Labour's Nightmayor

In ten weeks' time, in theory, Londoners should be voting for their first directly-elected mayor. Even that is uncertain: because the House of Lords has blocked the passage of the regulations that will govern the contest, there is even the possibility that it may have to be postponed altogether. If so, it would be a final indignity in keeping with the shambles which has pervaded all aspects of the proceedings up to now.

Labour's determination to prevent Ken Livingstone winning their party's candidacy has been all too public, and it is unsurprising that having narrowly won the nomination, and having disowned the more dubious tactics which have been alleged against his supporters, Frank Dobson has been none the less tainted. Labour's electoral system was altered from the promised one-member-one-vote to an electoral college, where a third of the votes were reserved for Labour MPs, MEPs and assembly candidates (who were denied the privilege of a secret ballot), and where affiliated organisations (trade unions and co-operative societies) could cast block votes and could do so without balloting their members, a past practice now outlawed in the Labour leadership elections upon which the electoral college is supposedly based. (In any case, the high weight given to MPs' votes in the party leadership elections can be justified since the leader of the party is also leader of the Parliamentary Party, and his position would be impossible if he did not have their confidence; but the Mayor of London will not be leader of the Labour group in the Assembly, let alone of London's Labour MPs or MEPs, so how is it justified here?)

Naturally enough, the whole saga has not enthused the electorate, and present indications are that it will not even succeed in stopping Livingstone, if he chooses to run as an independent. ICM's poll for the Evening Standard this week, taken immediately after the Labour selection result was announced, shows only 15% think that Mr Dobson's victory was "fair", and more than half of those who expressed a voting intention support Mr Livingstone. Three in five think he should stand - although he will have to weigh up the consequences of certain expulsion from the Labour Party as well his level of public support.

The pattern is all too familiar. In the Scottish Parliament, Millbank (Labour Party headquarters) wanted to stop the left-wing MP Dennis Canavan from being nominated as MSP for his Westminster seat; he left the party, ran as an independent against its official candidate, and won with embarrassing ease. In Wales, Millbank secured the election of Alun Michael as party leader, and eventual First Secretary, against the strength of local opinion which would have preferred Rhodri Morgan. This almost certainly severely dented the Labour vote (unbelievably, they lost Rhondda and Islwyn to Plaid Cymru), and Michael has now been forced out and Morgan installed in his place. (An ICM poll last week in the Scotsman found only 24% of the Welsh satisfied with the job Alun Michael had been doing as First Secretary.)

Which brings us to the defeat in the House of Lords. Conservative, Liberal Democrat and crossbench peers combined to block the government's proposed regulations for the election, because they made no provision for a free mailshot to be allowed for each candidate to deliver campaigning material to the voters. This free delivery is routine in Parliamentary and European elections, and was also allowed in the elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, but does not apply to local authority elections. The government has argued that the cost would be unjustified, and that this is only a local election; it has also been suggested that the unelected House of Lords is acting disgracefully in interfering with the arrangements for an election. (But that is partly what they are there to do: almost the only power of uninhibited veto left to the Lords under the Parliament Acts allows them to prevent the Commons postponing general elections beyond the existing legal time limits. There is a precedent, too: it was the Lords who blocked James Callaghan in 1969 when they thought he, as Home Secretary, was trying to gerrymander constituency boundaries by selective implementation of the Boundary Commission recommendations.)

In a MORI poll for the BBC at the end of last year, we found that just 29% said they were certain to vote in the Mayoral election, and a further 25% very likely. Compare this with last year's European elections: in January - about the same period in advance of polling day - 27% said they were certain to vote and 17% very likely; come June only 23% of the electorate actually bothered to do so; and that was in an election where the free mailshot applied, and candidates were not hindered from putting their case to the voters by the monetary cost.

An embarrassingly low turnout might be almost as damaging to the government as the defeat of the Labour candidate. The introduction of directly-elected Mayors is the flagship policy for reform and rejuvenation of local government in England; if the electorate cannot be made to take more of an interest in the new forms of local government than in the old, then it will have failed. In the last London borough elections, 35% voted (the lowest figure in 35 years); if significantly more do not vote for the Mayor, who can possibly be expected to take him, or the institution, seriously?

More than a decade ago, Margaret Thatcher too felt she had a problem with local government - it gave a political platform and power-base to some of her most vocal opponents, and it failed to engage the interest of local voters because the consequences of council decisions seemed too remote from the voting process. She tried to solve the first problem by changing the system to get rid of Ken Livingstone, and the big idea to deal with the second was the poll tax. Labour's reforms have not been that disastrous, yet - their voting support remains high, mainly because the Conservatives have no credibility as an alternative. But the danger signs are there: the government's satisfaction ratings are slipping, and in Scotland and Wales the Nationalists are making advances. In London, even Mo Mowlam - generally thought to be one of the best-liked of ministers - could not beat Red Ken, if reports a private poll commissioned by Millbank are to be believed. The magic is beginning to wear off the New Labour project.