The Tories have a problem

It might seem a long time until voters will get the chance to boot the Conservatives out of power, but Londoners will get their opportunity to oust a top Tory in May 2012.

This is when London Mayor Boris Johnson goes to the polls to seek a second term.

Months of arguments over cuts - from both government and Johnson himself - plus higher fares for the travelling public mean that the political climate has changed since Johnson took office in 2008.

And as Labour's mayoral candidate selection process has been taking place over the last few weeks, I have been reaching out to Londoners over the Conservative onslaught they've been facing.

On Tuesday when my transport policies were announced, the London Evening Standard reported: "A source close to Johnson said: 'We have already had to put fares up and that is Ken's primary line of attack. Boris will find it difficult to get re-elected'."

The ConservativeHome website complained this week that "Ken Livingstone - the frontrunner for the Labour nomination - seems to have every intention of pinning every difficult decision made by the government as coming from Boris's friends at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street."

Reporting the Conservatives' damage to London local government, academic Tony Travers told the Standard: "The government has created a problem for Boris Johnson here. They have been so willing to state the scale of the problem, they've created an opportunity for Ken Livingstone."

And a Standard editorial commented on Tuesday: "Today Mr Livingstone launched his transport plan for London, attacking possible cuts and Mr Johnson's planned fare rises in characteristically uncompromising style. Losing London to Labour would be an unwelcome mid-term blow for the Tories."

It shows that by taking our campaign to the Conservatives and speaking up for London we are creating momentum for progressive ideas and a winning platform.

The scale of the government's cuts is breathtaking - and its agenda is entirely ideological. There are alternatives that do not involve slashing services, jobs and pay or risking pushing us back into economic downturn.

This week my campaign published its analysis of the full force of the cuts to be inflicted on London.

Taken across the period set out in Chancellor George Osborne's Budget earlier this year, London stands to lose by £45 billion. That's a hefty £5,625 for every Londoner.

Osborne's hack and slash policy is far worse than anything conceived by Thatcher.

And we saw what her cuts did to the quality of life in London - bus services abandoned, the Tube allowed to crumble as funding was choked off and our public realm on the slide, with visible signs of poverty and homelessness on the rise, police numbers slashed, few affordable homes built and social dislocation and urban decay. In short, all the unmistakable hallmarks of neoliberalism.

Leaving governance to the market and laying waste to vital public services harms everyone and does not work.

In the course of the next 18 months we need to mobilise opinion against this agenda and send a message to David Cameron, Osborne and Johnson that London rejects their cuts and higher fares. We need to stand up for public services and look after those who are on the sharp end.

Johnson will do everything humanly possible ensure the mud does not stick. But the government's cuts are his cuts.

He began taking his axe to services in London even before the government was elected - cutting police numbers, failing to guarantee the future of safer neighbourhood police teams, reducing financial backing to the police service, gutting the Transport for London investment programme including key outer London transport links, and ramping up fares.

Johnson vigorously campaigned for his Tory colleagues to occupy the government benches, knowing perfectly well the economic and social policy that a Tory PM would deliver.

He stands to the right of public opinion on these questions, condemning the Labour government's new higher top rates of tax and opposing measures to make banks pay a fairer share to society of the global economic crisis and the bail-out.

In the run-up to the election Johnson's office batted away fears of cuts to key transport projects like Crossrail under the Tories, saying there was "no need to worry."

Yet all around us we will see the consequences of the Johnson-Cameron agenda.

Thousands of Londoners of all backgrounds are going to be worse off, with cuts to child trust funds, the Building Schools for the Future programme, the health in pregnancy grant, the future jobs fund, free school meals and higher education.

We will see freezing of child benefit, radical changes to tax credits, housing benefit cuts, cuts to disability living allowance, reductions to the Sure Start maternity grant, measures targeting lone parents and cuts to benefits, tax credits and public-sector pensions by changing inflation measurements.

The cumulative effect to the quality of life for Londoners is only now becoming clear.

We need a mayor who is on the side of hard-working Londoners and will stand up for people in the face of this extraordinary onslaught.

We need someone who knows how to use every lever to get the best from public services and budgets in tighter times and who will campaign vigorously on the side of London before and after the mayoral election.

My priority is to do everything in my power to seek to protect Londoners from the effects of economic uncertainty and the cuts now planned.

Over the past few months of Labour's selection process we have built a head of steam around that alternative agenda.

I have the backing of the majority of London Labour Assembly members, both London Labour MEPs, every London Labour woman council leader, hundreds of London Labour councillors, the majority of London Labour's black and Asian MPs and the leaders of both Young Labour nationally and London Young Labour.

My campaign has the support of unions Aslef, CWU, GMB, TSSA, Ucatt, Unison and Unite.

Labour can win in London in 2012, but that requires serious solutions and a campaigning agenda from day one that unites London Labour and takes the argument to Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

Ken Livingstone's analysis on the London cutbacks can be read at www.kenlivingstone.com/boris-cameron-cuts-ken