Ken Livingstone: A paper that's tired of life

Londoners are not getting the newspaper they deserve. That's why I'm taking the 'Evening Standard' to the PCC, says Ken Livingstone

London is full of people who love their city and its pace of life. It is not, by definition, a city likely to be impressed with a pale imitation of the Daily Mail. But that is what London's daily paper, the Evening Standard, has become. In the process, it has become bad for the city.

It is one thing for a newspaper to wage a campaign against a politician or party, but it is another to have a monopoly in London and use it to run down the city. What I really object to about the new-look Standard is the relentless doing-down of London, the sense that everything in London is bad, that the capital is some kind of crime hell full of people scared out of their wits at the lawlessness and filth around them. Of course, the problems that damage Londoners' quality of life must be addressed by the Standard. But that must be balanced with what is good about our capital. At present, the balance in the Standard is wrong.

Last week, the Standard blasted that the "Met charges only 11 per cent of criminals" (19 February), saying: "Scotland Yard's dismal record for catching criminals and bringing them to justice is exposed today in new police performance figures." Such coverage is typical. But the detail of the Standard's story showed a more mixed picture, with the Met's performance on burglary and car crime better than in the rest of the country. In seven out of 13 measures, the force performed above the national average.

The effect of this pattern of coverage, day in day out, is to hurt London's image at home and abroad, and to falsify the picture. Further, the cumulative picture it generates, with its tendency to dramatise the worst aspects of big-city life, does not correlate to the experience of most Standard readers. The ceaseless knocking of London will only deter people from coming here, from choosing it as a place to visit, invest, work, live.

The Standard has an official position in favour of congestion charging. The start of the charge has been met with a barrage of distorted coverage designed to maximise opposition. The problem I have with that, apart from the tedium of having to reply to the inaccuracies, is that 85 per cent of people entering central London rely on public transport, not cars. A high proportion of them are core Standard readers. Far more of its readers are public-transport-users than drivers. The Standard seems to have become detached from the interests of those readers because it sees the issues of congestion and public transport through a national, Daily Mail prism. In fact, polls show Londoners to be evenly divided on the issue of congestion charging.

The paper's hostile coverage of congestion charging led to a front page last Thursday: "C-Charge: Thousands Are Fined By Mistake". No one seeing that would have been in any doubt as to its meaning. It was emblazoned on the Standard's placards across London. It wasn't true. There will, indeed, be mistakes in billing people for the charge, as in any big IT system, but the Standard's headline stated as a news fact something that was a conscious distortion.

The Standard dominates its market as the only daily evening London paper. Associated Newspapers guards that position with Metro, a freesheet distributed – without competition – at rail and Tube stations in the morning. Thus, the Standard controls the morning and evening London newspaper game and owns the advertising market in that sector. The absence of competition deprives the consumer of any power. It is in the nature of such private monopolies that they will exploit their unassailable position to their financial gain.

In short, the Standard is bad for tourism, bad for the image of our capital, bad for business, bad for competition. The Evening Standard is, at present, bad for London.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has made a complaint about the 'Evening Standard' to the PCC