Benjamin Barber: Being an MP will be a step down for Mayor Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson is probably running for Parliament and presumably for higher posts beyond. But is this a move up the ladder or down? Will leaving City Hall for the Commons increase or diminish his political power?

In the traditional view of things it’s obviously a step up. But given the new role cities have assumed as effective players in an interdependent world where national governments are in crisis, it could be a step down. For cities are succeeding where states are failing, and inter-city networking is making waves while international affairs are a Sargasso Sea of inertia. The bottom line is that municipalities are solving problems where nations are creating them.

Boris himself has shown that cities are governable where states are not; that mayors today, whether defined by weak or strong executive regimes, are able and pragmatic governors, whereas national politicians are beset by ideological polarisation and bureaucratic elephantitis. Making a fetish of their archaic “independence,” nation states invite unsavoury rivalry with other nation states. For the UK this means lacerating uncertainty about whether to stay with or disdain Europe and the threat of Scottish secession.

The transactional inclinations of cities, on the other hand, impel them to co-operate, as they are doing in the C-40 Climate Cities, which has made more progress in curbing climate change than nation states. Ideology notwithstanding, Mayor Johnson has given London a green tint with Boris Bikes, congestion fees and the work of the C-40, headquartered in a Bloomberg building.

There are multiple reasons why cities work and states don’t, reasons I explore in my book If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. More than half the world’s population now live in cities, 78 per cent in the developed world. Cities create up to 80 per cent of GDP and pay the lion’s share of taxes (which they do not see returned to them).

Cities are built at crossroads of trade, culture and commerce and thus are multicultural, open, pluralistic and creative. Unlike nation states, whose sovereignty makes adversaries of their neighbours, cities are defined by an urbanity that is non-territorial. If Germany gets bigger, Poland necessarily gets smaller. It’s a zero-sum game. But both Berlin and Warsaw can flourish to their mutual advantage.

This is why London has more in common with Tokyo, New York and São Paulo that it does with Great Britain. And why Johnson has more in common with his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, or the progressive Bill de Blasio in New York than with his fellow conservative Angela Merkel in Germany.

There is something else about a city Boris understands: it is not just another abstract level of government, but the quintessential human community. Cities are us: they are where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, get married, have children. The city is also where the real mission of government is made manifest: to provide a setting where conflicts can be settled peacefully and common goals pursued effectively. Transport, clean water and air, health and education, police and fire services, access to housing and jobs — these are not parochial interests of the locality but the essential services that define our need for government.

No wonder the attack on “big government” usually addresses distant national governments locked in paralysing ideological struggles. No wonder you can close the Federal Government in Washington, DC (it has happened twice recently) and nobody notices. But just try to close London or New York, Bristol or Memphis, and see what happens. Cities never close.

So mayors like Boris Johnson do not have the luxury of standing on ideological principle while the city comes to a halt: they have to compromise and cooperate and forge public/private partnerships until the rubbish is collected, the roads are mended and the schools are running. Maybe that’s why mayors remain the only public officials in the Western world who still score 70 or 75 per cent trust ratings, while national politicians fall below 40 per cent.