BBC BREAKFAST WITH FROST
INTERVIEW:
KEN LIVINGSTONE,
SUSAN KRAMER,
FRANK DOBSON and
STEVE NORRIS
APRIL 9TH, 2000

Please note “BBC Breakfast with Frost” must be credited if any part of this 
transcript is used


DAVID FROST:
Well nominations have now closed in the race to become mayor of London. The 
election is less than a month away, there are 11 candidates and we have four of 
them here and now. Susan Kramer, or to give her her full title is now…

SUSAN KRAMER:
Liberal Democrat candidate for mayor of London, officially.

DAVID FROST:
Right, next Ken Livingstone, Independent, good morning Ken.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Morning.

DAVID FROST:
Frank Dobson of Labour, good morning Frank.

FRANK DOBSON:
Good morning.

DAVID FROST:
And Steve Norris of the Conservatives.

STEVE NORRIS:
Morning David.

DAVID FROST:
And who has done the magnificent sacrifice this morning of cutting short his 
wedding night to come and join us on the programme.

STEVE NORRIS:
Greater love hath no man…

DAVID FROST:
Exactly…but let’s start back with you with this question, what is the, given that 
Ken’s a Labour man as well, what’s the main difference between the two Labour, 
Labour candidates, between you and Ken?

FRANK DOBSON:
Well before I say anything else could I just say how saddened I was to hear of the, 
yesterday, of the death of my good friend and colleague Bernie Grant who was 
someone who’d always spoken up for Londoners, spoken up for black people, one 
of those people who didn’t need any spin doctors or anything, always said what he 
thought and ironically I was supposed to be appearing on a platform with him this 
afternoon and I think he’ll be sorely missed from London politics. But having said 
that I think the, this issue isn’t about you know what’s good for Frank Dobson or 
what’s good for Ken Livingstone or any of the other candidates, the question is 
what’s good for London and the mayor’s job is a very serious job, the mayor is 
going to have some responsibility for the Metropolitan Police for getting jobs in 
London but above all the mayor’s got the responsibility for getting through a vast 
modernisation…

DAVID FROST:
But in terms, what is the difference between you and Ken though?

FRANK DOBSON:
Well what I’m saying is that the mayor’s going to be responsible for the 
modernisation of the tube, it’ll cost at least £8 billion and I believe we can’t afford 
the waste that we’ve had in the past and basically Ken stands for the traditional way 
of financing these things and the traditional way of letting the contract. And those 
contracts have involved, you know the Jubilee Line extension, two years late, one 
and a half billion pounds more than it was supposed to cost and I don’t think we can 
really have that sort of approach in future so what I want to see, is I don’t want 
privatisation, I want the operation of the tube to stay in the hands of London 
Underground. I think Londoners want the job done quickly, they want it done well, 
they want it done safely but what we can’t do is expose them to taking the risk of 
picking up huge sums of public money.

DAVID FROST:
Right, okay we’ll come…

FRANK DOBSON:
Money, £500 per household it will cost…

DAVID FROST:
I’ll just step in there, just one lightening question, do you think Ken’s fit to be 
mayor?



FRANK DOBSON:
I think he’d, I think there’s a good chance he’d make a mess of the modernisation 
of the tube and it could end up with Londoners having to pay huge sums of money 
to bail out his schemes.

DAVID FROST:
Ken?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Well it shouldn’t be a great ideological issue, we should raise the money the 
cheapest way possible, that’s via bonds. We should then let the contracts with a 
fixed term and a fixed price and penalties if the firms over-run. Now private 
companies manage to do that all over the world and you’re held responsible and so 
let’s just find the cheapest way of getting the money and then the best firm in to 
actually do the civil engineering work. I mean the real problem is not this actually, 
because it is quite clear that this is will the mayor stand up to government for 
London even whilst we’ve got this mayoral election going on the government is 
now preparing plans to cut the grant to London by £800 million. We used to say 
well we’ve got 13 of the 20 poorest boroughs in Britain here in London, they’re 
going to change the way they calculate it so we’ve only got six. The £800 million 
London loses is mainly going to be switched to the constituencies of Cabinet 
ministers in the North and Scotland and whoever’s mayor is going to have to fight 
to stop this nonsense. We get cut and cut and cut.

DAVID FROST:
Susan?

SUSAN KRAMER:
Well in fact I’m standing, as you know, as the Liberal Democrat against the sell-off 
of the tube and I think it’s important, it’s what Londoners want but I come at it as a 
banker who’s used to putting together large projects and let me say this very 
simply. The tube needs two things, good management and cheap financing. Now I 
have to say to Ken when you were running the GLC I don’t think good 
management is the term we’d have used and the tube that you left us didn’t have 
good management as its hallmark. So I’m very uncomfortable with your approach 
to it because I don’t think you have the background to bring the management in. 
But Frank has opted for the expensive financing so they’ve each got an absolutely 
crucial failure in trying to tackle the tube’s problems. We have to have those two 
elements, new management, cheap financing and then we get both the service and 
we keep the fares low.

DAVID FROST:
You, in a perfect world you’d go for total privatisation Steve, wouldn’t you?

STEVE NORRIS:
I think privatisation’s been an enormous success over the last 20 years which is 
perhaps why it’s become, you know, the way…

DAVID FROST:
Except possibly transport with British Rail?

STEVE NORRIS:
No I think what you’ve got with British Rail is just simply in the early days of the 
massive investment programme and until you actually see those new trains there’s 
very little for people to, you know for people to actually appreciate…

SUSAN KRAMER:
That’s a cop out…

STEVE NORRIS:
They’re there and they’re actually working. But I think what’s interesting you know 
is that I thought that Ken was, you know was against the sort of privatisation of the 
underground or whatever, that was the question, this great sort of litmus test was 
the election for Ken, the reason why he sort of left his party and, and set up on his 
own was because he alone could be trusted to keep the tube, you know, in public 
hands. But actually everything I hear tells me that right now he’s saying no 
different from me which is that Londoners actually don’t give a damn who is the 
ultimate owner provided that the, that the system actually works and that, funnily 
enough, the funding issue is, is ridiculous, you don’t get great arguments at the 
National Health Service or in the education service or in Social Security about how 
each department raises its own finance. The treasury raises the finance and at the 
moment when Gordon Brown’s awash with cash the idea that a nationalised 
industry is going to start issuing bonds is just bizarre, I mean it’s a distraction 
because the real issue is, you see, that when you get the private sector in they tend 
to come with management that says we’ve got to make our money work, we’ve got 
to get more passengers, we’ve got to get rid of sloppy working practices and the 
RMT Union aren’t terribly happy about that, they are there with a stranglehold at 
the moment on London Underground and that’s a stranglehold Ken isn’t prepared to 
break. So I’m very clear we’re dealing with a government that says they want the 
system to broadly remain in public hands, I’m relaxed about that, but let’s get 
private investment in, it seems to be a position that actually everybody suggests is 
sensible and let that private investment manage the system for the benefit of 
customers. Because at the moment the system comes first the customers come last 
and that is simply not acceptable.

DAVID FROST:
Congestion charges, a related subject in terms of transport, you’re for them Ken?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Absolutely, I mean it’s, you’ve got to do something about congestion, when people 
go for a meeting from the City to a meeting in the West End they don’t know 
whether they’re going to take another half an hour or not, whether they go by the 
Underground which is breaking down or the congestion on the roads and you’ve got 
half of all the kids on the main road in this city have got asthma, you’ve got twice 
the chance of dying of lung cancer just breathing the air and every winter thousands 
of Londoners die from respiratory ailments because of the pollution and you’ve got 
to cut and we estimate that a congestion charge just in the centre between Park Lane 
and the City south of Euston Road to the river would bring in about £250 million 
which would be useful to expand public transport but it would cut cars driving into 
the centre by 10 to 15 per cent and you, everybody knows you just, it’s almost like 
it’s rush hour seven days a week all day, isn’t it, it used to be quiet on Sundays and 
Saturdays, now it’s, you can get out and walk quicker most days than staying in the 
car.

DAVID FROST:
Well David Blunkett’s been saying that about children going to school as well, in 
terms of pollution and so on. Now Frank you’ve said no congestion charges in your 
first term but maybe in your second term?

FRANK DOBSON:
Well I believe that congestion charges are a reasonably good idea but if they’re 
genuinely concerned with congestion and not just a tax then the idea is you get 
people out of their cars, well I think it’s perfectly unreasonable to say get out of 
your cars and in two and half, three years time we’ll have improved the transport 
system, I think we’ve got to do them in parallel. I also think that if London’s going 
to be a modern city of the 21st century we can’t have a second-rate paper-based 
system, what we need is a proper electronically based system right from the start 
but we’ve all been advised that that could take three and a half years or more to 
introduce and I think it would be better to thrash out all the problems, get them 
sorted out, get an electronically based system and only introduce that. If we have a 
paper-based system all the ways of monitoring it would actually involve creating 
congestion, they’d have checkpoint charlie when people entered the zone or legions 
of people going round checking on cars every day to make sure that they’d paid 
their congestion charge. I don’t think that that’s a good idea and I don’t think most 
people want to be paying £100 extra a month to get into the middle of London 
before the transport system’s been improved.

DAVID FROST:
What about policing, zero tolerance, the great phrase from New York, are you in 
favour of zero tolerance policing Steve?


STEVE NORRIS:
I don’t know anybody who isn’t, I mean what does it mean, it means that when 
crimes have been committed you do something about it, of course we’re all in 
favour, I mean, you know it’s ridiculous not to understand that the real issue in New 
York is that Mayor Guilliani started his term with 28,000 policemen and he’s now 
got 39,000. London by contrast is haemorrhaging policemen every single month, 
we’re losing more than 100 officers net a month, people simply aren’t joining 
anymore. The property market has gone crazy, a policeman married to a teacher, 
nurse married to a social worker simply can’t afford to live in the city, you know, 
and that is a real issue that the mayor has to tackle, the question of affordable 
accommodation, the question of badgering government to get a proper allocation.

DAVID FROST:
You can’t overcome market though, can you, I mean…

STEVE NORRIS:
No which is why what you’ve got to do is actually say to government this market is 
a consequence of London being a massive net generator of wealth but one of the 
consequences of it is that we need more of that resource back in London to make 
people who are in these terribly important public sector jobs actually able to be a, 
you know to afford to live here. Can I just say one thing on the point about 
congestion charging because I’m the only candidate who says that this is actually a 
con. I mean Ken says, you know, cleaner air, you know less, less accidents and so 
on, give me the money. Well I’d give him the money if I thought for a moment that 
would be the consequence but you see the trouble is in a perfect congestion 
charging scheme that’s what happens, the money goes into improving public 
transport, in the one we’ve got in the Act of Parliament the money simply goes to 
pay Gordon Brown for what Londoners in fact have already paid for which is a 
decent tube system. That’s the problem, you can’t spend the money actually 
improving public transport, you have to spend the money if you’re daft enough to 
ask Londoners for it, on putting back money that the Treasury ought already to be 
spending in London.

DAVID FROST:
What about a hot issue at the moment, asylum seekers, Susan what do you feel 
about, how would you deal with what people feel is aggressive begging?

SUSAN KRAMER:
Well I don’t think we would differ on how you would deal with aggressive begging, 
I don’t like it when it happens to me and I don’t know anyone who does. But listen 
what I’m concerned about if it’s being used for something else, it’s being used as a 
way to attack people who are genuine asylum seekers coming into this country, 
they’ve been stereotyped, it’s been used by the government to back up the idea of a 
voucher system so that when somebody who’s an asylum seeker goes into a shop to 
buy something, you know, I mean think back to the holocaust, they might as well 
wear a yellow star and that leads to the kind of racial tensions that we’ve seen in 
this city in the past. We have worked so hard to become a multicultural city where 
people can live together and celebrate each other’s diversity and now they’re 
starting to use this asylum seekers issue to try and really drive a wedge between us. 
Do you know what also makes me very angry, the burden is falling on local 
authorities, local governments and they’re having to dip into things like their social 
security budget, so you have old people saying listen I can’t get home help, I can’t 
get the services I need because the money’s going to asylum seekers, the 
government should have been putting the funds in to support this and instead it’s 
got two groups of poor people in need and I’m very sympathetic with our pensions 
who are getting the short shrift and it’s putting them against each other and we have 
to attack that.

DAVID FROST:
Ken what would you do about the role of deputy mayor if you were to win this 
election, who would be your deputy mayor?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Well what I’m think is that I will have one each year from each of the main parties 
on the Assembly. I mean one of the first jobs of the new mayor is to create a cadre 
of people in London within city management and city government is their prime 
interest and to develop various talents and rather than have one person there for four 
years I would actually look to bring somebody on in each of the party groups so 
they’ve got some experience of what’s happening, some experiencing of serving in 
the Cabinet.

SUSAN KRAMER:
Can I just say there’s a real problem with this, if Ken was a genuine independent he 
could talk about trying to work with all of the other parties but he constantly says 
he wants to be back in the Labour Party. Now he’s not going to get people to work 
with him when he says he’s going to go out and campaign against them and against 
their colleagues in the upcoming general election. Ken is not a genuine independent 
which is why that won’t work and I’m really afraid that with the Labour Party 
refusing to support him in the Assembly, the Tories refusing to support him in the 
Assembly, Liberal Democrats trying to look for where we agree and trying to build 
some kind of consensus but basically not having a majority we’re going to be in a 
situation where there will be absolute gridlock and the worst thing for London will 
be four years of what we’ve seen through much of this campaign, fighting, prize 
fighting, constant argument because there are real problems in London.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
That won’t be problem, I mean I, one of the first things I’d like to do as you know 
I’d like to bring you on to the transport for London, on the bond issues, I’ve said 
before I’d want Frank in there leading the struggle against poverty in London and 
I’d even bring Steve on with his experience of road haulage. I want to bring 
everybody who’s got something for London, I mean party or non-party…

SUSAN KRAMER:
I think that’s ridiculous how can you stay independent…

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
No, no, I think the reason they’ve had problems with me is I’m far too independent.


DAVID FROST:
Steve?

STEVE NORRIS:
Actually I was going to say, I was going to take us back to that issue about asylum 
seekers because we heard Susan but I mean, can I just make it clear that there is not 
total consensus here, I thought it was absolutely horrific the way the papers, or one 
or two of the papers attempted to attack William Hague because he said that the 
problem of bogus asylum seekers was really the problem that Labour was laid 
square at the government’s door and it’s bogus asylum seekers, people who don’t 
have a genuine claim to be here but who are effectively economic migrants, that are 
actually blocking up every local authorities’ budget in London and leading to extra 
rates having to be charged for this specific reason. Now you know the Home Office 
has got to get a grip of this, there’s got to be a system where people who don’t have 
a genuine claim are returned to whence they came within 24 hours and the reality is 
that that would then mean that those who do have a genuine reason to seek asylum 
here would first of all get to the front of the queue very much more quickly, could 
then be accommodated much more sensibly and thirdly would not suffer the kind of 
racial intolerance which inevitably arises when you see a flood of people, many of 
whom clearly don’t have a real justification to be here. So let me make one thing 
clear, I don’t think is all mum and apple and pie, I don’t think Britain can afford to 
be the kind of European hostel for everyone who’d like to have a better life than 
they’ve got in their own country, the government has got to grip that issue, it’s got 
to make sure that, that non-genuine asylum seekers are returned literally within 24, 
48 hours at the most.

DAVID FROST:
Frank where do you stand on this?

FRANK DOBSON:
Well I think in relation to London’s mayor, the main thing the mayor can do is to 
campaign to make sure that the services that the various London councils are 
providing for asylum seekers are paid for by the government and not out of 
reducing the services for other people in London and we’ve got to press for more 
money and we’ve got to fight for more money. We’ve got to fight for more money 
for the Metropolitan Police and one thing I’ve been doing for some time now is 
battling away to get this government to restore the accommodation allowance 
which the police in London used to have and I’m pretty confident that that 
accommodation allowance will be restored and it’ll make it easier for us to recruit 
more police officers in London because at the moment they’re being priced out of 
the market. But the same applies to large numbers of other people in London, 
teachers and nurses will come and train here, they’ll work here for a year or two and 
then they’ll think well we can’t afford to live here any more and again that’s one of 
the reasons why I’d be, managed to persuade John Prescott to agree what he 
announced on Tuesday which is the idea of interest free loans for nurses and 
teachers and other people who are vital to the future of this place. We’ve also got to 
use, get the mayor to use all the mayor’s planning powers and every lever to 
persuade people to do something to provide affordable accommodation here 
otherwise we’re not going to get by as a civilised city if we can’t get the nurses, we 
can’t get the teachers, we can’t get the train drivers, we can’t get the police.

SUSAN KRAMER:
It’s not just the public sector workers though, I mean you know think about the 
shop assistant, the ordinary people in middle management of the company, that’s all 
of the middle people who make up this city and we are at risk of becoming a ghetto 
of the rich and the place where you can live on housing benefit and if you’re in the 
middle you’re squeezed out and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working with the 
housing associations, try and expand programmes like shared ownership so if you 
have a modest income you can start getting into the property market, you buy half 
of your house and that let’s you at least get a foothold. We’ve got to take it way 
beyond just public sector workers, they need to be properly paid and we’re fighting 
for proper London weighting so that they are but everybody else has to be taken 
care of and their problems coped with too.



DAVID FROST:
Ken you, you said that your second preference vote would go to Frank, right, and 
what about in your constituency vote?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Well I have quite simple choice there, it’s a straight Labour-Conservative fight 
between Toby Harris who’s, I think, a very useful person to have in the Assembly, 
and the former Tory Leader of Brent Council, like it was the most appalling track 
records of incompetence and presided over one of the most corrupt administrations 
where a third of the members of his administration were under investigation either 
by the police or the district auditor…I don’t have a problem with that one…

STEVE NORRIS:
They obviously love each other in Brent.

DAVID FROST:
What about, what about, what advice will you give your supporters in terms of the 
list, the list vote?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
I haven’t made a choice…

DAVID FROST:
Who will go for?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
I haven’t made up my mind yet, I very much want to see some of the Greens 
coming in as well because I think the Greens with their concern about the 
environment, environment is one of the major problems here and I may very well 
go down that route. I need to look at what the polls are saying, whether they can get 
in or not without my support.


DAVID FROST:
Isn’t it going to be mayhem if you have no, you opted for no Ken Livingstone 
Party, isn’t there going to be mayhem with 25 people there?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
We set it up not to have a one party majority, it’s proportional representation, it’s 
supposed to be a new style of working, we look what we can agree with then if we 
do things that are in the interests of London, I don’t mind what your party is, I think 
there is a lot of people want to make this new system work, there’s enthusiasm all 
over London and I believe a good mayor will be able to bring in people from all 
parties and no parties and that’s what I’d like to do.

DAVID FROST:
Do you think he can pull that off Steve?

STEVE NORRIS:
Not a chance, not a prayer the irony is there will be a Tory Party which is unlikely, I 
suspect, to sit down with Ken Livingstone as mayor and say come on Ken we’d like 
to make your great regime a success. The Labour Party, well I tell you what if you 
think the Tories don’t like Ken you should wait and see Labour. I mean now he’s 
saying he’s not even going to vote for them as the top-up party. Lib-Dems? Well as 
Susan says they’ll probably float around somewhere in the middle but as there are 
going to be three or four of them I don’t think it’s going to make a lot of 
difference….

SUSAN KRAMER:
They will actually hold the balance of power…

STEVE NORRIS:
The irony is that what you’re going to have is an Assembly that is totally against 
Ken, in fact Ken as mayor does nothing, the tragedy with Ken as mayor is that 
London goes on hold for four years, that we get, we just get the downside, we get 
all of the controversy, we get all of the dark political ideology, what we don’t get is 
city governance because he won’t even be able to set a budget, Ken you know you 
can’t do it, there’s a blocking majority of the Assembly, two-thirds of the Assembly 
say no thank you Mr Mayor then the Assembly writes the budget, that’s what’s 
going to happen…and you know I’m sorry…

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
Londoners will not look favourably on people that try and wreck the new system, 
Londoners want us to make it work…

STEVE NORRIS:
But who’ll be wrecking it?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
And I think once you’re elected and you’ve got your assembly members in they will 
want it to work as well, they will not want the odium remember what happened in 
America when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had that gridlock, they got 
punished by the voters, I think most people have learnt the lesson of that…but…

SUSAN KRAMER:
But Ken you’re a confrontational person yourself, I mean that’s the problem, no 
exactly, that is the entire problem, I mean that is a pattern of prize fighting and the 
problem, we’ve seen it right through this whole campaign, it has been basically one 
bloody prize fight. We cannot live with that for four years, not in London, not with 
the serious problems, you’re not going to solve transport unless frankly you’re 
going to give this government a face-saving way to get out of this wretched PPP, 
it’s got itself trapped into mostly out of ego. You’re not going to be able to work 
with the police and with the local boroughs if it’s constantly seen as dividing 
London to this side and that side. We have to bring people together and that’s going 
to be a focus on management. It’s got to stop being such a focus on politics and go 
over to actually saying this is getting hold of problems, now I say this as a banker, 
watching how things work, working something like the transport system, you get 
hold of the problem, you work at it, you fix it, you build a consensus, you move 
onto the next problem and it’s not something that should be in the headlines every 
day. 

DAVID FROST:
And which, which of your qualities all of you, do you think is the most important to 
make you a good mayor, Frank what would you say, what, what qualities?

FRANK DOBSON:
First of all I have considerable experience in these matters, secondly I am actually 
very good at getting on with people and it does seem to me that the absolutely 
crucial requirement is that the mayor should be able to form a positive working 
partnership with the members of the assembly, with local authorities and with other 
people and although Ken’s doing the, you know, jolly old Ken at the moment his 
history is he ends up being a loner, I mean that’s one of the reasons why so few 
Labour MPs voted for him in this election…

DAVID FROST:
Alright…

FRANK DOBSON:
The folks who knew him best didn’t want him.

DAVID FROST:
Susan what’s the quality you have that’s most important?

SUSAN KRAMER:
Probably not being a politician quite frankly because it’s not a politician’s job, it is 
actually an executive kind of job, you take hold of the problem, bring people 
together, focus on it, fix it, move on to the next one, very different background, my 
party made that decision, I think they made the right decision.

DAVID FROST:
Ken which of your qualities is the most important?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:
I think what I’ve been able to do in this campaign, I’ve drawn more support from 
the, all the main parties than each of these candidates is getting themselves, my 
campaign has become a focus of people saying we want someone who’ll put 
London’s interests first, fight with the government when you have to but work with 
them if they’re prepared to and that, I think, is the sort of style I want to carry into 
this administration.

DAVID FROST:
Steve which of your qualities is going to be the most important?

STEVE NORRIS:
Well they call it mayor but you see it’s elected city manager, it’s not an alternative 
parliament for crazy political ideas, it’s making the tube work and the buses work, 
getting the police sorted, getting jobs created. I think it’s about competence and 
experience and commitment and credibility. That’s where I score as somebody who 
can actually make the system work.

DAVID FROST:
Well thank you all very much indeed. Great to have you all with us this morning.

SUSAN KRAMER:
Thank you.

DAVID FROST:
In this, what you referred to as this bloody prize fight, this was round four of a 
bloody prize fight. Thank you all very much indeed.

END


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