Johann Hari

Are we becoming an Attention Deficit Democracy, where we are swayed by shiny objects and empty images rather than – crazy idea! – the policies that affect our lives? When Londoners stream into the polling booths tomorrow, they won't just be picking between Boris and Ken. They will be picking between two different ways of doing politics.

From London to Washington DC, the right is increasingly losing the argument, on everything from Iraq to global warming to the need for government regulation. They know they can't win on the issues – so they are trying to dissolve politics in an acid-bath of distracting trivia.

They are trying to make the US presidential election about whether Barack Obama wears a flag-pin, and what his pastor said one Sunday when he wasn't there. They have tried to make the London mayoral election about the 300 bendy buses on our roads (out of 6,000), Ken's purely symbolic decision to speak to a despicable but anti-al-Qa'ida Islamic cleric, and what Lee Jasper (who?) e-mailed to Kumar Murshid (who?) about how to spend 0.0000000001 per cent of the mayoral budget.

Look! It's a picture of Boris on a bike! He must be eco-friendly! Never mind that he has a bitterly green-bashing record, while it's Ken who is committed to spending £500m on new bike lanes. Look! Boris calls for a safer London! Never mind that he also whispers he will make "big savings" and "real economies" in the police budget in order to cut taxes for the rich.

Beneath this junk, there is a real election going on. Let's start with the issue discussed with hushed anxiety in every London pub: housing. It's increasingly impossible for anyone but the rich to live in London; people shriek with joy if they can find a shoebox on the edge of a sewer going for £500 a month. In this election, one mayoral candidate is committed to a big programme to help the poor and middle-class to stay here. The other is committed to a big programme to help the already-rich own more.

Ken has introduced a rule saying that if you want permission to build homes in London, half of all the stock has to be affordable to people on an average wage. And he has now – finally – been given £4bn by the government to launch the biggest home-building programme in the capital in a generation. Boris, by contrast, says Ken is "hung up" on the percentage of affordable housing – maybe it does look like a hang-up from Henley – and will ditch the rule demanding it. His plan is very different: he is committed to spending £130m on a First Step Housing Scheme to help first-time buyers. Sounds good – but look at the small print. You would need an income of £60,000 to qualify – and that rules out 80 per cent of Londoners.

In Spectator-Land, these people are the "struggling middle class" who must be the sole beneficiaries of state support. In the real London – Ken's London – they are the cosseted elite who need help less than the rest.

How about the biggest issue facing London in the long term – global warming? Half of the population of this city lives on a flood-plain – and as the sea rises, we become harder and harder to protect. The salt-water is already swelling towards us. When it was first built, the Thames Barrier had to be raised once every two years; now it is raised 20 times a year.

After New Orleans, the London Assembly studied our flood defences – which are the responsibility of Westminster, not City Hall – and found great swathes are in an "appalling" condition. The more greenhouse gases are belched out, the more likely a Katrina-on-the-Thames becomes. (Excuse me for a moment – I must go and buy a flat in Hampstead ...)

There is a bright green line between the candidates. Against the sneering of virtually all the press, Ken pioneered a hefty tool against global warming, now copied across the world: congestion charging. He has brought the number of cars in the capital crashing down by 70,000 a day, and shown that if you massively invest in buses, you can get an extra two million people on to them every day. Now he is taking it up a step by making the drivers of the most climate-destabilising cars of all – SUVs – pay £25 to enter the zone.

Boris opposes it all. He admits he "cheered" when George Bush refused to sign the Kyoto treaty, adding: "When Bush says no, he is doing what is right for the world." He will slowly peel back the congestion charge and protect SUVs. About driving these Chelsea tractors he says: "Tee hee, I said to myself ... out of my way, small car driven by ordinary person on modest income. Make way for the Nissan Murano."

I could fill this newspaper with issues where the two men are on opposite sides of the sane/barking spectrum. Boris wants "more deregulation" of the City – in the middle of a global crisis caused by extreme deregulation. He wants to reprivatise the Tube, because it worked so well with the national rail network. He compared gay marriage to bestiality. He thinks he can get Bob Crowe to agree to sign a no-strike deal. And on, and on.

But the biggest gamble if we pick Boris will be with London's febrile ethnic mix. London today is a cocktail of Chinese refugees and Latin American rickshaw drivers and African exiles; if there's anywhere on earth that could release a convincing cover-version of "We Are the World", it's us. But it's easy to forget how combustible it is.

Live in east London and you hear a simmering ethnic resentment on all sides that could easily erupt – especially as we head into an economic downturn. Only a few years ago, Paris erupted into its bonfire of the cars-and-vanities after a right-wing politician reacted to flickers of racial tension with crude language. Do we want to risk having a mayor elected by the white outer suburbs who has repeatedly called black children "piccanninies" (and not just in spoof articles), tells a black presenter "you can't out-ethnic me", and responded to the 7/7 massacres by attacking the Koran and announcing "the problem is Islam" because it is "the most viciously sectarian of all religions"?

Ken Livingstone – with his adenoidal, amphibian populism – is the most successful left-wing politician in Europe today. Born into the white working class in the rubble of post-war London, he has helped steer the transformation of this city through an amazing flourishing of sexual freedom and immigration – and faced down Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair on the way.

At a time when most politicians cower beneath a lightning-storm of opinion polls and focus groups, he pushes politics forward in quantum leaps – on talking to the IRA, on gay equality, on the environment. Whenever he has the power to, he ploughs money into services – like buses – used by the poorest. If Londoners replace him tomorrow with the political love-child of Margaret Thatcher and Billy Bunter, we will have four long years to stop seeing the funny side.

POSTSCRIPT: Why did I dismiss Ken Livingstone’s decision to meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a despicable Islamic fundamentalist cleric who supports the killing of gay people, the beating of women, and the suicide-murder of Israeli children – as purely symbolic in my column today? Several readers have e-mailed demanding to know. The answer is: because it is purely symbolic.

I detest Qaradawi. He stands for everything I hate: homophobia, misogyny, theocracy. I think Ken made a horrible mistake by meeting him, and a worse one still when he said critics like Peter Tatchell were “Islamophobic”. I condemned it at the time; I condemn it still. I don’t find the mayor’s argument – that it’s necessary to engage with anyone who is opposed to Wahabbism and al Qaeda and has a broad following in the Muslim world – good enough.

But not a single person was any worse off because Ken met this man. Not one. It was pure (bad) symbolism and nothing more.

When it comes to actual policy, Ken has been far from soft on religious fundamentalists: he lobbied hard against Tony Blair’s decision to allow Christian and Muslim organisations to have an opt-out from the ban on discriminating against gay people, for example. He has fought for funding for the domestic violence shelters that specialize in rescuing Muslim women. He plainly opposes all violence in Israel/Palestine – on either side. If he had “got into bed with Islamists”, as some of his more overheated critics have claimed, he wouldn’t have done this. Far from appeasing Qaradawi, he has continued to pursue policies that are counter to his abhorrent agenda.

Ronald Reagan once said, “In politics, my eighty percent friend is not my twenty percent enemy.” On that, if little else, he was right. The supposed left-wingers who are fetishizing this one bad decision by Ken – a decision that makes him a one percent enemy at most – are viewing politics through a puerile, purist huff. And this purism is also suspiciously lop-sided: they do not apply these exacting standards to Boris.

Compare the zero victims of Ken’s bad decision to talk to Qaradawi with the large numbers of real people who will be penalized if Boris wins. The poorest people in this city will have far less access to affordable housing; tens of thousands of workers for the London Authority who are currently paid the London living wage – £7.80 an hour – will soon see this scraped back to the minimum wage; we will all have fewer police to protect us when he makes “big savings” in their budget to pass on as tax cuts for the rich; and the victims of a destabilised climate will pay for one of the great world cities having a mayor who has mocked Kyoto and cheered on George Bush’s decision to kick it into the trash can.

You can base your vote on a bad decision that resulted in a bad photo – and absolutely no changes in policy or principle – if you like. I think there are more important factors at play this Thursday.

When you hit your sixtieth birthday, most of you will guzzle down your Hormone Replacement Therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover. She will look in the mirror and think – ach, I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face.

I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes. She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer Dr Bassam Said Nadi explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six percent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine month old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre for Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5 million cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions.”

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded sixty years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened sixty years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to systematically slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land.” I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. It is a swirling Jewish metropolis on the Mediterranean, a buzzing hive of ideas where you can be a mensch, a nebach or a meshugeneh with a tan.

But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.
When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres.” In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins.

The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the thirty million stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only forty years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 percent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tend to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only ten percent - around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain.

But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a fourteen year old girl. Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the ’67 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next sixty years.

You can e-mail this article to your friends (or enemies) here.

[This is a rough approximation of what I said, because I was a bit shocked and rambled and can't really remember my exact words.]

I’m just wondering if I can use this Orwell Prize as I.D. next time I get asked if I’m old enough to buy alcohol…

Any political writer loves to think that they are lone rangers who stand alone against the world, but in fact we are totally dependent on so many people who make our work possible, so I’m afraid I’ve got a Gwyneth Paltrow-ish list of people I want to thank, but I’ll try not to cry.

The most important people to thank are the stringers and translators who I work with when I travel to some of the world’s dodgier places – people like Abdul Halim, who I just worked with in Bangladesh, or Idris Ahmed who I worked with in the Central African Republic. They keep you safe, and they take the flak for your stories long after you’ve gone.

I’d also like to thank the journalists and political writers who have shaped my thinking from when I was a teenager, inspired me and in some cases personally encouraged me: Clive James, Polly Toynbee, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and George Monbiot in particular.

I'd like to thank my friends, who help me figure out what I think by constantly arguing with me, and by reading my articles and telling me when I've gone mad - particualarly Tanya Gold, Rob Blackhurst, Alex Higgins, Emily De Peyer, Jessica Smerin, Dave Pearson, Anna Powell-Smith, Jospeha Jacobson, Chris Wilkinson and Peter Marshall. A special award for endurance also goes to my wonderful friend Antonia Cedrone, who endured the National Review cruise with me and kept me sane...

I also owe a huge debt to Adrian Hamilton, Cristina Patterson, Simon O’Hagan, Matt Hoffman and everyone on the comment desk at the Independent, and to Louise Hayman and our legal team, who save me from bankrupting the newspaper every week.

But most of all I’d like to thank the two editors I’ve worked for in my career. Simon Kelner has been an incredible boss. There are very few editors who, if you went to them and said that there’s an obscure war in an obscure part of Africa and you’d like to check it out at his expense for three weeks, would say yes. He’s given me guidance and support when I needed it, and freedom when I didn’t. He has let me say anything I wanted, no matter how mad it seemed. He’s backed me with the resources that you need to be a good columnist and not just somebody who sees the world through google, and it’s been a privilege to work for him for the past five years.

And I’d also like to thank Peter Wilby, the former editor of the New Statesman – and this brings up something I feel a bit guilty and anxious about. There’s a lot of media people here tonight, so I think it’s important to talk about, even though it’s difficult.

When I graduated, I suddenly realised that if you want to become a journalist, you have to work unpaid in Central London for as long as two years – and I just couldn’t afford it. There was no way I could. There are a lot of better writers than me out there – people who deserve to win this prize – who fall at that hurdle. They’re out; they go and work in some other less rewarding industry. Basically, if you don’t have rich parents, it is increasingly impossible to become a journalist in Britain – and that is really bad not just for social justice but for the newspapers themselves.

So I went to Peter Wilby, who had published some of my articles when I was a student, and explained the situation – and because he is a man of good left-wing principle, he gave me a £9000-a-year job, and it was enough for me to start in the industry. If he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here now, and I’m conscious that there are very few people like Peter out there in the media. There are a lot of deserving recipients of the Orwell Prize who are currently being shut out of the industry, and I think we should give a thought for them too.

Thanks again for this, and to the judges too; I’m really really chuffed.

Awards also went to Clive James and Raja Shehadeh. You can read more details about the awards here.

The first time Billy Bragg – the deep-red singer of socialist anthems – held up the English flag on stage, the crowd hissed. But the rock star who spent the 1980s championing the miners and a socialist Nicaragua wanted them to cheer. He said to his fans, “I know what you’re thinking. But we have got to take back the symbols of our country.” And so he sang a song: a patriotic English anthem he had written that ended with the words, “Oh my country, oh my country, what a beautiful country you are.”
o
“When I came off stage, my mates said to me – you’re taking the piss, right?” he says in that famously flat voice that nonetheless vibrates with sincerity. “But I’m not. I do love this country. I want to get to the point where people see the flag on the back of a white van and don’t think the worst.” Today, Billy Bragg is trying to write the soundtrack for another England.

“For years, we’ve allowed racists to hijack our national symbols,” he says, swigging black coffee in a West End hotel on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. We may, he warns, be about to feel the consequences with a dull thud. “There is a strong chance the British National Party are going to win a seat in the London Assembly on May 1st,” Bragg says. “They are led by a man who questions the veracity of the Holocaust. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m against anybody's who's willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Adolf Hitler. It's a total insult to that generation who fought so hard against the Nazis.”

“It’s time to repossess our national symbols,” he says. You can’t do that from your armchair. You’ve got to go out and do it.” That’s why he has organised an alternative St George’s Day celebration at the Barbican Centre.

“Where was St. George born?” Bragg asks, leaning forward. “The Middle East. Our patron saint is a migrant worker. He’s come here looking for work because he can do the patron saint job cheaper and better than the rest of us. Before the Medieval period, it was done by Edward the Confessor. But Old Edward was undercut by St George, a man was born in Lebanon. He was picked up in the Middle East and brought back here by the Crusaders and we’ve had him ever since.”

Bragg was born at the far end of the District Line, in Barking, into the white working class, in 1957. His father worked in a warehouse. He grew up with “no telly, no phone, no car, no inside bathroom.” He was sent to the local secondary modern, where everyone was being packaged to work at the Ford plant in Dagenham, and skulked away when he was 16. Today his only brother is a bricklayer, and his mother still lives in the house they grew up in. But this is also is a history layered – as every British family’s is, when you delve into it – with immigration. His great-grandfather came here across the water from Italy, and lived here forty years without learning a word of the language. “Yet his children and grandchildren loved and fought for this country.”

He smiles. “But partly because we – the left – have backed away from anything to do with nationalism, people don’t know our real history.” They don’t know about the great egalitarian traditions of England, stretching from the Peasant’s Revolt to the Levellers to the Battle of Cable Street. This, he says, is the England we should wave the flag for. “I love the strong tradition we have of holding those in authority to account, which stretches right back to Magna Carta and the Reformation, and came to a head – no pun intended – in 1649. Until we did it, there was no document like Magna Carta. There was no moment in European history prior to us chopping off the King's head where the people showed they were the real sovereigns. We have to prove that these episodes mean as much to us as the Battle of Trafalgar does to the traditionalists.”

But instead, we have been served up a national story that fetishises “monarchy and authority and hierarchy, all the stuff designed to keep people like me and immigrants in our place.”

He wants to stir a renewed English identity built on “space, not race.” He is trying to make the places of this island echo with as many musical resonances as the dancing-in-the-streets American landscape. He once rewrote the song ‘Route 66’ to be about the A13, the duel carriageway that runs from London to Southend-on-Sea. He rewrote his hero Woody Guthrie’s most famous song, singing: “This land is your land/ This land is my land/ From the coast of Cornwall/ To the Scottish Highlands.” It's a nationalism that avoids all the ugly old competitiveness: you love your slice of land, and you expect other people to love theirs.

As he talks, I realize one of the disconcerting things about Bragg. In an industry made entirely from artificial sweetener, he is organic – unprocessed, and entirely uncynical. Billy Bragging is the opposite of bragging: his sincerity slices through our sneering culture. He expects us to give a damn. It is as if Bruce Springsteen and Tony Benn had a love-child, and it is singing about us.

As an earnest man, Bragg has a twitching nose for phoniness. That morning, he appeared on Andrew Marr’s morning programme, and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told him he loved his music. “Him and Cameron claim they loved the Jam and the Clash,” he says. “It’s all lies. I can spot a Tears For Fears fan a mile off. I bet they spent the eighties singing along to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’”

There is an important story to tell, he says, about the working class England that was his womb, and why it is angry. It is a story about the failure to build council houses; the failure to provide good public services; and the spiralling inequality “which has got even worse under ten years of a Labour government, incredibly.” The story should end with solutions true to the best English traditions, not least “a higher minimum wage for everyone” and “more council housing.”

But that is not being offered. In the absence of stirring ideologies, some of his old schoolmates are falling back on the worst tribal instincts. “I'm loathe to refer to BNP voters per se as racists,” Bragg says. “There are racists among them, but in my experience they are people who might be better described as cynics, who have given up on mainstream politics. Labour has always delivered for the people of Barking, but in the last ten years they haven't. So [some people are] looking to lash out, and the BNP are the bluntest object they can find.”

He says the short-term solution is simple. “Vote. Vote. The BNP rely on a low turn-out. They can only get in if most of us stay at home.” And when you do, he adds, you should bear in mind that Boris Johnson has been endorsed by the BNP. “That word he used about black kids, ‘piccanninies’ – it’s from Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. The one where he said the black man would have the whip hand. Boris knew that association. It’s shameful.”

The long term solution, he says, is to take back Englishness. And it is England he is talking about: Britain, he says, is “just an economic union that’s past his sell-by date”. He recently sang: “Take down the Union Jack,/ It clashes with the sunset./ And put it in the attic/ with the Emperor’s old clothes.”

Where did this stirring to reimagine England come from? As a child, his father, Dennis, read him history books, giving him a sense that their suburban frontier-land between Essex and London was filled with the ghosts of English history. But by the time he entered his twenties, Billy had sloughed off nationalism, finding it distasteful and reactionary.

Today, Bragg is nearly as old as his father ever got to be. Billy is 51; Dennis died of lung cancer at 53. Are you rediscovering your father’s passions as you overtake his dying-age? For the first time, his long tumbling sentences stop. “He knew he was dying for eighteen months,” he says slowly. “When he went to hospital and had the operation, they told me and mum that the best way to deal with it was to not talk about it. So we never talked about it.”

Never? “Even when he was being injected with morphine. Even when he was seeing hallucinations in the room. Even when I was having to shave him because he was too weak to do it. We just never talked about it.” Not once? “Never. I can’t believe I’m saying it either. We just acted like it wasn’t happening. I was only seventeen, I didn’t know any better.” Is returning to English history a way of returning to him?

For the only time in our interview, he changes the subject. He says he knows that distilling Englishness will always be impossible. “Top of my list of things I love about England would be Marmite,” he says, “Well, that’s lost me half the neighbourhood straight away.” He laughs. And in his anarchic, uproarious laugh at our utter inability to define England, I feel a little ripple of love for my country.

I recently interviewed Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate for mayor of London, about the current street-by-street struggle for the job. I also spoke to his main opponents: Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. It was for the gay magazine Attitude, so we focused on gay issues - but I think the approach and philosophy of the three candidates that emerged from the conversations is revealing for all Londoners.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire. We now make up fifteen percent of this swirling, whirling world city’s electorate – so we can currently watch the candidates for Mayor of London ply us with electoral poppers in a bid for our support.

It’s a decision with hefty consequences. The Mayor controls the Metropolitan Police – the people who keep us safe. He controls the city’s transport system, and he sets policy for global warming – essential in a city as vulnerable to flooding as London.

The cast of leading candidates in this race is like a surreal reality TV roster: we have a left-wing veteran of the old gay rights battles, a tousle-haired Tory, and the most senior gay policeman in British history, all competing for our votes.

Brian Paddick has been breaking pink ceilings for his entire career. He rose to be the most senior openly gay police officer in British history, and today he is the Liberal Democrat candidate for the mayoralty. He has taken some poisonous homophobic smears: he was dubbed ‘the Camp Commander’ by one anti-gay pundit (even though he isn’t camp in the slightest) and had to put up with an eight page kiss-and-tell in the Mail on Sunday. But he’s still standing, and today he pledges it will be “payback time” for gay people with the police if he wins.

JH: Why should gay Londoners vote Paddick?

BP: Because I'm a born and bred Londoner, I'm passionate about London. I'm not a politician. I listen to people. I've proved that I can be trusted. And I'm gay!

JH: What are the issues specific to gay people you’d be dealing with as mayor?

BP: Crime is an issue for everybody but it is particularly an issue for the LGBT community - not just in terms of homophobic crime, but because we like to party, and I've lost count of the number of friends who've come out of the Shadow Lounge a little bit the worse for wear at two o'clock in the morning and have been mugged and marched round to the cash point at knife point. You know, we went through decades of being targeted by the police. It's pay back time. It's time that they started paying attention to the real issues that we face as LGBT people and started delivering the sort of service we should quite rightly expect from them.

JH: You were the most senior gay police officer in British history. How would you go about making sure the police deliver for gay people?

BP: There's been a charge in the law so that the mayor can now chair the Metropolitan Police Authority, which holds Metropolitan Police to account, decides the budget, sets the priorities and is involved in the selection process for commissioner - so there is a real hand-on role there.

JH: Is there still a homophobic culture in the police force?

BP: The Gay Police Association since last year had a twenty 25 percent increase in the number of calls from police officers who have been subjected to homophobia. This is still a live issue. At the moment if you as a victim of a homophobic attack or same sex domestic violence and you dial 999 you don't know whether you're going to get a good deal or not - it depends which police officer turns up. What the police have got to realise it's not like going to the supermarket: if you don't like Tesco, you can go to Sainsbury's. The police are the police and that means whoever it is who turns up on your doorstep, you should be able to trust them to deal with you appropriately. That ain't the case at the moment.

JH: Should gay people be worried about Boris, particularly his views on Section 28, and so on?

BP: He has not proved his credentials as far as the LGBT community is concerned and when he has endorsements from people like Peter Stringfellow who describes him as a red blooded male. You look at his history, the sort of things he's said about not just about gay people but about other minorities, then I think people should be concerned about what his real attitude is towards the LGBT community.

JH: Like describing black people as “pica ninnies” with “watermelon smiles”?

BP: Piccaninnies, yes. What Boris' PR people are doing is spinning like mad and trying to keep him out of trouble, trying to stop him saying the sort of things you've described. What Londoners have got to realise is they may be able to do that for four months in an election campaign, but there's no way they'll be able to keep him out of trouble for four years if he becomes mayor.

JH: Obviously Ken had until a few years ago an unequivocally glowing record among gay people, but there have been some concerns since he started palling up with Yusuf Qaradawi. What’s your take on that?

BP: He doesn't seem to be consistent in what he does and what he says. So, yes, he supported gay pride, like he supports lots of other minorities in their celebrations in Trafalgar Square – but in terms of his commitment to make a real difference to the day to day lives of minorities, then I think there is a big question mark. Surely he must realise that inviting somebody like that as a guest of his… I mean, you've got Peter Tatchell saying that for thirty years he's been an ardent supporter of Ken Livingstone but he isn't any more following what he did, then I think all LGBT people need to sit up and take notice.

JH: Would you invite someone like Qaradawi?

BP: No I wouldn't. There are plenty of other Muslim scholars who do not hold that view, who do not have such a radical view as that homosexuals should be put to death. Who can be invited to encourage more integration in London. What we don't need is people who hold such extreme views that they are likely to cause division.

JH: Have there been any homophobic attacks on you in this campaign? I haven’t seen any.

BP: I did an interview with the Islam Channel and I was asked specifically – don't you think there's going to be quite a lot of people who won't vote for you because you are gay? I said it’s funny because the previous Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Stevens, was concerned about putting me in as the Police Commander into Lambeth because of perceived homophobia amongst the Caribbean community. Fifteen months later when he tried to get me out, and the Caribbean community and the gay community and every other community in Lambeth were up in arms against the Commissioner for trying to remove me, I think he was wishing there had been some homophobia from the black community!

What I said to them was, when people realise that you're a decent guy, that you do a good job, then your sexuality quite rightly becomes a secondary issue.

JH: Bullying in schools is a big issue for gay people. What would you do about it as mayor?

BP: I was bullied for being gay at school. So I know from personal experience what that can do to you, and how isolated it can make you feel. We had an open air swimming pool in the playground at my secondary school which was only heated during the summer, and in the middle of winter, I got picked up, when I was in the sixth form, I got picked up by about half a dozen other sixth formers and carried through the playground to where the swimming pool was. They had every intention of throwing me into the water in the pool. Thankfully I was rescued by a member of staff who was patrolling the playground, stopped them from throwing me in. Then a few weeks later they tried to strip me - which was very interesting thing for alleged straight boys to do to a gay man - and on that occasion I was rescued by my twin brother. On the first occasion I managed to hold it together, but on the second occasion I went home in tears basically, even though I was seventeen at the time.

There was one other event I’ll never forget. As a police inspector you have to visit all the scenes of unexplained death, and at one there was a guy, a really gorgeous looking guy, naked, hanging from the back of a door in a flat on a council estate. And this was quite clearly a gay guy who couldn't come to terms with society's attitude towards him and presumably had nobody to turn to. It had such an effect on me to see that, it’s why I get really angry with people like [Times columnist] Matthew Paris, who on a programme to celebrate the anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality said that gay people have never had it so good. He doesn't realise that this bullying still goes on, and we were still having people being murdered on Clapham Common even a couple of years ago because of their sexuality.

It all starts at school, not just in terms of the damage that's done to LGBT people by that bullying but this insidious growth of homophobic feeling starts at school and ends up in murder.

JH: What can we practically do about this?

BP: I don't think the Mayor is vocal enough on these sorts of issues. You know, okay, he and I formed were on the lead float at Pride – Ken Livingstone, I and Shirley Bassey, or at leasta wax image of Shirley Bassey, were on the lead float of Pride, and it's all very well for him showing his support like that, but he needs to be vocal in supporting groups like Schools Out, Sue Sanders. He's very pro-Caribbean community in his rhetoric and yet he's not said a word about disproportionality in stop and search by the police. He is a superficial supporter of minority groups. When you come down to making a real difference to the day to day lives of LGBT people, then I don't think Ken's done very much.

JH: What’s your position on cruising areas?

BP: It's very important for the police to listen to what the concerns of local people are. We have had incidents of robbery and serious violence against men who have sex with men in public sex areas. Even if the police get complaints from local residents where the boys don't behave themselves as they should do, then it ought to be a case of the police working together with the local LGBT community and working with the gay media to raise those concerns with the people using those areas. We should be working in collaboration to find a solution to the problem, rather than going straight down the enforcement route.

JH: HIV rates among gay men are rising for the first time since the mid '80s. Is there something the mayor can do about that?

BP: The mayor is responsible for a fairly narrow range of things but he has tremendous influence. There is an obligation under the mayor to have a positive impact on London health generally. In my autobiography I talk about my experiences with unsafe sex and with HIV.

At a fairly low point in my life I ended up having unprotected sex with somebody. But it wasn't until after about three months that I found about by complete accident that he'd nearly died of AIDS. It was not a good time, really. It was the first Christmas Eve that I'd ever been on my own, and I couldn't get tested for a week because all the clinics were shut. Luckily they rushed it through as an urgent case, so I only had to wait two days.

There’s a younger generation who haven't lost lots of friends to HIV-AIDS and don’t understand what risks they are placing themselves at by having unprotected sex. A lot of it is to do with lack of self esteem. There are deeper issues here than simply getting a kick out of unprotected sex.

JH: That’s horrible. What can the mayor do about situations like this?

BP: I don't need to tell gay men in London how difficult it is to get an appointment at an STD clinic, or how long you have to wait if you go St Thomas' and go for the No Appointments service. And I have to say, certain high profile celebrities saying they're too scared to have an HIV test is not the message that we need to be delivering to the to the LGBT community. I have a test once a year anyway, and I'm lucky enough to be able to go private now, otherwise I'd never get it done. I remember saying to the doctor, “How long do I have to wait until I get the result?” and he said, “Oh, I'll be able to tell you as soon as I put the plaster on.” That's how quick and relatively painless it is nowadays.

JH: When did you realise you were gay?

BP: When I was eleven. That was a long time ago now, society's attitudes are different, my parents’ attitudes were very different to what my mother's is now. The only gay people you saw were very camp. I can do camp, but I'm not camp by nature. You would see Larry Grayson on the television, and you’d think – if that's what being gay is about, I think I'd rather not be. It took until I was thirty to get over it, and realise you just have to live with it – no, more than that, you can have a fantastic, fantastic time, being openly gay.

JH: Why did you marry a woman?

BP: It was an absolutely genuine attempt to play it straight. And I thought that I was determined to try at least and be happy living as a straight man. And five years wasn't a bad try. At least then I could round to my mother and say I tried that and didn't like it, so now I'm going to do this.

JH: How did you come out to your colleagues in the police?

BP: Well I had one experiment when I was a Detective Chief Inspector – you know, like Morse - I took the risk of telling my boss and the other members of the senior management team that I was gay. It was the wrong decision, big time. I was bullied by my boss, he constantly undermined my authority in the presence of subordinates, he publicly outed me in front of other staff, it was bad news, and so when I moved on to the next job, I kept quiet. The genie was out of the bottle then, and you couldn't get it back, but I certainly wasn't going to talk about my sexuality, because I had such a negative experience from being open about it. It wasn't then until I reached the level in the police that I had aspired to when I joined, Commander, that I decided to go all out - so I came out in a Saturday edition of the Financial Times.

JH: Are there lots of gay senior officers who won’t come out?

BP: Yes. After what happened to me would you come out? There have been tremendous positives from coming out as I did but I've had to put up with a lot, including a kiss and tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a Sunday tabloid, followed by weeks and weeks of regurgitation and repetition of the allegations that were made then. With Elton I belong to a small exclusive club of people who have successfully sued the Mail On Sunday.

JH: Some of the press coverage was really despicable. Richard Littlejohn was particularly vile.

BP: I took him out to dinner.

JH: Really? How could you bear to eat while look at him?

BP: I sat him down, and I said, you may think what you do is funny but there are human beings on the other end of your distorted and barbed comments. Do you realise what you are doing? He basically said, ‘I don't intend anybody to take anything I say seriously.’ Having said that, he has never written a negative word about me since. It's a bit like the racist attitude towards the black guy who lives next door- George is alright, it's all the rest of them. And it's exactly the same with Littlejohn. Except I think he's got issues with his sexuality, myself.

I once got invited to speak at a university in Minneapolis in America on the disproportionate incarceration of young African-Americans. I shared the platform with a black female judge, which is as rare as an openly gay senior police officer. What I said to the audience was there was – there’s no point being a black judge or an openly gay police officer if you behave like a straight white man. And even if every time I go to Barcode in Vauxhall, which is my local, a diary item appears in one newspaper or another saying that I have been dancing without a shirt on, that isn't going to stop me. Whether I'm mayor or not, I’m going to go on living a life as a gay man, because that's what I am andI'm very proud of that.

I recently interviewed Boris Johnson, the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, about the current street-by-street struggle for the job. I also spoke to his main opponents: Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick. It was for the gay magazine Attitude, so we focused on gay issues - but I think the approach and philosophy of the three candidates that emerged from the conversations is revealing for all Londoners.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire. We now make up fifteen percent of this swirling, whirling world city’s electorate – so we can currently watch the candidates for Mayor of London ply us with electoral poppers in a bid for our support.

It’s a decision with hefty consequences. The Mayor controls the Metropolitan Police – the people who keep us safe. He controls the city’s transport system, and he sets policy for global warming – essential in a city as vulnerable to flooding as London.

The cast of leading candidates in this race is like a surreal reality TV roster: we have a left-wing veteran of the old gay rights battles, a tousle-haired Tory, and the most senior gay policeman in British history, all competing for our votes.

Boris Johnson became famous as a columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a mop-headed panellist on Have I Got News For You. His persona – of an amiable, bumbling Old Etonian twit – disguises some canny instincts: he has risen to be the most popular Tory in Britain and is within inches of snatching the mayoralty for Ken.

But several gay groups have fretted about Boris: just a few years ago he was a strong supporter of the homophobic Section 28, ranted against “Pulpit Poofs” in his columns, and compared civil partnerships to marrying a dog.

JH: Why should gay voters choose Boris?

BJ: Just for the same reason that I hope that, all members of all communities should vote for me – because I want to bring a new eye to the government of London, which I think is out of control at the moment. I want to make a real effort to give people safety on the streets, buses, station platforms. I think it's time for a twenty first century transport system. In this capital we're not getting it.

I think the current Mayor is ideologically prevented from doing things that need to be done, and I think above all, people want housing in this city that they're not able to afford. They want beautiful new, affordable dwellings of the kind I want to encourage by being practical and less ideological about it.

JH: Are there any issues under the mayor’s remit that you think will particularly affect gay people?

BJ: I do want to have a London in which everybody feels happy and at home. I was very pleased the other day when a couple who had just had a civil partnership - or something, I always get the phrase wrong - they were going down Shaftsbury Avenue in a kind of rickshaw thing and they hailed me warmly and wished me well in the elections, and set off. I felt very pleased by that.

We are a very advanced city and we should lead the world in this kind of thing and I want to promote that and do all I can. But I don't particularly want to get into the business of devising loads of tailored policies for every particular group, because I think that starts becoming insidious. I'm not in favour of, treating people as though they belong exclusively to one set or group. People have multiple identities and everybody in this town is a Londoner and I want to treat them that way.

JH: Who were the first gay people you knew?

BJ: (Long pause). I really don't know… (Long pause.) I suppose, I suppose there were, I suppose there were loads of, I'm just trying to think… I suppose some teachers I knew must have been gay, but didn't really let on about it and didn't want to much.

JH: Many gay people would feel anxious that you supported Section 28, and just a few years ago accused the government of having “an appalling agenda of encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools”. Did you really think it was possible to teach children to be gay?

BJ: No, no, no, no, no - what's that? - the only point I was making there was that I thought that this was being introduced in a sort of… my point was about political Balkanising. It was being done to provoke people, rather than any real desire to...

Surely it wasn’t about provocation, it was about teaching children about homosexuality from a young age.

As I recall the issue was to do with compulsion. Wasn't the question [about] whether or not schools should be compelled to have [these lessons]? I thought the issue was are you compelling teachers in schools to take a particular line, and I'm not in favour of that.

JH: No, that’s not what Section 28 was. It wasn’t about compelling people to teach about anything – it was the opposite. Section 28 in practice was a ban on ever teaching about homosexuality.

BJ: I don't think that's true. I'm not against… Well, let me tell you my version. If schools want to teach homosexuality, I think they should, I think that's fine. What I'm against is any kind of compulsions on teachers to do this that or the other, and that is what, from memory, I didn't like about the repeal. There's far too much proscription already of what teachers have to say and do.

Obviously you've got to teach homosexuality, you've got to teach about gay sex in, in sex education, it's obviously vital, but, where I come in on this I'm against bossiness and telling teachers what they gotta do.

I don't understand homophobia myself, I think it's very often projection, in my view. You've got some issue going on there. Let's be honest, why else would heterosexual people be like that? Mathematically, in the great race of life, homosexual people have ruled themselves out of the competition for women, so what's to dislike?

JH: Some people also worry about what you said about gay marriage. Five years ago, you said, ’If gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.”

BJ: No, no, no, no, no, no. Nu, nu, noo. What I said, well this is what I think I said on Newsnight, or something like that, or Question Time…

JH: It’s in your book.

BJ: Oh, well I can't remember, oh, that's right. The point I'm making is I'm a libertarian on this, I think, as society evolved, taboos will go and shift. I'm not saying I'm going to do it by all means, but you know I was just making the point that things that seem unacceptable to one generation can be acceptable to the next generation. All I was doing was making a powerful point in favour of tolerance.

JH: Why were you against gay marriage at that time?

BJ: Because marriage has always been, technically defined as marriage between a man and a woman but if we are going to redefine it then that's fine by me. At the time that this question came up I was speculating about the use of the language. Is this, if we're going to call this a marriage, it means an evolution in the use of the word… and it’s fine with me.

JH: A few years ago, you referred to religious gay people as “pulpit poofs.”

BJ: No, I, well, I… I mean, pulpit poofs. Pulpit poof was admittedly a phrase that I borrowed from the Sun, I'm ashamed to say, and I did bung in [to an article], and if it did cause offence I am sorry. I think it's obviously intended in a pretty kind of jocular way and you know I hope I can be forgiven that one.

JH: Gay teenagers in London are six times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. What as mayor would you want to do to tackle that?

JH: I'm very worried about the incidence of suicide among young men anyway. Among the Turkish community there are depressingly high suicide rates at the moment. I think young men feel particularly vulnerable to changes that have happened in society, this applies to gay men, straight men, whatever, and they feel that the world has moved on in ways that they don't often understand. You know big tools, very important tools are at the disposal of the mayor, like encouraging them to get help and support for the arts. There's huge possibilities for doing better than getting kids away from gangs, make them feel happier, more confident. What really gets my goat at the moment, and infuriates me is that so much London Development Agency money is being wasted, with no proper accountability. It could be used to help kids, give them another way of thinking about themselves, give them opportunities.

JH: You’ve been very critical in the past of the idea of gay and lesbian outreach workers, using them as an example of a waste of money. But part of their remit is to deal with suicidal teenagers. Is this something you would want to peel back as mayor?

BJ: I'm not certain that you need to Balkanise society in this way. I just think we need to focus more on the needs of Londoners.

JH: Obviously one concern for gay Londoners is homophobic hate crime. What would you want to do about this as mayor?

BJ: I, I loathe and despise this kind of prejudice, I don't want to see it in London and we will make sure that we crack down with the full force of the law.

JH: Organisations like the Gay Police Association say we need to have a campaign like the one that followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence. But you were very critical of the reforms that happened at that time, comparing them to Ceausescu’s Romania.

BJ: I wasn't very critical actually. If you read the interview I did Sir William MacPherson what you'll find is the thing I really didn't like, and actually which Sir William then retracted, was was the suggestion that you could be done for thought crime in your own house. If someone reported you, sneakily, and said, ‘oy, oy, I was having dinner you know, the other day, with Johann, and, God, you should have heard him mouthing off, something rotten it was.’ And then there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night. And I thought that was a load of nonsense, and it was just no way to run a society. And I compared it to Ceaucescu's Romania, because that's exactly what used to happen in Ceaucescu's Romania, with kids being encourage to inform upon their parents.

JH: What's your attitude towards cruising areas? The Mayor seems to have had an attitude that was should effectively have quite a hands off attitude to it.

BJ: Erm… In my JCR [Junior Common Room] at university, which was a very progressive JCR, it had a rule that there could be no sexual contact of any kind, except homosexual contact. But I think what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If you're going to have measures to prevent people having sex in public they should be applicable to everyone.

I don't want to give the forces of law and order any pretext for being bullying or persecuting, but when there are going to be children about and members of the public, then I think there should be a sense of decorum. Decorum, civility, that's what I want for the streets of London, and that means people behaving themselves in public. But provided there's no public nuisance or public risk or it's not encouraging any kind of culture of criminality, then I'm in favour of tolerance, I want tolerance. If there is no risk to the public and there is no real law and issue involved and we're talking about consenting adults then it certainly would not be high on my list of priorities, no.

JH: Ken Livingstone has been criticised for meeting with the Islamic fundamentalist Yusuf al-Qaradawi. What are your thoughts on that?

BJ: I do think it's very odd that someone who preaches, someone who espouses a doctrine of promoting great gay rights should embrace a man who wants gays to be killed. I think that's incredible, and I think a stand should be taken not just from the Mayor, but from the many fantastic, thoughtful members of the Muslim community who secretly loathe all this stuff and just feel a bit nervous about speaking out about it. It would be great if they could speak out too.

JH: In the eighties, Ken said he thinks we’re all bisexual. Do you agree?

BJ: I'm a polymorphous pervert. That's what Freud would say, I don't know about Mayor Livingstone.

JH: A lot of people have an image of Eton as a hotbed of sodomy. Is that what it’s like?

BJ: To a degree I find personally insulting, it really wasn't like that for me. It didn't really work out that way.

JH: That’s a good New Tory way to end – with a regret that you weren’t sodomised at school…

(Boris laughs).