As the Standard reported yesterday, a document written by Ken Livingstone’s chief of staff and campaign manager Simon Fletcher confirms that Team Ken is determined to pin a Tory true blue rosette on Boris Johnson and persuade Londoners to hurl ordure accordingly.

Fletcher has pounced on David Cameron’s reported remark to his backbench MPs that securing victory for Boris in London next May is “essential” to the Conservative Party’s fortunes. He argues that exploiting this emphasis can help the Labour campaign in its task of undermining Boris’s carefully contrived distance from his party’s activities nationally and sharpening the differences between its candidate and the man it has long been pointedly calling “Tory Boris Johnson.”

I too have now seen the Fletcher document, which was written for Labour’s London campaign staff and has been copied to Ed Miliband’s office. A cynic might read it as a bit of gee-up for the troops, who can’t have been heartened by the eight-point lead Boris had over Ken in the most recent opinion poll. Even so, it makes a persuasive case that Ken’s Fare Deal campaign has found a weakness in Boris’s position not only on fares in particular – a weakness that same opinion poll identified – but more generally too. Fletcher writes:

We know from our own research that while Boris Johnson has been successful in differentiating himself from the Conservative party in the past, his brand is depleted when voters see him as a recognisable Tory. That in turn establishes a clear diving (sic!) line between Johnson as a representative of an increasingly out-of-touch Tory government and Ken whose relative strengths are as someone who is “on your side on the issues that are really affecting you right now”.

He continues:

The more that Boris Johnson is seen as a Conservative, the more this will enhance how our campaign defines the terms of the election – on Ken’s Fare Deal versus Boris Johnson’s rising fares, on police cuts and rising crime, on speaking for the majority not just a privileged few. In tough times like these, Londoners can’t afford a mayor who is so out of touch that he is raising transport fares, cutting police numbers and thinks it’s ok to have a second job paying £250 000 a year – an amount he calls “chicken feed”. Those perceptions will be strengthened enormously if it is understood that Johnson’s election matters so much to the Tories nationally that the Conservative Prime Minister calls it his number one priority.

And he adds:

Our next big campaign is when the fares rise in January. Cameron’s comments that Boris Johnson’s re-election is his top priority should be used in this context…Our [campaign] script must be amended immediately to say: “David Cameron says his priority is getting fellow Conservative Boris Johnson elected – that means your fares rising under a Tory government and a Tory Mayor for years to come.”

Fletcher also argues that the recent Feltham and Heston parliamentary by-election revealed the political wind to be blowing in Ken’s favour, despite the Tory Lord Ashcroft claiming that a poll he conducted showed otherwise – a claim Labour London Assembly candidate Tom Copley challenged here.

It is, of course, in Fletcher’s interest to assert that Fare Deal is cutting through in a big way, but his analysis of Boris’s politics is impossible to quarrel with. The mayor is, as I wrote here, a total, complete and utter Tory. (In some respects this endears him to me more than Conservatives in general do: in his case his ultra-Toryism reflects a philosophical consistency that enables him to be a social liberal as well as an economic one.)

Fletcher is also correct, of course, that Boris falls out in public with fellow Tories for tactical reasons. His recent squashing of erstwhile close ally Stephen Greenhalgh’s plans to plant stacks of luxury, skyline-piercing flats in King Street, Hammersmith and Fulham, despite the angry opposition of the local well-to-do had a strong whiff of that about it: “We must protect historic buildings, green space and the views of our great city,” and so on.

The truth is that Boris, far from impeding Tory-led coalition policies as they affect the capital, is essentially their keen facilitator, whether on planning, housing, public spending cuts or anything else. Livingstone needs to gain a lot of ground if he’s to win next year’s election, but in this Labour-leaning city he seems to have a solid plan for going about it.

Bleak Houses, the new London Assembly planning and housing committee report on improving London’s private rented sector (PRS), contains nine recommendations and an array of suitably Dickensian facts.

The recommendations, listed on pages 36 and 37, include urging the mayor to develop a London-wide kitemark or accreditation badge to be awarded to homes that meet minimum standards, government tax incentives for landlords to improve the standards of properties and a number of ideas for encouraging them to offer longer tenancies.

The Dickensian facts are that about a third of the capital’s roughly 850,000 privately rented homes don’t meet the “decent homes” standard that applies in the social rented sector, and that the same proportion of its landlords are considered “rogue.” This is at a time when the PRS, which already provides for one in four London households is, as committee chair Jenny Jones AM puts it in her Foreword, “increasingly taking on taking on the functions of the social rented sector.”

At the same time the PRS is more and more providing accommodation for the sorts of people who in the fairly recent past would have been looking to buy their own homes in London (people like me) but these days cannot begin to afford to (people like my children). It may soon cease to be unusual for Londoner couples with average household incomes to start families in privately rented homes and to have, at most, low and distant expectations of becoming homeowners in the capital.

The Bleak Houses report says the PRS in London grew by 83% in the first ten years of this century and is now “the only growing housing tenure in London.” It is, in other words, the housing future of this city for more and more of its people, ranging from the very vulnerable to the reasonably affluent.

The challenge presented in the report for London’s mayors and London’s boroughs is to act to eliminate low standards without risking reducing the supply of PRS homes when social rented accommodation is drying up and homes for sale are priced out of sight.

Some combination of constructive regulation and conditional encouragement is the answer sought here, with tenants and a critical mass of good landlords locating a shared interest in long-term security at the heart of it, though suppressing current soaring rent levels – the other theme of Ken Livingstone’s recent policy speech – is, of course, another huge part of the picture and beyond the scope of Bleak Houses.

The report seems to chime with the findings of a recent study of the PRS in other countries by the London School of Economics, which you can read about here.

Update: Shelter’s Director of Communications, Policy and Campaigns Kay Boycott has responded to the report as follows:

Shelter is glad that the London Assembly’s report Bleak Houses has acknowledged the growing problems affecting families in London’s over-heated private renting market. In the last two years, London has seen a 68% increase in the number of families with children who rent from a private landlord and they are ten times more likely than homeowners to have moved house in the last year.

As London private rents soar, and tenants can be evicted with just two months notice, we welcome the London Assembly’s ideas for improving the stability that private renting offers, and in particular for families with children. If the London Assembly is looking incentives to achieve this, the most important thing will be to identify landlords that are able to offer longer tenancies and find the right incentives to encourage them to change their practice.

Many thanks for that.

Ken Livingstone’s proposals for improving London’s private rented housing sector, unveiled in a speech on Tuesday, have been greeted in some quarters like a sighting of rising damp, with dire warnings being issued about the ruinous impact of introducing rent controls. This is no surprise: the smallest prospect of tighter regulation is guaranteed to have such as Boris Johnson and some landlord pressure groups howling about toadstools sprouting from skirting boards. But were these people aware that rent controls as such weren’t mentioned by Ken in his speech?

If asked about them the Labour mayoral candidate will advocate the principle with that cheery insouciance some love and others, including political media managers of the conventional kind, really hate. But he knows he’d lack the power to put it into practice. And there was no promise to pursue such a path among his words to the IPPR/Centre for London conference.

Two pledges were made. The first was to “establish a campaign for a London Living Rent,” which would learn from the achievements of the London Living Wage campaign by “arguing, cajoling, intervening and collaborating” to persuade landlords that it can be in their interest for rents to take no more than a third of tenants’ incomes rather than the more than 50% now devoured by two-bedroom dwellings in most London boroughs. Longer-term, more co-operative tenants might be one beneficial result.

The second was to “work with other stakeholders” to establish a “London-wide, non-profit lettings agency,” which would “put good tenants in touch with good landlords across the spectrum of private renting so that both can benefit from security of tenure and reduce the costs of letting.” Such an agency, I’m told, would be run from City Hall like a social enterprise and seek to encourage good practice and root out rogues and rip-off artists.

Both are quite large ideas. But coming from a politician who, according to the interwebby chums of his Conservative opponent, is interested only in forcing Chingford to twin with Cuba they have a bridge-building, consensual quality.

Ken’s initiative and the housing policy jousts of the mayoral contest in general have brought a measured response from Richard Lambert, chief executive officer of the National Landlord Association. Commenting on the idea of a London-wide non-profit lettings agency he welcomed “initiatives that seek to improve access to private housing for tenants on housing benefits,” citing an example already working in Harrow.

On the wider question of access to affordable housing, Lambert made the point that, “Rising rents in the private sector do not automatically mean bigger profits,” and said he hoped “the real focus of all candidates in the lead up to next year’s mayoral election will be the overall affordability of living in London. We would welcome a debate on what constitutes a ‘living income’ at a time of rising costs of living, expensive housing, stagnating salaries and decreasing housing benefit.”

Judging by Ken’s speech, which majored on living standards in the capital, he’s not the only one.

Unemployment across the UK has risen again, and once more London has not escaped the national trend. Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show the seasonally-adjusted rate for the capital for August to October to be a fraction short of 10%, the worst of any region apart from the north east of England and an increase of 0.3% from the previous quarter. November’s ONS figures for claimants in London, which don’t include all unemployment people, underline the continuing bad news. The total is 234,699, representing an 11.9% increase over the past year.

At constituency level, the highest percentages of claimants are in Hackney South and Shoreditch (8.6%), Tottenham (8.3%), West Ham (7.6%), Walthamstow (7.4%), Edmonton (7.3%) and Bethnal Green and Bow (7.3%). These locations prompt a certain bleak reflection: four are in Olympic host boroughs; two sit alongside the Square Mile; one is where the summer’s riots began and another is its next door neighbour, a place grimly associated with fatal youth violence.

Mayoral candidates have been responding. Conservative incumbent Boris Johnson remarked that young Londoners in particular were being “squeezed out” and urged businesses to take on more apprentices and paid interns. Yet he appears to have uttered not a squeak of complaint about the scale of the government’s public spending cuts, which have produced so much unemployment in the capital as they have across the country.

For the Liberal Democrats, the Tories’ coalition partners, Brian Paddick said much the same, although he specified the City rather than London businesses in general, urging it to “put money into training and apprenticeships” and the current mayor to try harder.

Jenny Jones for the Greens? “Both the Coalition and the Mayor’s office seem willing to consign an increasingly large section of today’s youth to the sidelines,” she said. “With such a concentration of affluence continuing unscathed within the Square Mile under the Mayor’s protection these increases in youth unemployment are inexcusable.”

Labour’s Ken Livingstone launched a more general attack on the government and said Boris seemed “embarrassed” to mention unemployment in the capital. He accused him of doing nothing to “offset these negative trends,” and of being “more keen on covering up for his fellow Tories in government.” Ken had had a bit more to say on rising unemployment in a speech he gave on Tuesday, linking it directly to public spending cuts and “a stagnating economy” and pledging that if elected he would do all he could to “protect Londoners from the decline in living standards and the squeeze that ordinary people are facing.”

See full London constituency JSA figures on the Guardian’s data summary chart, starting at entry number 328. Have stiff drink to hand.

The first casualties of urban riots are blameless people robbed of their livelihoods, their homes, their peace of mind, even their lives – nothing should come before easing their pain and striving to ensure that such barbarity is never again inflicted. The next casualty, cowering right behind, is the willingness of people in power and authority to get an intellectual grip on why those riots occurred, in order help prevent a repetition.

The starkest examples in recent days have been provided by Conservative Party politicians. Michael Gove’s performance on Newsnight was definitive. Fellow guest Harriet Harman’s mild observation that the causes of the riots are “complex” produced a barked tirade of rigid sanctimony – the first refuge of the right in denial. The politician responsible for children’s education presented himself as stoutly opposed to mental reasoning of any kind.

London’s top Tory hasn’t done much better. Boris’s approach has been to denounce what he called “sociological justifications” and indulge in the populist sharp practice at which he excels. His remark on yesterday’s Today programme that the government might reconsider its cuts to police budgets achieved its intended effect, intoxicating a media so addicted to Johnson’s rivalry with David Cameron that, with noble exceptions, it barely mentioned the Mayor’s own, continuing, contribution to reducing police numbers in London. It was initially left to journalists with lives outside the Westminster Village to point this out: Adam Bienkov and Martin Hoscik at MayorWatch.

The taboo against clear-eyed, realistic, intelligent diagnoses of a profound and terrifying rupture in London’s social order is so ferocious that any politician attempting it in public is effectively lynched. Ken Livingstone’s first statement about the trouble in Tottenham was explicit in saying “there can be no justification” for the destruction of businesses and homes, but he was dangled from the Daily Mail’s lamp post anyway for, albeit rather clumsily, daring to argue that government economic policy had helped create conditions for unrest. On no account must social context be permitted to dilute the orgy of self-gratifying condemnation, it appears. The irony is that Ken’s statement also called for a halt to police budget reductions, beating Boris to the punch by days.

It’s always entertaining to watch London Tories bashing Ken on crime: he’s every bit as pro police, pro stop-and-search and pro bobbies-on-the-beat as the are – every bit as Tory, in most ways. The big difference between Ken and Boris is that Ken is prepared to put council tax payers’ money where his mouth is, whereas Boris is not. Tories are frantically accusing Ken of exploiting the riots for political purposes. They are, of course, exactly right, but they don’t seem to mind their boy doing it too. Ken, meanwhile, has now joined the Labour mainstream in the inane “police numbers” bidding war, praising Margaret Thatcher in the process. This is, unless I’m very much mistaken, a little bid to outflank Boris on the right. At this rate he’ll have Brian Coleman crossing the floor.

Journalists too are menaced by Tory-led anti-thought policing, and the anxiety that their audiences will join in. On Tuesday morning I had the novel experience of first eavesdropping on then later hearing the broadcast of a radio interview. BBC 5 Live’s Aasmah Mir was one of several correspondents on central Hackney’s Clarence Road, scene of burning and looting the night before.

Her piece was first-rate, dead straight, street-level reporting, gathering the reactions of people from the Pembury estate to the destruction on their own doorsteps. Nearly as striking was her live preamble to it, in which she felt obliged to gently, almost apologetically break the news that almost no-one she had met had condemned the riots outright but talked as well about the frustrations of even law-abiding local youths. Warning: the following item contains truth; some listeners might find this enraging.

Our leaders could do much worse than pay close attention to what concerned, responsible members of riot-hit communities are saying. Some of my Hackney neighbours have joined the fearful clamour for tear gas and troops, but others know the counter-productive risks of the “tough” approach to enforcing the law, as they told Boris himself as recently as the end of May. Does any politician in this city really believe that the ruthless, pitiless criminal subcultures that have emerged so brazenly from the capital’s shadows can simply be “robustly” policed out of existence? How’s the “war on drugs” going, by the way?

My sense is that Boris Johnson did himself a bit of good with his Today interview this morning. His law-and-order line will play well with his London suburban core vote and others – some Hackney neighbours have told me they crave the military, tear gas and rubber bullets to deal with rioters. His titbit suggestion that the government looks again at cuts to police budgets is already being ravenously swallowed by a media that fails to grasp that Boris-biffs-Dave stories are to the political advantage of both men – so much so that one commentator with good Tory connections has claimed that they are practically staged.

And Boris needs to claw back all the credibility he can. A poll published today by YouGov finds that 54% of respondents think Boris has handled the riots situation badly – and YouGov tells me that almost all those responses were received before that uncomfortably heckled appearance at Clapham Junction yesterday, for which Boris has received an almost universally bad press.

But all of this makes me despair. Effective and properly resourced policing is, of course, an essential part of any approach to tackling criminality in communities, but the policing issue that Boris and other politicians, Ken Livingstone included, should really be addressing is not the number of police in London – a facile and highly-spun debate over a couple of thousand either way – but how productively police resources have been used in recent years.

I closely witnessed the incident that marked the start of the first wave of trouble in Hackney on Monday, opposite the railway station. A large group of riot police emerged from a trio of vans and detained two men, whom they interrogated in front of a diverse crowd of around a hundred. When one of the men was released a cheer went up, and the situation deteriorated from there. This brought to mind a public meeting held in May, a five-minute walk from Monday’s riot scenes, addressed by Boris, his policing deputy Kit Malthouse and others.

The audience predominantly comprised concerned black adults – responsible local people. They expressed a range of views. Some said there weren’t enough police on the streets, and doubted Boris’s (questionable) assertion that their numbers were increasing. Others drew attention to the high rates of exclusion of black children from schools and the lack of corrective supervision for them afterwards. But the biggest cheer of the night was for the comments of a local churchman, Wayne Malcolm. Here’s what he said:

There appears to be a disconnect between people’s actual experience of the police on the street and what the statistics say…[there] is a very real sentiment as far as many young people I’ve worked with, as far as my own children [are concerned], a perception that the police are not on their side – on the side of law-abiding people – that they are thuggish, that they are pretty much another gang, and that they are abusing their power of stop-and-search, and they’re treating people and speaking to people with such lack of dignity or respect that…

At this point his words were drowned out by clapping. He resumed:

We on the [youth] mentoring side are saying, ‘You are someone, you can be someone, you can become something,’ and their experience with the authorities is ‘You are nothing, you are in the way.’ The perception is real, and it really has to be managed.

More applause. Both Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are supporters of stop-and-search, the former conspicuously so. Yet it has long been far from clear that the tactic has had any benefit in terms of reducing knife and other violent crime against young people, which have risen under Boris. At the same time it is regarded by mature and intelligent adults to have had a very bad influence on the relationship between young Londoners and the police. The post-riot debate should not fixate on the quantity of police resources, but the effectiveness – or disastrous lack of it – with which they have used.

Update, 11:25 As Adam Bienkov and MayorWatch point out, Boris’s suggestion that cuts in police budgets might be reversed looks a bit iffy in view of his record.