'If we work hard we can make London safer, fairer, cleaner'

NEVER has a year been so written off before it even got going. Never has humanity tiptoed into January with such trepidation - and you don't need me to belabour the bad news.

It promises to be a hell of a 2009, a year of jolts to the financial security and self-esteem of millions of people, shaken by economic events far beyond their control. The challenge is how to survive and to emerge in better shape, and to do that we need to perform a psychological trick - a mental transformation that will help us succeed.

We politicians can't just sit like slack-jawed victims of some tsunami or asteroidal impact. We can't just blame Gordon Brown for 10 years of profligacy. That milk is spilt.

We have to recognise that this downturn is a big, brute fact and that we must therefore learn recessionomics -- and by that I mean how to make the facts of the recession fit our agenda for London.

What we want is simple: a cleaner, greener, safer city, where you can get from A to B as cheaply and as conveniently as possible, where Londoners can afford to live, and which remains one of the best places on earth to come and invest.

Yes? Well, in spite of the recession -and sometimes because of it - there are things we can do to help. We in the GLA can freeze our share of the council tax by cutting waste at City Hall, and we can cut pointless taxes like the £25 charge on family vehicles, and we can extend free travel for older people and those on income support.

We can use the fall in house prices to invest our £5 billion housing budget, helping people to avoid the agony and waste of repossession by taking temporary equity stakes in their property; and above all we should be exploiting the colossal opportunity presented by the fall of the pound.

We can boost tourism and boost exports, by pointing out that sterling-denominated assets currently represent outstanding value, and that Paris fashions are currently far cheaper here than in Paris. At every stage as the recession unfolds, we need to see the opportunity behind the disaster.

For a generation now it has been difficult to attract the brightest graduates - especially scientists - to teach in our state schools.

Given the choice between earning gigabucks or inspiring a love of physics in disadvantaged kids, they have gone for the City, with bad results for education and for social justice. Well, if those City jobs are now dwindling, is it not time to divert those brilliant mathematical minds to our schools and the vast and growing challenge of educational inequality?

Which brings us to the issue that bulked so large in Londoners' concerns before the recession took hold - the knives and the gangs and the continuing problem of too many ill-disciplined kids and not enough adults with the courage or charisma to lead them.

If there are more talented adults with time on their hands, let's mobilise them to help with the network of voluntary groups - understaffed and under-resourced - that are trying to offer young people the discipline and opportunities they need. And if there are some bankers out there who are still embarrassed by the size of their bonuses, then I propose that they palliate their guilt by giving to the Mayor's Fund for London to help deprived children in London.

If we work hard, we can use the facts of this recession to make this city safer, and fairer, and less lonely; and we can clean it up, too. We must not let the green agenda wither in the economic cold, not least since the environment represents a fantastic commercial opportunity.

London should become the world leader in carbon trading and in developing new technologies. If 38 per cent of our greenhouse gases are produced by domestic properties, then we should be training and unleashing armies of retrofitters - and saving occupiers a fortune in their bills. We should be using cheap land and low rents to pioneer low-carbon technology, and if - as I believe - our species is nearing the end of its love-affair with the fossil-fuelled internal combustion engine, then London should be leading the way in using and developing the vehicles of the future.

That is why it is time for a new bus for London which, apart from anything else, will lead to significant reductions in noise and air pollution; and now is the time to step up the pace of investment in transport projects that will make this city more pleasant and convenient to live in. That is why we are pressing ahead fast with a bike hire scheme and a new and distinctive network of cycle highways. That is why we are right to expedite Crossrail, which will expand London's transport capacity by 10 per cent. Take that together with the Tube upgrades, the East London line extension, the North London line improvements, the 50 per cent expansion of the DLR, including the extensions to Woolwich Arsenal and Stratford, and you have the biggest programme of investment in London transport for 50 years.

Recession or not, this will be remembered as a new Victorian Age, when we made capital investments that not only helped to deliver thousands of jobs in the downturn but which boosted competitiveness for generations to come.

London's financial-service industry will recover, but it is a mistake to think that all our eggs are in that one basket. We have a world-beating creative and cultural sector, a manufacturing industry that - amazingly - still has at least two independent cycle manufacturers, a constellation of world-class higher education and medical-research establishments; and that is before we have even mentioned the prospects of the new Olympic city we should be creating at Stratford, complete with an international Olympic university.

There is no gold under the streets of London, no oil or coal; yet London was the greatest city on earth in 1800. It was the greatest city on earth in 1900 and in spite of the shocks of the 20th century it remained one of the world's greatest centres at the turn of the Millennium.

That was a tribute to this city's astonishing ability to adapt, and to the advantages we retain today. London is unique in its openness to talent, its energy, tolerance, humour.

We retain the time zone that makes it as easy to talk to Beijing as to New York on the same day; we remain the originators of the global language of business.

If London plays to its fundamental strengths, it can come through this recession stronger than before.