in a dramatic final over.

That opening match boded well for the events that would unfold over the next few weeks. The tournament featured fielding and catching that was routinely breathtaking; umpires who got most things right; the example of Ireland giving encouragement to amateur cricketers all around the world; and England’s victory in the parallel women’s tournament. Completed in less than 18 days, the competition left the fans wanting more.

Quality was the key, and we saw the return of traditional skills like wicket keeping and spin bowling in all its variations, as teams realised that the biff-bang approach doesn’t always work. And London showed what an excellent sporting venue it is, with fans of every nation embracing and enjoying Twenty20 – rather more so than some of the more conservative MCC members, it must be said.

London is the historic home of cricket, and the “spirit of the game” now enshrined in the official rules by the MCC embodies the Olympic ideal of fair play. So hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 can provide the capital with an ideal opportunity to showcase cricket, allowing it to reach a much wider global audience, while in return increasing the appeal of the Olympics amongst cricketing nations that don’t engage as fully with traditional athletics.

Leading cricketers such as Gilchrist, Waugh, Dravid and others have been promoting the inclusion of Twenty20 cricket as a “full” Olympic sport in the 2020 Olympics, under the catchy slogan “Twenty20 for 2020”. As a prelude to that it would be useful if cricket were part of the Games in London 2012 in some form.

In the past, the host Olympic nation has introduced a “demonstration” sport as part of the Games, with the aim that this should become an official Olympic sport in future years. This changed with the removal of demonstration sports at the Beijing Olympics, so host cities are now showcasing local sports as part of the “Cultural Olympiad”.

During the Beijing Olympics “Wushu”, an exhibition and full contact sport derived from traditional Chinese martial arts, was incorporated into the Cultural Olympiad. So if the Chinese can have Wushu, l can’t see why we shouldn’t have cricket in its Twenty20 version incorporated into the London Olympics, given that it is our summer cultural game.

Cricket has been part of the Games in the past – it was last played at the 1900 Olympics, when Great Britain beat France. So with a successful Twenty20 World Cup concluded last Sunday, isn’t it time to think about having cricket returning to the Olympics for 2012?

First published in West End Extra, 26 June 2009

London Assembly Member, Murad Qureshi, has expressed his shock as the huge cost of Boris Johnson’s latest environmental failure was revealed. New figures reveal that a report by consultants Ernst & Young on the potential of London’s low carbon economy cost Londoners £85,000.

Murad said: "It is appalling to think that Boris has asked private consultants to produce a report that could have been written in-house while his own environment team face the threat of job cuts. It’s just outsourcing for outsourcing’s sake.

"This expensive report says nothing new – it’s merely a re-hash of information already in the public domain and could have been put together as a student project. I’m surprised and disappointed that the Mayor is willing to put this out as a credible policy document."

Specifically, the report:

• Fails to assess the interventions of the London Development Agency (LDA), the Mayor’s economic arm in the GLA group, into the low carbon economy.

• Fails to mention that the LDA have under-spent £12.9 million on important environment projects since Boris took over last year. *

• Gives undue emphasis to the financial sector rather then the real economy in London and thus does not acknowledge that London’s aspiration to be the global centre of carbon trading and appropriate business services will depend on the capital’s ability to limit its environmental footprint.

Murad added: "If we’re going to get this right, we need to be pressing ahead with a whole range of measures like, for example, building energy from waste plants, having a decentralised energy network and making London’s buildings a lot more energy efficient – not to mention developing London’s green manufacturing sector.

"This expensive report fails to acknowledge the internationally renowned work undertaken by the previous administration at City Hall. Ken Livingstone’s administration had a clear action plan. It set up the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA) and was instrumental in setting up the C40. We’ve lost that impetus under Boris.

"Boris says he wants to cut costs and seems to think we don’t need environment experts at City Hall, but shelling out over £85,000 for a single report is hardly good value for money. You could fund a senior policy officer for over a year for that money and get far more than a single report from them."

Notes

1. Murad Qureshi AM is a Londonwide Assembly Member. He is Labour’s spokesperson on the environment and Chair of the Assembly’s Environment Committee. 

2. City Hall has recently revealed that in the current round of job losses the environment team will be reduced from 37 posts to 20 and merged with the transport team.

3. The cost of the Low Carbon report was revealed in a written answer from the Mayor here http://www.london.gov.uk/mqt/public/question.do?id=26058

* Performance and Monitoring Report to LDA Audit, Risk and Performance Committee, 12th March 2009, reports a £12.9 million under-spend on Environmental projects.

Last Thursday I went to the US Embassy as invited guest to listen to Barack Obama’s Cairo address. And I came out mightily impressed by the depth and scope of his speech. Drawing on his own personal experience of Muslim-majority countries, which greatly helped convince his audience, the US President outlined the seven crucial issues that in his view need to be resolved for a new beginning in relations between the West and the Muslim world.

Though l do have two concerns. Firstly that, by defining the debate in religious terms, Obama didn’t include those in both the West and Muslim world who have no faith or do not regard their religious affiliation as the primary focus of their life and identity. Many such people exist and have an important contribution to make to this discourse. And secondly, while he touched on almost everything else, he didn’t address the importance of development aid, which has always been a major tool of foreign policy.

We should all welcome Obama’s comments on the occupation of the West Bank and illegal settlements, as this change in language is in itself very significant. In reality, though, he will be judged by his follow-up actions and not simply by his fine words. He needs to make it clear that aid to Israel will be cut if the construction and expansion of illegal settlements continues, as the Economist recently suggested. Many US citizens will be amazed to hear that the biggest recipient of US aid is affluent Israel and that it has not been going to those in desperate need around the world. Obama also needs close the tax loophole that allows the private funding of illegal settlements by US-based charitable organisations.

Equally, continued US aid to Egypt should be made contingent on moves towards genuine democracy. The Mubarak regime has become much discredited, with its dictatorial nature having been exposed by dissidents, many of whom now live in London. The existing political system does not leave much space if any for those who disagree with Mubarak, and it would in everybody’s interest to democratise Egypt and allow its lively civil society to play a full role in politics. Otherwise, the political vacuum after Mubarak eventually leaves the scene could be filled by an even more repressive regime. Better for Obama to press for democratic reform now rather than leave it till it is too late.

Finally, while l feel much more comfortable with a USA led by Obama, I haven’t forgotten that the key issue for many Londoners with the US Embassy here is that it should pay its outstanding congestion charge bill. That will be something to pursue with the new US ambassador when he arrives. In the meantime, l think it’s time for me to pay a trip to the Al-Azhar, in Cairo.

Having returned from the Champions League final in Rome, l won’t dwell on the football too much, just to say that we didn’t seem to know how to respond after going down 1-0 and we have probably seen the last of Ronaldo sadly. Hence the play on the words of Julius Caesar.

It is clear that all roads lead to Rome, certainly if you look at the way Stadio Olimpico has been managed since the 1960 Rome Olympics. It has both local teams, Roma and Lazio, playing with fanatical support at the stadium on alternative weekends on a pitch around a running track. This is something we are not doing after 2012 with our stadium in London despite all the expenditure on it.

I have also lent my support to a suggestion in a Guardian editorial that the Stadio Olimpico should become the permanent home of the Champions League final, with some provisos. These being that we should not have to show photo ID at the stadium, that a drinking ban on the day is inconsistent with beer firms sponsoring the Champions League, and that the final should be held over a weekend and not mid-week.

During the same week that London Mayor Boris Johnson celebrated his first anniversary at City Hall, a report from the environment committee of the London Assembly, appropriately entitled Every Breath You Take, highlighted how bad the air quality in london was getting for its residents.

It confirmed that premature deaths and years of life lost caused by pollution in the capital is three times higher than claimed, confirming the city has the worst pollution levels in Britain and some of the worst in Europe.

This at the same time as the Government is under pressure to improve air quality as a result of European Union proceedings which began earlier this year following this country’s failure to comply with the directives on levels of PM10. This could mean Britain being fined up to £300 million.

So what’s the Mayor of London doing? So far, we’ve only seen backward steps from Johnson on this. Behind his charm and bluster, he has been actively dismantling measures to reduce pollution in London. He claims to be supporting 90,000 small van drivers by cancelling the next phase of the low emission zone, but he has lost sight of the approximately 107,000 people made ill in London each year by pollution levels. This is on top of Johnson’s plans to scrap the western extension of the congestion charge.

So there is a worrying disparity between the Government, which is legally bound to reach air quality standards, and the mayor and local authorities, which merely have to show they are “working towards” targets.

In the meantime, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has submitted an application to extend its deadline by 2011 to avoid the fines. DEFRA is also looking seriously at its powers of direction over the London Mayor, following his decision to suspend the third phase of the city’s low emission zone. This would mean the Mayor would be directed to implement alternative measures to meet the air quality limits set out in the directives. And the expectation would be that he would put in place other measures Designed to deliver equal, if not greater, benefits to improve air quality than the third phase of the low emission zone, at the least.

So the showdown with DEFRA and the Mayor of London is very real. Unless Johnson can implement a big new idea to slash pollutants within the next 12 months, DEFRA will have to use the power of direction on the Mayor, as his decision to cut down the congestion charging zone and the scope of the low emission zone are proving to be ruinous for london’s environment.

Over to you, Hilary Benn.

Published in Tribune, 18 May 2009

Londonwide Labour Assembly Member Murad Qureshi AM is to present a petition to the Mayor from disgruntled Notting Hill Gate residents demanding that the abandoned tube station toilets are brought back into use as part of the station refurbishment.

Murad met campaigners to receive the petition – featuring several hundred signatures – at Notting Hill Gate station today.  The loos have been out of use for some years, but locals claim that the current improvement works in the station create an ideal opportunity to revamp and reopen them.

The petition will be presented to Mayor Boris Johnson at Mayor’s Question Time on Thursday May 21st. Murad said: "The Mayor has spoken warmly about boroughs taking part in Community Toilet Schemes, where local shops and pubs are encouraged to allow people to use their loos. So clearly he’s taken on board the message that London needs more loos. Yet here Transport for London, which he chairs, have unused toilets on their own premises – he needs to lead by example!"

Local resident John Scott of the Notting Hill Gate Improvement Group who collected signatures for the petition added: "The Victorians invented public conveniences when people were urinating in the streets – now we are closing them down. This is a retrograde step and the public are furious."

Murad added: "Notting Hill Gate is a busy tube station and good quality toilets are vital to quality of life – especially for older people, pregnant women and parents with children. The Mayor needs to take positive action and show that he really cares about the needs of Londoners."

This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the murder of Kelso Cochrane. Two commemorative events were held, an unofficial one at Kelso’s graveside in Kensal Green Cemetery and the other official one at the place where he was attacked, off Golborne Road.

On such a sober occasion, lessons of the past can enlighten the present and the future by comparing the events and context of 1958-59 with the present day, and by noting the struggle against racism since then and what it says to us about resisting racism now.

Kelso Cochrane was born in Antigua in 1927 and migrated to London in 1954, settling in Notting Hill. On 17 May 1959, while walking home from Paddington General Hospital where he had received treatment after a work accident, he was attacked by a group of white youths and stabbed to death. More than 1,200 people attended Kelso’s funeral.

Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement was active in Notting Hill at that time, and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League had its headquarters in Princedale Road. The previous year, a series of violent attacks on black people had culminated in the Notting Hill “race riots” in which white mobs of up to 400 people attacked the houses of West Indian residents.

In 1961 a local Mosleyite named Peter Dawson told the Sunday People that a Union Movement member was responsible for killing Kelso. However, the police denied that the attackers were motivated by racism and nobody has ever been charged with the murder.

Looking back on the terrible events of 1958-59 – the Notting Hill riots and the murder of Kelso Cochrane – we are able to see how far we have come since then. Today, the sight of 400-strong mobs of white racists rampaging through North Kensington or indeed any multi-ethnic area of inner London, attacking the homes of minority communities, seems inconceivable.

Of course, racism and fascism remain a threat – the election of a fascist to the London Assembly last May bears witness to that. But the BNP’s support is mainly restricted to a few areas of outer London. In inner London, people are at ease with multiculturalism and diversity, and the far right are marginalised. In the West Central GLA constituency which includes Notting Hill, the BNP got a paltry 2.4% of the vote in last year’s Assembly elections.

This situation is a tribute to the activists who have fought racism and fascism during the half a century since Kelso’s death.

It was the whipping up of an atmosphere of violent racism by Mosley’s Union Movement and Jordan’s White Defence League that led directly to Kelso’s murder. Due to the subsequent campaigning by anti-racists, in 1965 the Race Relations Act criminalised incitement to racial hatred, so that racists and fascists are no longer free to behave like that today.

And the struggle against racism was conducted on a cultural level too. The 1958 riots and Kelso’s murder produced the train of events that led to the launch of the Notting Hill Carnival – a celebration of Caribbean culture that brings together hundreds of thousands of Londoners from all of our city’s diverse communities.

It is not accidental that since his election last year the BNP’s London Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook has repeatedly used Mayor’s Question Time to attack the Notting Hill Carnival and call for its suspension.

In that context, I think it is a disgrace, and an act of appalling political irresponsibility, that the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has cancelled Rise, the biggest anti-racist festival in Europe. I am pleased to report that at the next meeting of the London Assembly my colleague Jennette Arnold will be presenting a mass petition calling on Boris to reinstate Rise.

Unless there is a continuous struggle against racism and fascism they will return again. The best way that we can commemorate the death of Kelso Cochrane is to continue that struggle today.

And we also need to get justice for Kelso’s family, who have to live with the thought that his killers may still be walking the streets. At the official unveiling of the plaque on Sunday the family made a plea for the individuals who committed the crime to be found and prosecuted – not because they are looking for revenge but simply because they want justice.

Labour on the London Assembly have welcomed the Mayor’s desire to make London the cleanest and greenest city on earth, but warn to look at his actions – not just listen to his warm words.

Speaking after the Mayor’s speech at the C40 conference in Seoul, Labour’s environment spokesman, Murad Qureshi, said:

"We want London to become the cleanest and greenest city on earth and if Boris’ actions matched up to his words we might even have a chance of succeeding. He says he wants to end our obsession with cars, but when you examine what the Mayor is doing, rather than what he’s saying, you can see he’s rolling back on charging polluting vehicles to come into London; he’s committed to making just 4 per cent of the bus fleet cleaner by 2012 and his actions on the environment have led the government to consider countermanding him. Of course we support the Mayor’s aims but we want him to realise that to make London a world leader takes more than just warm words."

Mayor’s actions

• Boris Johnson’s TfL business plan commits to introducing 360 hybrid buses by 2012 – out of a fleet of 8,300
• In February he suspended rolling out the third phase of the Low Emission Zone, which tackles the most polluting vans and minibuses
• He has commissioned work on building a brand new airport in the Thames, despite claiming to oppose a new runway at Heathrow on environmental grounds
• He has announced plans to scrap the western extension of the Congestion Charge, which will lead to 30,000 extra vehicles a day entering the zone and will lose TfL an estimated £70m of revenue
• Scrapped plans for a Brixton to Camden cross-river tram, a DLR extension to Barking & Dagenham, the Greenwich Waterfront Transit and an extension to the Croydon Tramlink
• He has begun rephasing traffic lights to give pedestrians’ time to vehicles

The creation of a “low carbon” economy that will provide jobs and clean up industry is now a crucial policy objective for countries trying to spend their way out of the world economic downturn. A recent report by HSBC calculates that the United States is allocating 12 per cent of its fiscal stimulus to the green economy and China, 34 per cent.

There is a compelling scientific, economic and strategic case for low carbon development and the first movers have a lot to gain with worldwide investment in renewable energy having grown by 65 per cent a year since 2004, and projected to reach $600 billion a year by 2020.

China’s 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10) includes a target to reduce energy intensity by 20 per cent during that period. This would translate to a saving of emissions around four times greater than the European Union’s current commitment under the Kyoto Protocol.

But despite these ambitious objectives China’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are already on par with those of the US and rising fast. This is clearly driven by the imperative of economic growth for China’s 1.3 billion people. China thus faces a qualitatively different challenge to the one that faced by industrializing nations in the past: of combining rapid industrialization, urbanization and poverty reduction with the transition to a low carbon economy.

No country has ever done this before, but the Chinese appreciate that carrying out the work of energy conservation and emission reduction and coping with climate change is a requirement of the Scientific Development Concept.

In response to the challenge of achieving a low carbon economy in China, a number of research institutes working with Chatham House in London have developed the concept of low carbon zones (LCZs). These will aim to stimulate transformational regional political leadership in a similar fashion to the special economic zones (SEZs) in the early 1980s, which gave certain regions the power to introduce more liberal economic regulations than the rest of the country, with some spectacular results.

Under the LCZ scheme, designated regions could be granted similar powers to experiment with a low carbon policy. To qualify for the LCZ status, regional leaders would have to commit to low carbon standards beyond the existing benchmarks at the national level.

These LCZs could then attract hi-tech foreign direct investment through measures such as strong patent protection, tax incentives and targeted recruitment of skilled workers. They could attract new types of carbon finance, too, by building the institutional capacity required to support local emissions trading schemes, drawing on international experience and underpinned by strong monitoring and reporting systems.

Furthermore, allowing them to pilot harmonization of standards with Europe in key low carbon sectors such as vehicle emissions, energy using products and construction would help facilitate Chinese exports and enhance trade and investment flows in the LCZs.

A second variant of the LCZ can be found in the UK, where there are similar proposals but on a smaller scale and mainly in the context of local rather than regional government. Cities are massive producers of carbon dioxide not just from traffic, but also from more energy use in buildings. So it is not surprising to hear calls to introduce a rolling program of LCZs aimed at dramatically improving the energy efficiency of all buildings — public and commercial premises and especially houses.

Here a precedent exists in the smokeless zones of the 1950s, which reduced pollution arising from the use of coal after the smog of 1952 killed 4,000 people in London. These LCZs could be rolled out across the country incrementally, with local authorities declaring an area to be an LCZ. Private sector partners would then be invited to deliver the actual service.

These partners would assess each building or house for energy efficiency and design and implement individual energy saving regimes. Within a specified time, it would become mandatory for all properties in the zone to reach the minimum ratings of energy efficiency.

A range of technologies and measures is available to ensure that energy efficiency addresses the whole property, and many of the measures will pay for themselves through lower bills. Focusing the zones on neighborhoods has great advantages because there are economies to be made from concentrating on defined areas and scope — for example, by introducing combined heat and power plants. This second form of LCZ was proposed by the last administration at London’s City Hall by the then deputy mayor.

Designing and implementing effective policies to drive the transition to a low carbon economy and share the costs equitably is a major political challenge for governments across the world. As we pursue the low carbon route to future economic development, LCZs both in their Chinese and UK variants offer an important means of dealing with the challenges ahead.

Published in China Daily, 5 May 2009