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.

The New Bus for London (NBfL), also known as the New Routemaster, the Boris Bus and the Tory Mayor’s Entirely Shameless Vanity Project (copyright: Team Livingstone) promises a number of environmental advantages over not only its conventional diesel counterparts but also fellow hybrid buses already operating in the capital.

Transport for London (TfL) tells me that on a simulated London bus route at the Millbrook proving ground the test model NBfL emitted 640 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometre compared with 864 grams for a current hybrid and 1,295 grams for a current diesel. It threw out 3.96 grams of mono-nitrogen oxides (NOx) per kilometre, compared with 7.7 grams from other hybrids and 9.3 grams from a diesel. And its fuel consumption was 11.6 miles per gallon, as against 8.6 for a a current hybrid and 5.8 for a standard diesel under similar test conditions.

Sounds pretty good, though I feel bound to point out that even the NBfL needs a bit of diesel in the tank to make its electric motor work and if it doesn’t get enough, embarrassment can ensue – a matter I now pledge never to mention again. But with only eight of Wrightbus’s creations ordered to join a fleet that was 8,528 strong as of March this year, how green is the capital’s surface public transport these days?

Not as green as had been hoped when Boris became mayor, I’m afraid. When TfL announced in December 2008 that it was to quadruple London’s hybrid count to 56 it also said that “a further 300 hybrid buses will be in operation by 2011,” and that it and Boris’s commitment to hybrid technology meant that “by 2012″ it expected all new buses joining the fleet to be hybrids. A roll out of 500 a year was anticipated, which would have been the largest in Europe.

Come March 2010 TfL was still sticking to its commitment that by 2012 all newcomers to the fleet would hybrids, but the expectation that “a further 300″ would appear by 2011 on top of the 56 previously announced had changed to 300 altogether. And last month, Green Party AM Darren Johnson was told in a written answer by Boris and TfL commissioner Peter Hendy that the target date for 300 hybrids was now “by 2012.” As for all newcomers to the fleet being hybrids by then, that hope had bitten the dust. The written answer says:

TfL plans to introduce approximately 800 new buses in 2012/13, of which 52 will be hybrids.

Just 52 out of 800. The answer also said that there are 133 diesel-electric hybrids operating at the moment, with a further 184 on order.

Why the problem? As the Boris/Hendy answer also says, the price of hybrids “has not reduced as originally anticipated.” A man at TfL tells me that it’s basically down to the confidence of the companies that lease vehicles to the route operators. Hybrids haven’t been around very long, so they’ve yet to prove their staying power over the dozen or more years required. That makes the leasing companies wary of investing in them, which means smaller orders for the bus manufacturers, which keeps the prices of the buses high, which puts the operators off buying them – yer basic economies of scale.

The TfL man stressed that they’re doing all they can to build the confidence required to bring the price of a hybrid down from the £300,00-315,000 mark to something nearer the roughly £190,000 of a conventional double decker. It will be interesting to see how many additional NBfLs at £330,000 a shout Wrightbus is asked to provide.

Further comment on the NBfL can be read at Autocar. All previous installment of Boris’s Bus (A Political Journey) can be read here.

From Boris Johnson’s transport strategy:

In the life of the strategy, the Mayor may consider road user charging schemes if other measures at his disposal are deemed insufficient to meet the strategy’s goals and where there is a reasonable balance between the objectives of any scheme and its costs and other impacts.

It’s point E21 in the executive summary – see page 19. Similar material was present in previous mayor Ken Livingstone’s transport strategy too. Some London Conservatives and Ken-haters, who’d convinced themselves that Transport for London was a conspiracy of Communist vegetarians, leaped upon this as proof of hidden agendas to ban go-faster stripes, cross-dress Mondeo Man, nationalise the Victoria sponge and so on.

Such screams of outraged discovery have not been repeated under Ken’s successor, despite the existence of point E21. This is unsurprising. Boris has cut the congestion charging zone in half and made plain his view that extending it to the suburbs would be “a blatant tax on the motorist.” Please note in passing that Boris calls the C-charge a “charge” when he’s feeding the media tales of billing Obama for his embassy’s poor manners, but a “tax” when he’s thinking of ballot boxes in Bromley.

But whatever it’s name, he’s against more of it. And so, for now at least, is Ken who has ruled out bringing back the western extension that Boris – in the end rather reluctantly – abolished should he re-take City Hall in May. This a sad state of affairs given that estimates of the annual cost of congestion to London’s economy range from £2 billion to £4 billion and that it is calculated that 4,000 Londoners a year die prematurely as a result of poor air quality generated mostly by road traffic.

The report commissioned by the London Assembly’s Greens published last Friday is therefore very welcome. Compiled by Professor John Whitelegg, it is called Pay-as-you-go: managing traffic impacts in a world-class city, and takes as its premise that Boris’s ambition to make London the “best big city in the world” cannot be released unless its road traffic is controlled more effectively.

The report reviews research which has found congestion charging effective wherever it’s been introduced and looks at technological advances that would make a London-wide pay-as-you-go road pricing system technically possible. It addresses the problem of selling such a radical idea to the public as follows:

Public support is very closely linked to concepts of fairness and equity. In the context of London with millions of trips being made by public transport, walking and cycling it is self-evidently fair to levy a charge on the much smaller number of car trips that cause a much larger environmental burden than non-car trips. If that revenue is then deployed for the benefit of all Londoners and for a cleaner, greener London then that is likely to win and retain public support.

This may seem madly optimistic in view of recent public rejections of congestion charging in Manchester and Edinburgh, an issue explored by a man from London Travelwatch at the City Hall launch of the report. He reminded us that mayor Livingstone introduced charging in the face of opposition from everyone from (surprise, surprise) the Evening Standard to his own advisors and that not every politician is as single-minded and ready to take big risks as Ken.

Still, as the report points out, road pricing is unusual in that it unites economist concerned with efficiency, enivronmentalists concerned with pollution and CO2 emissions, and social justice campaigners who want transport policies that help women, children and those on low incomes. There is also the question of London’s need to raise money in the age of austerity. Professor Whitelegg reaches the following conclusion:

The revenue benefits of a London-wide pay as you go scheme are substantial and it is highly unlikely that the objectives of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy can be achieved in an era of declining public finance, rising costs of supplying and maintaining public transport operations and no significant increase in revenue from road pricing.

Put in very clear language it is our view that a London-wide road pricing scheme is essential and without it congestion will worsen, air pollution will worsen, the legal consequences of failing to meet air quality standards will grow in severity and fall on the GLA, the health of Londoners will suffer, CO2 reduction targets will be missed and London will stand no chance whatsoever in achieving “best in class” status that it so richly deserves.

Read the whole report here.

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.

They travelled from afar, intent on devotion, bearing gifts of cameras, column inches and hyperbole. As one they worshiped the newborn, glowing ruddy in a humble corner of Trafalagar Square. There was no ox in attendance, though some believe the politician who sired the bus-child is an ass. I was among the host of media congregants bending the knee before his proud creation. Behold, Boris Johnson’s new London bus has manifested in the capital.

Some dismiss the 11.2 metre long, three-doored, double-staircased, diesel-electric serial hybrid vehicle as a mere vanity project. Were it not the season of goodwill, I might be tempted to agree and, furthermore, dub the project emblematic of Boris’ mayoralty as a whole. Yet I’m also confirmed in my view that it’s a good addition to the London fleet.

Though each new bus will cost more than the hybrids already working London’s streets – perhaps £330,000 compared with roughly £300,000 – manufacturers Wrightbus of Ballymena say that its fuel consumption is some 15% better. I like its back end and its sides and though not wholly enamoured of its front, find its interior a delight. The lights are subtle, the moquette rich and bold. The tech is impressive too. “See these bells?” enthused TfL surface transport chief Leon Daniels. “Completely wireless.” The seats are installed with a view to easy floor-cleaning after vomit episodes. They’ve tried to think of everything.

Political opponents have slammed the £7.8 million paid to Wrightbus to develop the vehicle, but TfL says it will recoup that cost through royalties from future orders secured elsewhere. The sum is a tenth of that spent on setting up Boris’s cycle hire scheme, which was recently reported to be on course to make £11 million less than hoped for this year. By comparison, the new bus looks good value for money. Should it have been spent instead on holding down public transport fares, which in January will rise by more than RPI inflation for the fourth consecutive year under Boris? Arguably yes, though delivering a “21st century” successor to the famous, defunct Routemaster was a major Boris manifesto pledge.

Two of the new buses will go into service in February on route number 38 between Victoria and Clapton Pond in Hackney (the latter end, thrillingly adjacent to my home). One of the project’s leading lights explained that at first these will operate “in parallel” with the existing double deckers, and be joined by others as they come off the production line. There should be five by the end of March and once the sixth completes its journey across the Irish Sea they will start replacing the older models on the route. TfL’s initial order is for eight.

There seems no doubt that new bus will continue attracting attention all the way up to mayoral election day May, though there must be a concern that not all of it will be of the right kind. Aside from its bespoke design and the elegance of its insides, the new bus is truly like a Routemaster only in reviving its open rear platform (though in practice this will often be closed off, and only open when a 21st century conductor is on board). Being free to hop on or off the bus at a time of their choosing rather than the driver’s will be a bonus for many passengers, including me, though nostalgia tends to blind us to the feature’s disadvantages.

My memories of the last days of the Routemaster aren’t all fond. One is of one of my sons, then about 12 years old, arriving home quite shaken up having been shoved off the back of one by unseen assailants and landing in the middle of the road. Another is of following a Routemaster in my car down Islington’s Essex Road watching three lads on bicycles competing recklessly to hitch a free ride by holding on to the open platform’s upright pole while the conductor fretted helplessly.

Boris won’t want his new bus to stop being the all-conquering good news story it has been all day. The whole of LBC radio’s Nick Ferrari morning show was broadcast from inside or next to it as it posed at dawn next to City Hall. The new bus doesn’t have a name. Ferrari called it “the first Boris Bus.” Will the nickname stick? The Tory mayor isn’t human if he isn’t hoping so.

All previous installments of Boris’s Bus (A Political Journey) are archived here.

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.

At architecture journal bdonline, Wouter Vanstiphout’s piece about the planning and related political implications of the riots begins in urban France:

In November 2005 French President Jacques Chirac welcomed back normality, after weeks of riots in the French banlieues. Instead of 1,000 to 1,500 vehicles being burnt every night, it went back to 163, and then kept to the normal 50 to 150. Every night of the year dozens of cars are being set on fire in the French banlieues and this had been going on for years on end.

What is normality to a French banlieue? It can mean that in the morning the elderly, women and children – and sometimes architects and historians looking for modernist housing projects from the sixties – can freely roam between the slabs and blocks, shop, play and look around.

After that the unemployed young men appear from their bedrooms and take up their positions near the entrances of the apartment blocks and on street corners. The elderly, women and children scuttle back home and the tourists leave altogether. The young men whistle and sign to each other, taunt and threaten the belated visitors and the semi-militarised police that buzz by in vans.

In many French banlieues, day turns into night around noon. Once, in one of these places, we approached a group of heavily armed policemen to ask for directions on the central square of a French housing estate.

They looked around nervously and said we shouldn’t stand still for too long, because one of the gangs could start throwing rocks. They then said that we should really really be back in the historic city centre within the hour; it was 3pm. They themselves would be out of there at dusk, at the latest. This was between riots, this was normality.

I know of nowhere in London that matches that description, but can we rule such scenarios out of the capital’s future? The comparison is inexact: “banlieue” means the urban outskirts, not the inner city areas where our riots began and mostly occurred. However, some fear that the effect of the government’s housing and other benefit reforms will be to foster banlieue-type concentrations of social marginalisation in London’s poorer suburbs, making the capital’s current situation even worse.

Vanstiphout continues:

In many ways, the [French] riots were “just” spectacular worsenings of a chronic condition, extrapolations on a permanent crisis lived by millions, but neglected by tens of millions. Something became visible for a moment, and then disappeared again, as a bad dream. Behind the scenes however a mechanism is in place that contains the badness, that keeps it from spilling over again, while making it inevitable that it will…the banlieues and their inhabitants have been effectively abandoned…

One person did well out of it, though: Nicolas Sarkozy, who as a minister of the interior fanned the flames by going on television, standing shoulder to shoulder with the riot police and calling the rioters scum (racaille) who would be wiped away; then rode the wave of popular fear all the way to the presidency, from where he invited a battalion of international architects to give back France its glory, by designing futures of the French capital, “Le Grand Paris“….

Right now it has become very difficult to think of an urban politics, let alone an urban planning or design approach that would be able to take on the underlying problems of riots like the ones in the UK in a serious way.

I do not think that the reason is that politics and planning have realised their limitations to shape society. I think that the reason is that urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental [my emphasis].

Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgment on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups, their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture.

Something there for politicians of all persuasions to reflect on. And there’s more:

It is much too soon to say anything about the relationship between the gentrification of Brixton or the coming of the Olympics to London, and the current explosion of violent alienation. But if we imagine another kind of urban politics, one that does not take into account a marketable image of the city, but the reality of the entire community, it would probably have entirely different priorities.

The first would be to work against the ever sharpening inequality of London, making it one of the unfairest cities in Europe, in poverty levels, education, crime and other indicators.

But then the reality of urban riots is that they have always turned out to be the opposite of a learning experience for a city. Riots have nearly always resulted in politicians simplifying the problem even more, and citizens looking away even further.

After a riot, your average city will become more afraid, more authoritarian, more segregated, more exclusive and less tolerant. That is the real tragedy of the post-war western urban riot, first it shocks and terrifies us, then for a moment it makes us see flashes of the kind of city we should be working towards, which then fades away into the darkness. Back to normal.

A “normal” that is unacceptable.

Wouter Vanstiphout is a partner at Crimson Architectural Historians in Rotterdam and professor of Design & Politics at the Technical University Delft. He is currently researching the relationship between urban riots and urban planning. I’m very grateful to @amarkodio for bringing Vanstiphout’s article to my attention.

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?

Given the fury directed this week at any politician daring to suggest that the riots, as well as being intolerable, will have had complex social roots that need to be addressed I was encouraged that Boris said the following to me this morning:

I do not think that this is a simple issue, and I do not think we can simply ascribe it to wanton criminality or simply ascribe it to “Tory cuts,” or whatever, you know.

He offered that thought during a visit to Stoke Newington fire station in Hackney to thank London Fire Brigade members for their efforts during the riots and disbelievingly note the imbecile urge that seized some people to throw missiles at them as they went about their work. He also took the opportunity to thank Transport for London and all those operating “non-emergency transport services,” notably buses, for keeping things moving on the roads, and, striking a reassuring vote, to advise his fellow parents that “London is a great and safe city, and that everybody should allow their kids to grow up here with confidence and freedom.”

I was able to ask him some specific questions about the parts of London that had been affected, why he thought the riots had happened and how the issues they have raised should be addressed. We talked for about eight minutes – more time than it’s usually possible to grab with him – and he said some interesting things. I reproduce just about all of our conversation below:

DH: It’s very nice to see you in Hackney, though obviously not at the locations where the burning and looting and disruption took place. I understand that there might be very good reasons for that, but…

BJ: I am going [to those places], ah, shortly. Not necessarily today, but soon. I’ve got a heavy agenda. I’ve got to go and reopen the Croydon Tramlink, for example.

DH: That’s great. So in the future will you be taking a close interest in all the parts of London that have been particularly hurt and damaged? Because that seems to be quite important in terms of trying to figure out what happens next.

BJ: Yes. Look, Dave, let’s be clear. It’s too early yet to begin the kind of big post mortem. What we’re looking at still is getting it right, calming it down, repairing, business confidence about the compensation they’re entitled too, getting the money where it needs to go – we want to make sure people understand that it’s being dispensed. And, of course, Hackney – everything that happened in Hackney – is going to be very high on our list. But what I want is for us [London as a whole] to come out better than we were before the riots.

DH: There was a statement you issued shortly after all the rioting began in which you said there is no connection between what happened with Mark Duggan and the immediate aftermath of that, and the rioting that came in the following days. [To be exact, he said in the statement: "These acts of sheer criminality across London are nothing to do with this incident."] I’m assuming the point you were making was that the rioting can’t be excused [by the Duggan shooting].

BJ: That’s right.

DH: But it wasn’t a coincidence that three days of rioting followed all that went on around the Duggan incident. So would you accept that there has to be a connection of some type between the two things, and that you’ve got to look at that.

BJ: Patently, patently. Absolutely, I would certainly agree with that. And the IPCC has got to do its job, and they’ve got to do it without fear or favour. I tell you, as soon as I got a text on holiday saying that this operation had gone wrong, whatever had happened, I had a bad feeling about it immediately, I have to admit. The IPCC has got to get on and do its stuff, and I’m sure they will get to the bottom of it. But as I said in that statement, I don’t think that any event can excuse or justify what happened and frankly I think the vast majority of people who then took part in the looting and the rioting were by no means actuated by…

DH: Noble sentiments of moral outrage?

BJ: I think it unlikely.

DH: I’m sure you’re right.

BJ: But the other thing, let’s be clear Dave, there are rich ideological pickings for both left and right. That’s the deep truth of the matter. And there are issues here that can cause heart-searching on both sides of the political argument. That’s about as much as I want to say about all that at the moment, because I really want to think about it and try and produce a more considered assessment about what it means, a bit later on. You know what I’m saying…

DH: Yes I do, and it’s very good to hear you saying it. And I understand that in the immediate aftermath of things like this people take rather defensive positions and [only] say, ‘We must stamp down on this,’ and so on. But you do have to do more than that in the end I think.

BJ: And on that, let me just say…well, I don’t want to say much more about it now, but it will become clear that I do not think that this is a simple issue, and I do not think we can simply ascribe it to wanton criminality or simply ascribe it to ‘Tory cuts,’ or whatever, you know.

DH: My last question is really leading on from that. I’m now beginning to scratch my head and ask, what does all this actually tell us about where we are and where we’re going as a city, because stuff has come out of the shadows that was always there and it’s still there, even though it’s gone [from view] again.

BJ: It’s still there. Look, as I say, I want to be more considered about this so please take this as a sort of first, you know. I think London is a wonderful city, and it works brilliantly and it brings people together in the most amazing way. [But] there are huge gaps, inequalities, there are problems of aspiration, of achievement, all sorts of [things] that lead people to behave in absolutely despicable ways. And, you know, I don’t want to get into the whole background field of causation, cos it is very, very various…

DH: And a minefield.

BJ: It is a minefield. But what it has exposed is things to do with society over a long time. I don’t want try to sum it up in a groping way with you now, but what I certainly think is true is that it has exposed issues, and what I really want this to do is to allow us to tackle gang crime, to get a grip on it. There it is, it’s absolutely in the spotlight of the nation, and if this [becomes] our way of dealing with some of the issues that have been exposed…illiteracy or crass materialistic values in young people, whichever way you want to put it, then this is the moment.

So out of this disaster, this blow to London, I think great things can come. London is fundamentally in an amazing, good state at the moment. I was looking at a piece by a French journalist saying, look at the royal wedding, the Olympics coming up, it all looks fantastic, and this suddenly exposes something worse. The opportunity now, that big, flat rock having been flipped up, is to look at the creepy-crawlies.

DH: There’s less excuse for averting our gaze.

BJ: There’s less excuse for averting our gaze, and there’s the opportunity to do something about it. That’s the important thing, cos everybody can see it…I’m telling you far too much.

I hope he’ll telling us more before too long, and I’m grateful to the Mayor for his time.