Looking through the threads of the two Cif articles in question – by Ken Livingstone’s former chief of staff Simon Fletcher and by esteemed fellow Conspirator Adam Bienkov – we see striking examples of Gilligan making false allegations against his critics, being shown to be in the wrong, then failing to admit it or apologise. They don’t inspire much confidence.

1) At 4.50 on Friday afternoon, a commenter called AView posted three times on Adam’s thread in quick succession. Posting at 5.53 Gilligan asserted that AView was a pseudonym of Livingstone’s economics adviser John Ross. An hour later Ross, posting as RMRoss, made an appearance to point out that this was wrong (as did AView in the small hours of the following morning).

Image by Beau Bo D’Or

2) A more serious example emerged from Gilligan’s exchanges with Ross. In his first post on the thread, Ross revealed that during the election campaign the Evening Standard had apologized for something Gilligan had written about him in a long and tendentious attempted expose of an alleged plot between (as it happens) Simon Fletcher and TfL, to discredit Johnson’s “New Routemaster” policy. I have a copy of the article in question, complete with the offending passage. As a result of Ross’s complaint this was removed from later editions of that day’s paper and does not appear in the online archive version.

Gilligan’s response was to deny that any of this had taken place.

We certainly never apologised over anything I wrote about you or Ken because, despite regularly attacking my reporting, you never actually made any complaint to us.

The following morning Ross posted the text of the email he had been sent by the Standard in response to his complaint. “Please accept my apologies,” it said. Gilligan made no further appearances on Adam’s thread.

3) Gilligan’s first backfiring attack was against me, on Fletcher’s thread. Fletcher wrote that my blog Mayor and More, which I published independently in parallel with my Guardian work during the London mayoral campaign, “probably did more than any other news outlet to develop the story of the spectacular implosion of the finances of Boris Johnson’s ‘new Routemaster’ bus policy over a number of weeks.”

Gilligan’s response:

Don’t be so bashful, Simon: the Dave Hill story about the cost of the Routemaster which you understandably praise actually came from, well, you – two Livingstone campaign press releases on February 29 and March 3. That’s pretty much exactly what I meant when I talked about some City Hall bloggers merely copying other people’s work.

He’s referring to a piece that appeared, not at Mayor and More, but on the Guardian website. His allegation is completely untrue. It is also a smear, maliciously implying that I was a conduit for Livingstone propaganda during the campaign. As I explained on the thread, I obtained estimates about the cost not from Ken Livingstone’s campaign but from Transport for London. I did so because I wanted to test the competing claims the two main candidates were making in press releases and elsewhere.

To cut a long story short, TfL’s figures contradicted both Johnson’s and Livingstone’s on conductors and although they were close to Livingstone’s for the policy as a whole (Johnson had not published a costing of the whole policy at that stage: he later offered a figure that wasn’t far short of Livingstone’s or TfL’s) they were arrived at by different calculations. This didn’t deter Livingstone from claiming that they vindicated him, or Team Boris, anticipating Gilligan, from accusing TfL of generating “Ken-friendly figures.” Both campaigns were therefore guilty of spinning TfL’s figures to suit their own ends, but that is not the issue here.

The issue is that it should have been obvious to Gilligan that my Guardian article was not “from Ken Livingstone press releases.” Why? Perhaps because some of the differences between Livingstone’s figures and TfL’s are set out in that very Guardian article. Perhaps because I critically examined the candidates’ claims here and here and here and elsewhere.

Perhaps because, according to TfL’s press office, it provided Gilligan, at his request, with a copy of the very same “New Routemaster” estimates it had compiled for me. Anyone still not convinced? After I challenged Gilligan he first cited irrelevances in an attempt to prove his point then, ignoring my request that he apologise, tried to change the subject.

What explains Gilligan’s behaviour?
The key point to emerge from the CIF threads episode as a whole is that what remains of the reputation Gilligan gained for fearless, forensic truth-telling when at the BBC is a little further diminished.

We might wonder if even those of his investigations that were valid and important were informed by the same impulse he displays here. We might be tempted to conclude that this is a man whose opinion of himself is so inflated he is unable to acknowledge his own errors even when they are obvious to everybody else.

Add to this his persistent dodging of those pesky questions about sock-puppeting, and you have a flagship journalist of London’s Quality Newspaper whose credibility is unraveling. And he still owes me an apology. Were he to offer one, I would graciously accept. Sadly, I can’t see it happening.

Government data shows that children from a number of ethnic minority groups, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black African Britons, were doing far worse in these tests than white Britons. But while social factors such as economic background, attitudes to and attendance at school and mothers’ educational attainment appeared to explain this in relation to the other groups, it did not seem to with regard to the Caribbeans.

Strand emphasises that accounting for this is not straightforward, but suspects teachers’ expectations are partly to blame. His clue for this lies in the type of SATS test teachers enter pupils’ for at Key Stage 3. These come in different degrees of difficulty, and the data reveal that a Caribbean child is a third less likely to be entered for the most demanding version than a white child whose level of attainment in the preceding three years has been the same.

As the Guardian’s education editor Polly Curtis explains, this means that, “Significant numbers of black pupils who are academically capable of getting the higher marks have them taken out of their reach.” Lower levels of outcome are therefore guaranteed.

It is with some caution that Strand uses the term “institutional racism” to describe this, but use it he does. He wonders if part of the expectations problem lies in the interaction between some Caribbean pupils and some white teachers, the former believing the latter do not give them a fair chance and the latter finding the former confrontational, resulting in depressed perceptions of their academic potential.

A familiar debate has ensued. Although the government points to a narrowing of the attainment gap at the subsequent GCSE level over the past four years, black educationalists have called for further action. There are, though, differences of view about where and how this action be should be directed. Gus John believes Strand’s work confirms what black parents have known for years and advocates a joint approach with teachers to correct the failing.

Lee Jasper has been quoted as saying that the answer is schools run by black governors and staffed by black teachers with the specific needs of black youngsters in mind. By sharp contrast, Tony Sewell says it is wrong to blame teachers when the biggest problem is an anti-learning culture among black boys (his article does not identify Caribbean boys in particular, nor does it mention girls) which schools cannot be held responsible for.

I think there is force is all these arguments and that even the most opposed may be more reconcilable than they at first appear. Is there, for example, necessarily a conflict between encouraging Caribbean Britons to self-mobilise in terms of what their children aspire to, and encouraging teachers to do the same with regard to the pattern of discrimination Strand seems to have unearthed in them? The optimist in me thinks not.

Yet the three generations after the Windrush, the pessimist in me could not blame Caribbean British parents for concluding that, whatever they do themselves, the state schooling system will never serve their children as it should.

So why can’t “London’s Quality Newspaper” stop fighting the 2008 election? Haven’t they noticed that their boy won? Or are they, perhaps, secretly worried that Livingstone might yet present a threat to him?

I ask this only because they’ve seen fit to make the redundancy payments of Livingstone’s former advisers their front page story. Er, scoop. Needless to say Veronica’s Cat – who only ever deals in facts, you understand – manages to describe these people as “fanatically loyal” and “current or former senior members of Trotskyite group Socialist Action”, just in case there was any doubt in our minds that the severance sums are undeserved.

Of course, you eventually learn that there was nothing improper about the payments and that they are to be made under a policy approved by the Assembly to bring advisers’ employment rights into line with those of permanent GLA employees. But that hasn’t stopped the Standard describing these former mayoral advisers pejoratively as “Ken Cronies” in its headline and on its billboards all over town.

This is a rather promiscuous use of the word “crony.” Presumably, in the name of fairness and consistency, the Standard will from now on describe Tim Parker, Kit Malthouse, Sir Simon Milton, Ian Clement and the appealing Anthony Browne as “Boris Cronies.” And presumably too the rest of us can start calling Andrew Gilligan a “Veronica Crony”.

But that would be a bit of a cheap smear, wouldn’t it?

Update: The full statement from the Mayor’s office:

The Mayor of London is dismayed he has had to take a decision on the fate of the previous Mayor’s staff who were on fixed contracts. He feels he is not best placed to do so and that the law is flawed on this issue. Employment rights for these members of staff overtake the GLA Act which states they are on fixed contracts, hence the position the current Mayor finds himself in.

The Mayor wants to make clear that he has no problem with the staff who by all accounts served the previous Mayor well. The Mayor has followed legal advice on this matter and made a decision with the taxpayer in mind. These members of staff are entitled to these settlements. They are only receiving what they are entitled to. Some members of staff have over 20 years loyal service in local government and payments were agreed with this in mind.

Never let reality get in the way of a good persecution, especially when you’ve invested so much of your collapsing credibility in it.

For the record, I’ve long been perfectly persuaded that the relationship between mayoral advisers and the LDA needs to be clarified. Indeed, it was the Standard that persuaded me. I’m also quite satisfied that Lee Jasper displayed poor judgment over some LDA grants and in one case hid from the consequences. He wouldn’t be my choice for equalities adviser either (though even his enemies applaud his work with the police.) But these were never grounds for a hard-right newspaper to smear the individual and an entire Labour administration, which is what the Standard and its political assassins did.

Mayor Johnson’s Tory panel was only ever going to provide an opportunity for it and others to spit on the victim. Moreover, its report has had the unintended consequence of spreading alarm both within City Hall and beyond. Why else did the mayor give it such a carefully-qualified welcome at MQT yesterday? Why else might Tim Parker have sent out that memo the previous day after reading the report himself? Might he be among those disquieted by the Wheatcroft prescription for the future size and scope of GLA activity?

The real problem with the FAP report is not that sets out a Tory vision of how to proceed – that is mayor Johnson’s prerogative – but that it and its apologists have tried to foster the impression that it is politically unbiased or that its Tory-ness is of no consequence.

Yesterday, I posted a comment beneath the Standard’s leader on the report, pointing out that three of the panel’s five members were declared members of the Conservative Party and a fourth chaired a Conservative business organisation. At the time the leader had said that only two of the panel were Tories.

My comment has survived – just as well, because I’d be so fed up if it disappeared – but the leader has been re-written, and now makes no mention at all of the panel’s deep blue political complexion. All journalists have biases, but we should at least try to report the world with 20/20 vision. That’s rather tricky when you’ve only got one eye.

I see the FAP has its own spin doctor now. Some kind of “lefty” apparently. How strange.

It also mentions that Ken Livingstone was formally invited to meet the panel to help them with their work. There had already been an informal approach, rebuffed by Livingstone in clear terms. But last Tuesday Patience Wheatcroft wrote him this note:

Dear Mr Livingstone,

You will be aware that the current Mayor asked me to chair a Forensic Audit Panel looking into the operations of the GLA and the LDA. During the course of our work we have interviewed many members of the Assembly, LDA board and executives and GLA executives. It would be helpful if we were also able to talk with you. I know that an informal invitation to you has been extended and rejected but I would now like to issue a formal invitation to you to meet with the panel.

Livingstone has sent this reply:

Dear Ms Wheatcroft,

You are a member of the Conservative Party. Two of the other members of your body are members of the Conservative Party – Stephen Greenhalgh and Edward Lister. A fourth, Patrick Frederick, is Chairman of Conservative Business Relations – South East England & Southern London, and therefore presumably a member of the Conservative Party as well. How can any body of which 4 out of the 5 members are members of the Conservative Party be considered impartial and objective in any way? It is evidently not independent or objective but a Conservative Party body.

I note that when you were appointed you did not bother to state that you were a member of the Conservative Party, nor did you state it in subsequent television interviews. Your membership of the Conservative Party was revealed only in your Declaration of Interest to the GLA. It is evident that it if it was intended to have an independent investigation into any matter it should not be headed by a member of a political party. Any person who wished to lead, and wished to be seen to lead, an objective and impartial enquiry would clearly have refused to chair a body with such a composition.

I also note the further irregularities that have occurred during your being chair of this body. First your son Kelham Salter was appointed to a post in the GLA – even though journalists have been informed he is not paid this is not an action of the type that would be expected from the chair of an independent ‘forensic’ body. You attended the Mayor’s Press Conference on 3 July, held to defend Ray Lewis, sitting in the front of the audience with Tim Parker, First Deputy Mayor, and also a supporter of the Conservative Party – not an independent chair.

There were clear irregularities in the procurement of PWC to do £50,000 of work for your committee. The contract was awarded by your committee which includes Andrew Grove, who is a partner of PWC – a clear conflict of interest and meaning that the auditors used were not independent of the Committee. No other companies appear to have been invited to tender.

In light of this it is evident that one of your recommendations should be that the amount paid annually to PWC in consultancy fees in the last four years be published and a record of how much is paid to PWC in consultancy fees each year in the next four years should also be published.

I also note that the genuinely independent inquiry into issues raised in regard to Lee Jasper headed by Rabinder Singh QC, of Matrix Chambers, was abolished by the Mayor to be replaced, as stated, by one in which 4 out of 5 members were members of the Conservative Party.

I am of course completely willing and keen to work with any genuinely independent body, such as the London Assembly or independent auditing companies, which are looking into any matters of public interest that relate to the time I was Mayor. In regard to present matters they would record, for example, that I suffered only one enforced resignation of any of my most senior officials during eight years – a record that compares very favourably to national governments of both parties, while the present administration has suffered the enforced resignation of two of its most senior officials in only two and a half months in office.

Such objective investigation would also reveal the incredible costs being imposed on London by the new administration which far exceed any issue you were asked to look into – the £30 million a year extra cost to TfL for implementing the cycling programme now that the income to cover it from the £25 a day CO2charge on gas guzzling cars will not be received, the embarking on a programme for a new Routemaster bus with conductors which all independent transport experts estimate will cost over £100 million a year, the loss of £15 million to pay for half price travel for those on income support from Venezuela with the result Londoners will have to pay for any scheme for subsidised travel, and the £400,000 legal fees paid to Porsche. As a result of this Londoners will be hit by tens of millions of pounds worth of unnecessary new charges.

To cooperate in any way with your purely Conservative Party dominated body would be to lend it a facade of independence and objectivity which it clearly does not possess. I regard the fact that your body has no objectivity and independence as a matter of public interest therefore I am releasing this correspondence to the press.”

I’d say that was a “no”.

2. Were you aware before you were elected that you were not going to be able to arrange for a statue of Sir Keith Park to be mounted on the Fourth Plinth and if not, why not?

3. Will the interim report of the Forensic Audit Panel, due in a few days, be made public?

4. Following your announcement that the oil deal with Venezuela won’t be renewed, you said you will ask TfL to look into ways of continuing to offer discount bus and tram fares for Londoners on income support. If TfL don’t come up with anything, what will you do?

5. Some members of your 15-strong transition team are being paid roughly the equivalent of a full-time directors’ salary. Given that you’ve also appointed a number of directors and deputies to paid posts, can this expenditure be justified and can you provide details about how the transition team members are providing Londoners with value for money?

6. Will the money for Ray Lewis’s youth programmes come from any sources other than the charitable Mayor’s Fund and if so, which ones?

7. Do you anticipate your appointees Tim Parker and David Ross contributing to the Mayor’s Fund and will you be disappointed if they don’t?

8. If your “New Routemaster” bus does not have an open platform which passengers can hop on and hop off, will it be worthy of the Routemaster name?

9. In your speech on the night of your victory you acknowledged that London contains great inequalities. Presuming that this was an expression of concern, how do you intend to address those inequalities?

10. If any Conservative local authority appears to be dragging its feet over helping you to deliver your target of 50,000 new affordable homes by the end of 2011 what will you do about it?

See you later, Mr Mayor.

I’m out of town at the moment, visiting my mum, hence the recent paucity of posts. My time in the tiny internet shop I presently share with three Warcraft junkies and their loud crunchy sweets is mercifully short.

But I’ve had a quick read of this Evening Standard piece pointing out the misalignment between Mayor Johnson’s Tube booze ban and those of the Manifesto Club, which his culture director Munira Mirza was a found member of.

Imagine if she had been Ken Livingstone’s adviser.

Far from being a mere news story this information would have been seized on by a member of the Standard’s Get-Ken squad – especially the “lefties” among them – and inflated into a massive, oversold expose of a “key associate” having “links” with a “front organisation” for a “secretive libertarian cult” with roots in the far-Left Revolutionary Communist Party which supported Serb extremists during the Balkan wars and whose, erm, “shadowy leaders” have a 40 year history of assuming false identities and engaging in subversive political activities in an attempt to undermine the British state.

In fact, it would all be true, but not really terribly important – which is, ironically, what the Manifesto Club clique is so terrifically anxious to be.

On the day campaigning officially began, I argued that the job description and moderate content of Johnson’s stated polices meant that many of the differences were less of Big Ideas than emphasis. This wasn’t what Team Ken wanted to hear, as it made clear in a letter the Guardian published the following day: its job from the off has been to sharpen the contrast in substance – of both policy and pedigree – between the two men; Johnson’s, in keeping with David Cameron’s approach, has been to position himself just enough to the blue side of the incumbent to mobilise Tory support without confirming suspicions that he’s daft and extreme.

But though the choice between the two was not as stark as their media images suggested, there was no doubt they were there. The thing was to clarify and quantify them. I’ve done my best and now feel I can vote for Livingstone with conviction.

Here are 10 reasons why.

One: Livingstone Has Better Policies

Brian Paddick has made the best arguments about policing, but that’s not the comparison that counts. And while Johnson has made the most noise about crime and antisocial behaviour and Livingstone has sometimes looked complacent about it, The Blond isn’t offering more than the Labour man. He’s spoken of “zero tolerance” but its virtues are contested, and his support for ending police accountability with regard to stop-and-search and references to “political correctness” are worrying.

On housing, there is evidence that Livingstone’s determination to force London’s boroughs into line – Tory ones especially – over increasing the numbers of affordable homes can be counter-productive. By contrast, Johnson says that by “working with” the boroughs he can achieve the same total. But if Tory boroughs declined to build their share, would mayor Johnson use his powers to persuade them? He hasn’t said. And while it might be alarmist to claim that his policies would result in the further concentration of the poorest Londoners in the poorest parts of town, such a trend can’t be ruled out. What’s more, to take advantage of his First Steps home ownership scheme would need an income of £60,000 a year. Four-fifths of London households need not apply.

Johnson’s policies on the environment are tailored to parochial, suburban interests. There’s nothing wrong with that if those interests are virtuous, but a world city like London should be leading the fight against climate change. Livingstone’s larger schemes have been damned as costly gestures for limited returns, but Johnson’s plans don’t promise greater ones. And on transport, where the mayor’s powers are greatest, it’s been no contest: Livingstone has beaten Johnson hands down.

In conclusion, Livingstone is decisively better than Johnson in some key policy areas and where isn’t, he is safer. And if you think my general conclusion betrays a blind pro-Ken bias, check the Ken-hating Evening Standard’s assessments. Even it doesn’t favour Boris over Ken on the whole.

Two: Livingstone Has Made The Best Joke

It happened last Friday morning. A caller to Vanessa Feltz’s Radio London show asked the three main candidates which Shakespeare character they most resembled. Livingstone, self-mocking, chose Julius Caesar. Johnson said Pericles. Much has been made of Johnson’s admiration for the great Athenian leader of that name. Embarrassingly for the classicist, Shakespeare wrote about a different Pericles. Livingstone, often derided as an un-British philistine, spotted this. Johnson, graciously, acknowledged his mistake. Talk then turned to the Sun’s endorsement of the Tory candidate. Johnson expressed his gratitude for this. “Oh Boris,” quipped Ken, “that was before they heard your mistake about Pericles.”

Three: Brian Paddick & His Partner

The Liberal Democrat, as we all know, is gay. His partner has sometimes accompanied him on the campaign, though being careful to avoid photographers. A charming man, he linked up with Paddick on the day I joined him on the trail for votes. Some images stay with you: the pair of them shuffling onto a tube carriage together at Southwark station and later walking, heads together, through the streets of Marylebone at dusk. Gay men feel less fear on the streets of London than they did 25 years ago. As leader of the GLC, Livingstone fought for gay and other minority rights in the teeth of often vicious opposition. Such things shouldn’t be forgotten.

Four: Livingstone Is A Better Politician

Politics is about winning arguments. Livingstone has yet to lose one with an electorate and has won big ones against Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. London needs a good arguer. Could Mayor Johnson outmanoeuvre such enemies as? Could he arrive as well at settlements with others who are not natural allies? He has his charms, but I have my doubts.

Five: London Needs To Be Bossed From The Centre

People say Livingstone’s a megalomaniac whose regime is too centralised and lacks accountability. The Lee Jasper affair is cited as proof. But though Jasper’s behaviour reflects badly – just how badly, we’ve yet to learn – on Livingstone’s administration if take a step back you find an institutional problem. It’s not the only one with the GLA arrangement and agencies under mayoral influence. Would a Mayor Johnson correct this? His accountability manifesto makes promises and contains some good ideas, but there’s nothing very definite in there. He also talks about devolving power to the boroughs, but would that improve the capital’s governance? Tristam Hunt says history suggests otherwise. A renewed Livingstone mayoralty on its best behaviour is a safer bet than a Johnson one whose key personnel he hasn’t revealed.

Six: Livingstone Is A Better Leader

Think about it.

Seven: The Evening Standard Will Be Gutted If Livingstone Wins

Not every aspect of the Standard’s mayoral coverage has been shamelessly, sometimes hilariously, anti-Ken, but the highest profile stuff has. How much difference has this made? Judging that is as difficult as predicting the result, but Londoners have deserved better from the capital’s sole paid-for title. There’s a media studies course in the worst of it: selective reporting, misleading headlines, photographs chosen to send damning signals, the works. Johnson has criticised Livingstone’s free paper The Londoner as Pyongyang style propaganda. But at times, the Standard has resembled Pravda.

Eight: The Tories Don’t Really Deserve To Win

Boris Johnson has gone up in my estimation during the campaign (and no doubt he is weak with gratitude). He’s worked hard to master his brief, engaged with people and problems he’s never bothered with before and been obliged to recognise that opinions that amuse the readerships of the Telegraph and Spectator can cause deep hurt and damage elsewhere. He’s an intelligent and approachable man. But we all know he wouldn’t be in the race at all were he not famous from the telly. Livingstone, of course, is a celebrity too, but his fame is rooted in what he has achieved in politics. By comparison, Johnson is famous for being well known. Whatever his virtues, a victory for Johnson will be a victory for the politics of personality. He has no record in the politics of London. By contrast…

Nine: Livingstone Knows More Of London And Londoners

Experience matters. So does empathy. While it is true that a fresh face can bring fresh energy and ideas, I’ve been moved by some of Livingstone’s engagements with people on the streets, especially in the inner boroughs: there’s a depth of connection there and a store of knowledge – about neighbourhoods, about people, about the nuts-and-bolts of local government – that it’s hard to imagine Johnson ever matching. You feel you could put Livingstone in most London living rooms and he’d be able to hold a proper conversation. With Johnson, for all his affability, that’s much more difficult.

Ten: We Can’t Be Sure What A Mayor Johnson Would Do

I sympathise to some extent with Team Boris’s close policing of their boy. Hacks love a gaffe and Boris says things that hacks think qualify when quite often they don’t. Also, I haven’t been convinced by claims that behind the clown’s mask, a Bullingdon Beast or swivel-eyed Thatcherite waits to emerge – for one thing, I don’t think Dave would be too pleased. Yet Thatcher’s winning 1979 campaign contained little hint of the reckless arrogance that followed. And the problem with Johnson is that it’s hard to know exactly how he would behave if installed in City Hall. A model of visionary delegation or of muddle and drift, with a team of aides whose identities he feels unable to reveal going about their business much as they pleased?

At best, a Johnson mayoralty could be energetic, innovative and exemplify in different ways the urban liberalism that Livingstone has fostered and that Cameroonian Conservatism has sought to accommodate. At worst, it could be sloppy, stingy, neglectful of London’s ground-in inequality and indulgent of the worst suburban suspicions and snobberies. Many Londoners have yet to decide which way they will vote. With Livingstone, they know what they’ll be getting and they’ve been grateful for most of it before. Johnson is a risk I’d prefer they didn’t take.

Actually, other people are in a muddle about it too, but Boris’s latest comments are making matters even worse for him. The story so far:

Episode One: Boris tells Vanessa Feltz it would cost £8 million to put conductors on the existing bendy bus routes. The following day, Ken Livingstone claims it would cost £80 million, though his website swiftly reduces that to £70 million. They can’t both be right.

Episode Two: I ask TfL to tell me what it thinks the conductors would cost, and to make an assessment of the cost of implementing the entire Johnson “new Routemaster” policy, buses and all. They think it would cost £49 million for the conductors and a total of £112 million a year to put the whole thing into effect. This means TfL thought both candidates were wrong on the cost of conductors, Boris by the most. Team Ken, however, immediately claimed victory with regard to the overall figure because it nearly matched their estimate of £110 million. In fact, they reached that figure by a different route from TfL: they had a higher figure for conductors but forgot to include the cost of hiring the additional drivers that would be required if existing passenger capacity was to be maintained (double deckers can carry fewer passengers than bendys, so you’d need more of them, hence more drivers). I did point this out to them at the time, but they weren’t about to look a gift bus in the mouth and, after all, I suppose they could have stuck on a bit extra for the drivers if they’d been so inclined.

Episode Three: Team Boris accuses TfL of being “highly mischevious” and said it stuck by its £8 million figure. The suggestion that TfL was deliberately generating Ken-friendly figures was repeated in an Evening Standard article on 19th March, despite TfL’s estimate having been broadly confirmed by the independent company TAS in the meantime. But, of course, the TfL figures were at odds with Livingstone’s as well as with Johnson’s. Funnily enough, the Standard story didn’t mention that.

Episode Four: On Newsnight, Boris Johnson still wouldn’t offer a total figure for his “new Routemaster” policy. His earlier defence – the one his campaign presented to me – had been that you can’t reliably estimate the cost of a bus that has yet to be designed. This might not be very satisfactory, but at least it sounds plausible. Instead of it using it, though, Johnson claimed it would cost about the same as Livingstone’s proposed “hybrid” buses. And he again failed to make clear that the £8 million figure referred only to the cost of conductors. True, it was miles out, but not £100 million out, and could have been finessed – as his campaign team did in response to my questions – as enough for an initial roll out, one which Londoners could be said to support.

Episode Five: In a well-executed sting operation, Johnson revealed to an undercover Livingstone supporter that he did, in fact, have a figure for his new Routemaster scheme – “about £100 million,” which is pretty close to the £110 million the Livingstone campaign had said right at the beginning, and the £112 million TfL said it would be – the very calculation Team Boris told me it was “highly mischievious” of it to have provided. Result? A somewhat vague but, nonetheless, serviceable and potentially popular policy looking a complete and utter mess.

If we accept that as a reasonable rough definition, who is the most progressive candidate for London mayor? The answer is not straightforward. Livingstone, of course, claims the progressive high ground and is calling for Green, Lib Dem and far Left sympathisers to join him there. He does so with some justice. In his GLC past he took the lead in campaigning against racism and for gay rights in the teeth of seething opposition. With public transport he championed and imposed cheap fares “on the rates”, driving his enemies madder still by becoming popular for doing it. Today, the green lobby lauds him as a trail blazer in tackling climate change and seeking to restrain car use.

And yet, and yet…you know what’s coming. Ken’s been too business-friendly, too dictatorial, too centralising, too ready to accommodate Islamism and his environmentalism has been more about hype than achievement. I don’t know about the last one, but all the others might be a bit worrying from a “progressive” point of view, even if you don’t buy in to the Evening Standard, Nick Cohen or Martin Bright diagnosis of Livingstone.

Now we turn to the other candidates with progressive credentials of one kind or another. How do they compare? Well, Sian Berry is greener as you’d expect. She’d also like to see a 60 percent affordable housing policy brought in, which is more than Livingstone. In this, though, she too comes into conflict with progressives’ desire for power to be devolved.

Brian Paddick is much keener on this, in planning and policing just for starters. And then Boris Johnson comes into the picture. He says he’s very keen to work co-operatively with the boroughs in just about everything instead of bossing them about like Labour’s man. He also says he’d want his advisors to declare all their interest on the GLA website. It’s not a huge step towards redressing the accountability deficit Livingstone’s critics say he’s run up – and we await with interest further announcements from The Blond on this – but it’s something.

So what about social inequality – a key progressive concern? Which candidate seems most likely to correct it? This, perhaps, is the hardest question of all because there’s a limit to what any mayor can do. For that matter can any mayor running a huge and growing urban hub of global capitalism be truly progressive at all? One final thought.

I’ve now done the clever and helpful Vote Match test four times, each time answering certain questions differently. Each time I’ve been told that I’m a Livingstone voter. But each time I’ve found that I’m at odds with him or only just in accord with him on several questions. To win, he needs to prove his progressive credentials to a group group of voters in a variety of ways. Maybe he should have a go at VoteMatch too.

Could it happen?

According to Cohen it could if, a) he is right that last week’s poll shows that…

“As it stands, Livingstone can’t be re-elected because Johnson is almost home.”

…if, b) there are enough people caught in “a Left-wing dilemma” of hating Ken but hating Boris too to make that “mass defection”.

… and if, c) Johnson makes “a spectacular blunder,” before polling day. But that’s three pretty big “ifs”. And you have to wonder why he’s bothering with advancing this case given that even those Standard readers entitled to vote in London seem unlikely to be troubled by that “Left-wing dilemma” in the first place. The answer, I suppose, is that his contempt for Livingstone is so intense that to him – and his employer – it seems worth it.

But has he got a bit carried away? Towards the end of the column he writes:

“It’s a sign of how malicious and incompetent the Mayor’s campaign has been that he has smeared his rival as a ‘racist,’ which Johnson isn’t, instead of a buffoon, which is how he often seems to many.”

Has Livingstone called Johnson “a ‘racist’”? I don’t remember him doing that. I do remember him saying during the ITV London debate in January that he thought Boris a nice chap who’d have round for a drink if he lived next door. True, his campaign has drawn attention to the “watermelon smiles” and “piccaninnies” stuff, but wasn’t it Compass that made the biggest noise about it? Let’s dwell, though, on those words “malicious and incompetent” while looking back at a column Cohen wrote for the Standard last month about Lee Jasper and his connection with Operation Black Vote:

“Unfortunately, Lee Jasper is its chair and the destruction of high purposes and public trust follows with a wearisome inevitability. The campaign has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle for Ken Livingstone. If you doubt me, listen to Jasper in a recent interview with the Voice.

“I am going to be working hard with Operation Black Vote and a host of other organisations to register as many of our people to vote,” he told the black paper. Fair enough – the organisation exists to increase turnout. But, he continued, black voters should vote for only one man. “I think people see that the other candidates don’t have substantive policy positions on any of the major issues. Ken, standing on his record and his manifesto, will be declared the candidate of choice.”

Readers of the Voice – or of the attacks on critics of Jasper on the Operation Black Vote website – can’t doubt that this supposedly nonpartisan campaign is endorsing Livingstone, and that everything about its turn into party politics is wrong.”

Does Cohen’s evidence support his case? Looking at OBV’s website it’s not obvious that it’s a vehicle for re-electing Livingstone. Well, maybe I’ve missed something or stuff has been taken down. But let’s look at Cohen’s account of Jasper’s interview with the Voice and compare that with the interview itself. Both Jasper quotes are reproduced accurately by Cohen. However, their relationship to each other in the Voice interview is very different from the one Cohen reports. The second did not continue from the first as he says it did. In fact, in the Voice interview the two Jasper quotes appear in the reverse order, in entirely different places and are wholly unrelated to each other.

The second quote Cohen cites – the one about “Ken” being “declared the candidate of choice” – was part of the answer to the eighth question Jasper was asked in the Voice interview and was a prediction of the election result. It was not made in answer to a question about OBV or even about black voters in general. Indeed, OBV hadn’t been mentioned in the interview at that point. And the first quote Cohen drew our attention to? That was part of Jasper’s answer to a question about how he would be spending his time while suspended from his job – as he was at the time – and appeared right at the end of the fourteenth and final question put to him by the Voice’s interviewer. The full answer to that question contains no reference to any political party or politician.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, Cohen has completely misrepresented what Jasper told the Voice in order to sustain his accusation that Operation Black Vote has been “hijacked and turned into a vehicle for Ken Livingstone.” Malicious? Incompetent? Or am I being terribly unfair?

It may help, but Ken shouldn’t hold his breath. For one thing, summoning Plod is unlikely to prevent the Standard augmenting or reheating its attacks. For another, he has a new problem – signs that his rival candidates are gaining momentum. This is not a scientific judgement on my part: as Mike Smithson points out there have been few opinion polls on the mayoral race and the last one – which suggested Livingstone’s position had actually strengthened followed Martin Bright’s Dispatches programme – used a very small sample. It is, though, based on some close observation both of the candidates and of the press.

For the Liberal Democrats, Brian Paddick is starting to turn up the heat, as he must. A former senior Met officer, his charge that Boris Johnson is “clueless” on crime carries authority while his comment at Thursday’s environment hustings that Livingstone’s new congestion charge proposal was “playing politics with the planet” has some force. More worryingly for the Labour man, Johnson himself is looking stronger.
The latter must do two things if he’s to win on 1st May: one is to rev-up the Tory core vote, the other is to mitigate as far as possible his image as a silly ass. He’s been working hard on the former and, notwithstanding Paddick’s jibe, his manifesto on crime will look substantial and practical to many. Meanwhile, his sense of humour has won him headlines, and not only from his fans. The more he can present himself as both responsible and refreshing, the more attractively he will contrast with Livingstone, who’s been looking battle-weary and, now and then, a bit ratty recently.

People far better qualified than I think this a very tricky contest to call. My guess is that the allegations of cronyism and corruption may have the effect of hardening Livingstone’s core support just as much as they may do the same for Johnson’s. That’s not to say, though, that their effect is neutral. Sean Fear has identified a group he calls “Livingstone Conservatives” – people who vote for Tory candidates for the London Assembly, but for Livingstone for mayor. If these change their minds this time, it’s bad news for Ken. They liked him in the past because he seemed to be both capable and charming. He needs to convince them that he hasn’t changed.

Meanwhile at New Statesman and at Comment Is Free Martin Bright has been insisting that his Dispatches programme has been vindicated by Livingstone’s own words since its broadcast. And at The Times, Camilla Cavendish – I wonder which inner city comp she went to – likened Livingstone to “the dictator of a small third world country.” The London Mayor himself has decamped to Davos where he’s found time to blog a broadside in his own defence. It’s been a bruising week for him. But how badly damaged is he? And where do the week’s hostilities leave the state of the mayoral race?

In his Cif article Martin reckons to have Livingstone bang to rights over advisors conducting political campaigns at tax-payers’ expense and that “support within the Labour party is draining away.” I’d say he’s not far wrong in the first case and that in the second the picture isn’t quite so clear. “There is concern within the London Labour party about many of the issues raised by the documentary,” he writes. So be it. Yet a bunch of Labour MPs have signed a letter to the Guardian supporting Ken. “Many activists who tramped the streets of London for Frank Dobson in 2000 have yet to forgive Livingstone,” says Martin. But how many?

I could name an old friend of his who was so disgusted by a barely coded letter sent by Tony Blair to her and all other party members when he was desperate to have Dobson rather than Livingstone nominated as mayoral candidate that she resigned from the party the same day. Plenty of grassroots Labour people regard Livingstone as a beacon of progressive principle. There may be many more who, like Hackney Labour councillor Luke Akehurst, are rallying round their candidate in his time of need despite differences with him in the past. However much some Labourites may dislike Ken Livingstone, you can bet they dislike the Evening Boris even more.

And then there are the voters. On Wednesday morning I took a bendy bus from Deepest Hackney to the Guardian office to discuss coverage of the London mayor campaign. In transit I disclosed this to my mother on the phone. When I’d finished speaking to her a woman who’d been sitting directly in front of me got up and took the seat adjoining mine. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “But I couldn’t help eavesdropping.” As we went down Essex Road she told her tale. An educationist, she feared that additional funding supplied by Livingstone for students she was concerned with would end if Boris Johnson displaced him.

Such people and such issues have been totally neglected by most journalists so far. In so doing, they neglect the existence of large numbers of Londoners who believe they have something to thank Ken Livingstone for. They also forget too easily that such gratitude goes beyond the provision of recent grants. It goes back, way back, to a time when ethnic minority and other groups felt daily menaced in the capital and Livingstone was the only prominent politician to stick up for them. Darcus Howe as good as says he wouldn’t piss on Lee Jasper if he was on fire. But he’s still going to vote Ken. “Much, if not all, of his support from black and Asian people stems from his singular contribution to the anti-racist movement and much else. The battle is already joined to dislodge this mass support.”

The point is well made. Boris Dovkants’s article about Emodi sweatily insinuates that her rise and fall illustrate that Livingstone’s popularity among BME voters is misplaced. Other elements of the coalition from which Livingstone has long drawn support are also being invited to consider if he still deserves their backing. Peter Tatchell’s contribution to Dispatches will have been significant for gays and others animated by gender issues. Leftish voters in general are urged by Martin, Boris Cohen and others to consider if they really want to support a candidate who holds hands with Islamists and abuses his power.

All of these factors, valid and venal alike, pose a threat to Livingstone. And yet, like the bookies, I still expect him to prevail on 1st May. For one thing, his most dedicated enemies underestimate the extent to which their motives and actions may be regarded by voters as more tainted than the politican they so loathe. For another, Boris Johnson has to prove himself a fit potential successor to the man who for many still embodies the best things about London. I rest my case.

P.S. And, lo, there came an opinion poll!
* Cross-posted from London: Mayor & More.

In theory, ContactPoint will enable public sector professionals to better anticipate when children are at risk of harm and to respond in a more coordinated way when intervention is required. In practice, say its critics, such professionals will spend an awful lot of time at computer terminals following false trails of misleading information while the fear of breach of privacy – of up to around 300 people they’ve never met “knowing their business” online – will deter the very children and families most in need of help from seeking or accepting it

In my last piece on this subject for Liberal Conspiracy I reported that ministers might be adjusting their sales pitch for ContactPoint, replacing vaguely shroud-waving references to the Victoria Climbie tragedy with less emotive talk of general practitioner efficiency. However, during her damage limitation exercise over the latest disappearing data embarrassment – those British learner drivers’ details that got lost across the pond – Ruth Kelly directly invoked Climbie when appearing on Newsnight (thank you, ARCH blog) and I heard her on Five Live asserting that the public would rightly be appalled if information wasn’t shared in relation to child protection.

Well, her last point is indisputable taken in isolation: of course relevant child welfare professionals working on the same case need to know what each other are doing. But, whatever the top brass of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services claim, a national database of dubious reliability and questionable security, compulsorily compiled and run by local authorities without parental consent being required seems precisely the wrong way of going about it.

How can we best mobilise opinion against ContactPoint? It seems to me that simply howling “Big Brother” isn’t enough. We need to show that e-government in all its form risks creating greater dangers to individuals and to society than it prevents. ContactPoint is a good example of this, and I urge readers to join the Facebook group I’ve formed to oppose it. Lobby your MP too, and lend your support to Annette Brookes MP, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson on children’s issues.

But let’s look at the wider picture as well. Guardian technology correspondent Michael Cross has recently argued for a far more open and political debate about e-government, taking in everything from ID cards to NHS records. He rightly observes that the public has been given no clear idea about the growth of e-government, how best to make it work and what its true implications might be. One of my New Year resolutions will be to encourage that debate in 2008. Maybe it will be one of yours too.

I’ve had an indication that the government may be adjusting its defence of ContactPoint. A correspondent tells me of a colleague who wrote to Ed Balls mentioning the invoking by ministers of the Victoria Climbie case as the primary reason for the database being set up. Beverley Hughes has been especially quick to do this as a way of countering critics. I’m told Balls’s reply included the following;

“In your letter, you assert the Government is introducing ContactPoint chiefly to prevent another terrible case like that of Victoria Climbie. This is not the case. The chief purpose of ContactPoint is to improve the efficiency of children’s services by freeing up practitioner time.”

My correspondent remarks that offering bureaucratic convenience as justification for reducing family privacy is unacceptable. Agreed. The same source also remarks:

“The government comments fail to mention that if you want to know a child’s GP school, etc YOU CAN ASK THE CHILD OR PARENT. They keep talking as if there were no other route than IT. It’s worth reminding people that the old fashioned low-tech solution of being polite and asking is still a viable option. Some LAs [local authorities] report [during pilot schemes] that users don’t know who they are in contact with. We should not ask families to give up privacy to compensate for incompetent professional practice.”

Agreed again. ContactPoint is a dud. And I haven’t even mentioned E-Caf yet.
Campaign page

Why? A group comprising experts in child protection, children’s rights and IT security produced a report for the Information Commissioner. The core of their case against ContactPoint and other databases for the logging of information about kids is that such screening and sharing of social indicators – family circumstances, health records, school performance etc – is an unreliable predictor of children being “at risk” of harm or engaging in antisocial behaviour. What’s more, it might generate self-fulfilling prophecies by putting poorer children and their families under unwarranted scrutiny. Also, it is likely to work against creating the bonds of trust that are so vital if effective help is to be accepted by and given to those who genuinely need it. They also doubt that ContactPoint would be secure – an argument likely to carry greater force in view of recent cases of discs disappearing from HMRC and the DWP.

Last week I wrote here that campaigns against erosions of civil liberties are more likely to gain widespread support if connections are made between every day “common good” issues and the principle of protecting the citizen from state intrusion. It’s not enough to be affronted by government “nannying” or to mutter darkly about Big Brother. We need to show that the database state and other curbs on privacy and freedom do more harm – possibly serious harm – than good. ContactPoint is a clear example of this. At best the system will result in professionals whose job it is to keep vulnerable children and families safe spending more and more time chasing false leads on computer screens. At worst, it will damage those most in need.

My slightly longer piece on this subject appeared on Cif last week and I wrote about it in detail about a year ago (the latter is now slightly out of date, but the key arguments still hold). The good news is that a review into ContactPoint’s security has been ordered, enabling the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives to ask more fundamental questions about the scheme. I think it’s a dud. If you agree, sign this Downing Street petition and spread the word.

Henry Porter’s campaigning pieces in The Observer have been a good example. The extended thread applause they unfailingly receive seems to me to be won too easily. Henry’s doggedness is admirable but his unfortunate joining in with the government’s crass campaign of last year to tick off veiled women for not being British properly exemplified how he sometimes comes at his subject in the manner of an affronted Tory, in this case seemingly unimpressed by the inconvenient assertion by some Muslim women at the time that to be veiled is be liberated rather than downtrodden. Similarly, it’s one thing to be appalled that Big Brother is everywhere but it will take more than quoting Voltaire to persuade a lot of people living on crime-riddled council estates that they’d be freer without CCTV than they, rightly or wrongly, feel with it.

Robert’s piece here earlier today argued that resistance to ID cards should major on the moral case against the state hoarding information about us rather than the practical one that it’s not safe or reliable, as demonstrated by those disappearing CDs. “The political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the state buys a better computer system,” he wrote. I agree. But might it not also be true that unless we are able to show that the various monitoring and “database state” schemes are unlikely to solve the problems the government claims they will, we risk coming over like high-minded, even scare-mongering idealists and leave ourselves susceptible to the predictable charge of not respecting the fears of real people about crime, terrorism and so on?

The only part of this vast territory I’ve ventured into has been the so-called Children’s Index, now repackaged as Contact Point. This is the database intended to hold personal details – some of them very personal – about all 11 million children in England. The government claims that this aspect of its Every Child Matters strategy will help protect children “at risk” of harm, but some very good judges have serious doubts. Their arguments are about practicalities insofar as they claim that the scheme is unsound both technologically and administratively. But they are also about efficacy – moral efficacy –in that they seek to show that Contact Point will make it harder rather than easier to detect and protect the vulnerable.

This is a genuinely liberal-left pro-civil liberties position demonstrating that the welfare of the weak – and hence the health of society at large – is more likely to be enhanced if there is less computer-based sharing of personal information by state agencies rather than more. It connects the defence of individual privacy to the pursuit of the common good by way of everyday issues people care about. The more connections of this kind we can make in relation to all civil liberty erosions, the more support we will secure for our opposition to them.

Consider these recent developments. The Guardian has reported that ministers are conducting an “urgent review” into the academies programme launched under Tony Blair. This will have given some satisfaction to critics who have long claimed that these expensive secondaries, which are state-funded but operate largely independently of local authorities, are failing to fulfil their principal remit of improving attainment among poor children in urban areas.

Stoke-On-Trent Labour Councillor Peter Kent-Baguley is among these critics. He is not alone in seeing academies as, in his words, “creating structural inequality” in education. Their opponents believe that such success as these schools claim – and some can claim very little – can be largely attributed to their enthusiasm for excluding troublesome pupils, who then have to be taken in by neighbouring LEA schools.

Falling pupil numbers mean that Stoke is to reorganise its secondary provision, with some existing schools likely to be closed. Kent-Baguley accepts the need for change, but is enraged by what he sees as central government’s interference in the form of education consultants SERCO being “catapulted” in to manage it. He regards SERCO as the instrument by which the government will impose academies on his city, whether it wants them or not. He fears social division in education imposed from above.

Now let’s look at what David Cameron has been saying. The Tories, of course, have pledged to accelerate the academy programme. But last week their leader made a speech (cheekily, in Manchester) promising to enable parent or community groups to set up their own schools – as “Conservative co-operatives” – using the money their LEA would otherwise be spending on their children at existing ones. Until more details are published it’s hard to judge this policy, but it certainly looks like a further potential challenge to the power of local government. In this case, though, the challenge, though enabled from the centre, could come from below.

Might there be merit in Cameron’s idea? There are obvious reasons for concern. Chris Keates of the NASAWT said such co-op schools would be “a recipe for social segregation.” Would they simply give hardline religious groups, ethnic separatists, the pushy posh and others the freedom to effectively insulate their kids against others “not like us” at those other kids’ and tax-payers’ expense?

But there’s another way of looking at it. Cameron characterised his idea as “giving ownership” of education to parents, a formula to please his core voters. Yet might such a reform turn out to be truly “localist”, reinvigorating active citizenship on the ground and having the potential to support those children, which existing schools and policies are finding hard to help by placing them in environments more suited to their educational needs? And, if so, should the Left consider adopting – or at least adapting – the principle, even if not the precise Tory policy when it emerges?

I find it hard to say. On the one hand I sympathise with Peter Kent-Baguely and I’m receptive to the idea of power being devolved further than even many local councillors might like. On the other, I’m aware that the freedoms this would bestow could end up being enjoyed by the few at the expense of the rest and narrow children’s horizons in the process. Is there a way of having the best of both worlds? And if so, can someone tell me what it is?

I doubt I’m alone in feeling that way. No need here to recap the British left’s long and turgid history of ideological introversion and sectarian scrapping. No need either, I hope, to lament the space periodically wasted on this-or-that recanting hack proclaiming their overdue escape from some state of supposed liberal denial.

I can’t be arsed with that stuff. Never have been. That’s because beyond the narrow battlegrounds and hillsides of media straw men there lies a larger landscape inhabited by people with broad minds and real lives who nowadays hold in common the sorts of values that have improved life in Britain for so many who live here over the past fifty-odd years, and of which they and the nation should be proud.

It’s a far more fulfilling place to be: a pluralist Britain where it is taken as read that there is a collective responsibility to see that the sick are cared for, children educated, the poor not left to starve and prosperity worked for and spread around. It is a place, too, where citizens respect each other’s right to do and believe what they like so long as others aren’t hurt by it. That principle has more recently extended to people’s intimate lives, weakening harmful taboos around sexuality and relationships.

The same wise and generous impulses have rendered racism furtive and disreputable. There is general assent that girls deserve the same opportunities as boys and that men who disparage their wives at dinner parties for the amusement of male fellow guests deserve divorce.

Readers too young to have grown up in small town England in the Sixties and Seventies as I did – or most other parts of Britain in that era – may not appreciate how much they owe social liberalism and the best of the political left for nourishing these admirable changes. It won’t help that those changes are so vehemently resented in some quarters.

This resentment lies behind the right’s successful insinuation into everyday conversation – even into the mouths of BBC reporters – of the term “political correctness” and conservative commentariat’s repeated bleating that “the feminists” and multiculturalism (whatever they think it means) have “gone too far” and that “we” are “not allowed” to have “an honest debate” about immigration because of – you guessed! – “political correctness”.

All this would be laughable were it not so insidious. Its very ubiquity reveals both the enduring power of those who spread the word that liberals and lefties are to blame for every ill and the continuing existence of a Britain that is ready – or half ready – to believe them. These voices of the seething classes – seething with bitterness at no longer having everything their way – routinely panic the Labour government and inhibit people in everyday life from challenging injustice or working for change. The right won the economic arguments in the Eighties and Nineties but were defeated in the cultural ones. They now show themselves to be bad losers. How very unBritish of them.

For me, the job of this blog is to construct a political narrative describing how best to defend, consolidate and build on the successes I’ve described and secure greater success in other areas: inequality, education, health provision, civil liberties, citizenship, tax and the economy, foreign policy…the list is formidable.

The goal is to bring about a Britain that is freer, fairer and therefore happier for more of those living here than it is now. Simply defining what “freer” and “fairer” mean should keep us busy for a while, especially where the two seem to conflict. Yet the process should be constructive and pleasurable.

Ensuring this will be easier if all those contributing to it maintain a sceptical distance from media bubbles and Westminster villages and instead keep their heads, hearts and feet firmly planted in those parts of the everyday Britain others like us have helped build.