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A missed opportunity

Thursday, 7th February 2008

A shame, this.

Damian Hockney, a 'One London' member of the GLA, is to run for Mayor. I appear to disagree with him on almost everything. However, my interest was aroused by his stance on the Olympics. His manifesto starts off very promisingly:

London's Olympic bid was either a fraud or the product of serious maladministration, perpetrated by the Government and the Mayor on London's taxpayers. Damian Hockney was attacked by politicians from all parties at the London Assembly when he predicted three years ago before the bid had even been won that the Olympics would cost £10 billion. He was even accused of being unpatriotic! But the government has now increased its estimate from £2.375 billion in 2004 to £9.3 billion. Already it looks like that figure will be breached later this year (but after the mayoral election).

Aha, I thought; that looks more like it! Perhaps he will use his candidacy as a last ditch effort to campaign against the Olympics. He could simply refuse to honour the commitments made so far - and damn the consequences. If he promised to spend the entire period in the run up to the election on that theme then he'd garner lots of support - including my own.

But no, it's a damp squib. Here's his promise:

Londoners must not pay a penny more for the Olympics and a strong Mayor is needed to defend this position. The current mayor has already agreed to increase Londoners' liability by £300 million (an increase of nearly 50%). Damian Hockney has never been a cheerleader for the Games and would be prepared as a last resort to withdraw London's support for the Olympic Games if the budget continues to balloon out of control. This would mean handing full responsibility to national government, which would then need to decide whether to withdraw its invitation to the Olympic Committee to host the 2012 Games or to stage further raids on overstretched national taxpayers and lottery funds. If the government can contain the budget, Damian Hockney as mayor will offer full support in ensuring that the Olympic Games are a truly memorable sporting event of which Londoners can be proud.

Big deal. He'll huff and he'll puff and then he'll run away.

Have some backbone, man.

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Damian Hockney AM

February 7th, 2008 3:53pm

Ha! There's an irony here - when the Evening Standard erroneously reported yesterday that our manifesto policy was to scrap the Olympics, my own staff cheered! The problem with campaigning to scrap the Games as Mayor is that it is not within the Mayor's remit to do this. The way in which the Olympic Delivery Authority and LOCOG are set up makes it impossible. Having looked into it, we realised that the most powerful thing the Mayor could do would be symbolically to withdraw London's support for the Games. This would land the government with a huge and possibly insurmountable problem, which may well succeed in persuading them to abandon the whole shambles. I have to admit that this issue split our team completely, with me initially on the side of scrapping and doing exactly what Stephen Pollard says. And doing what most candidates in the Mayoral race do - totally ignore what the real powers of the Mayor are and do some empty posturing. This is fine for those who are not really serious (including Boris Johnson, it would appear!) but I wanted to enter the race with a set of credible policies that are backed by fact, properly costed and can be tested in debate. Voters will know what they are getting. Anyone who knows the One London duo at the London Assembly would laugh at the idea we would 'run away' from a good scrap. At the London Assembly it is often us 2 against the other 23…when I made my statement all those years ago about the Olympic costs reaching £10 bilion, I was jeered as extremist by all other parties. When we alone opposed the new GLA Act for its centralisation of power in the hands of the Mayor, the other parties failed to grasp the point that removing the boroughs' powers (and what little power the Assembly has) is not devolution at all. They all know now what it means (as explained recently by Dispatches), but too late. There are so many examples of this if anyone cares look at the history - it's one of the main reasons we decided to fight the election…Stephen's article is welcome because it focuses on policy rather than an endless personalised cavalcade about newts, Eton, drinking whisky, cronies, blonde hair and Chavez. It's going to be an interesting three months!