Part 1 of an essay on the significance of the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, both for contemporary politics in general and left in particular. Part 2 is here

On 1 May Ken Livingstone – arguably the most intelligent political operator on the left in Britain and a bold, relatively principled and creative politician whose originality greatly exceeds that of Tony Blair – was defeated by Boris Johnson in a direct election to be Mayor of London. Johnson was known as an entertaining character (like ‘Ken’, he is usually known by his short given name), but one who was so unreliable he had already been expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. So how did he win?

It is surely not enough to evoke the ‘perfect storm’ of coincidences which the Guardian blamed for Ken’s political demise. The moment suggests an important truth about British political culture. Indeed may it mark a historic turning point. Usually, when the aspirational voters of the suburbs identify with the urban centres – and think of the cities as places they want to be, or have something common with – they tend to vote Labour. This is what happened during the ‘Cool Britannia’ episode which carried New Labour to power in 1997. When the suburbanites turn away from the cities – thinking of them as places that they fear, or envy, or simply cannot afford to live in – then ‘Middle England’ tends to assert its quasi-pastoral Tory identity, as it did following the urban unrest of the late 70s and early 80s.

The shift from Ken to Boris is an especially significant moment. On the one hand, it was the product of a classic desertion of Labour by the suburbs: Ken won far more support than Boris across the central London region – and the new mayor may well face considerable resentment there as his term progresses – but the strength of the suburban vote was enough to carry the day for the Conservatives. On the other hand, Boris’ election may mark the emergence of an urban, even a multicultural Toryism.

Political motivation and identification are complex things. The strengths and weaknesses of candidates’ images and styles are likely to connect with various constituencies in different ways. Some simplification is inevitable in any sketch of how they resonate with the wider culture in which their images circulate. But it seems clear that, as the New Labour experiment is sucked into the vortex of financial globalisation to which it pinned its fate, a new strain of British conservatism is emerging which is as at home in the city as the country house – a process initiated by the arrivistes of Thatcherism but now confirmed by the popularity of the David Cameron’s “Notting Hill Set”. A successful left response to this will take a lot of work, and will have to start from a much deeper understanding of what has happened to politics itself over the last decades than is currently on offer.

This essay, then, will take a three-fold look at the meaning of Boris Johnson’s assumption as Mayor of London. Firstly, it will ask, what were the qualities of Ken that Boris defeated? This question has real interest: in contrast to the obvious weakness and duplicity of Blair’s New Labour, which clearly helps to explain the rise of David Cameron, Livingstone was not unpopular (his core vote remained high despite his lame and tired campaign). His defeat despite the strength of his achievement is an indication of the novel quality of Boris’s appeal. To measure the latter we need to acknowledge the former – before considering what the rise of Boris tells us about UK politics. Finally, we must ask how democrats should respond to the situation

The Originality of Ken

In 1986 Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) which had been led by Livingstone since 1981. The move was part of her attempt to “destroy socialism” in Britain through the exercise of central power, and it left Europe’s greatest city headless, without any overall elected government. Labour was committed to undo Thatcher’s decapitation and after a London-wide referendum that endorsed its creation, a new Greater London Authority, the GLA, came into being in 2000. This was far from a simple return to the past.

The GLC had been a traditional borough-based municipal body that elected its leader in a parliamentary style. The GLA by contrast was to be much more limited in its powers but at the same time to be headed by an American style executive Mayor to be directly elected by London’s millions of residents – in its own way an even more extraordinary innovation in UK politics than Thatcher’s high-handed abolition. Indeed, it was a constitutional innovation that has put London politics on a par with developments in Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland, where devolution has released energies distinct from the damp and drafty pomposities of Westminster and Whitehall.

In the meantime, Livingstone spent 14 years in the parliamentary wilderness, isolated by the leaders of New Labour who detested his brand of leftist populism. Realising that his ambition to climb his party’s ladder was hopeless, Ken turned back to London and the lure of a Mayoral office. When the Labour machine deprived him of this opportunity too, despite the fact that he was obviously the best qualified candidate and remained popular across London, not least amongst Labour’s own supporters, Livingstone ran as an independent. His campaign destroyed the other candidates – including the hapless official Labour candidate, the previously popular Frank Dobson – and he romped home (a harbinger of the political weakness of New Labour).
Although his powers were limited, he nonetheless transformed London’s transport infrastructure in a short time. He introduced free bus travel to pensioners and young people. He has brought traffic congestion under control when most predicted that he would fail to do so. He managed to improve pay and conditions for some of London’s poorest workers. He brought the Olympics to London against all expectations. He has overseen a period of extraordinary expansion in the capital while social costs and conflicts have been minimised. He has kept faith with his most radical supporters while maintaining his famous political pragmatism. He personified the open, unprejudiced yet forthright spirit of the capital.

A sense of his achievement and the support it could generate can be discerned in this passage from an open letter in support of Ken against Boris, drafted by Neal Lawson of the Compass group (and signed by a wide range of the left’s ‘great and the good’) when he felt that Livingstone’s campaign was slipping to defeat:

From a newly created post and a new institution Livingstone’s record is impressive… certain decisions stand out. Not least the Congestion Charge, which was as brave a political move as anyone has made in British politics for years because it socialised the failure of private transport and offered a coherent and workable alternative to the car against initial public opinion. On this issue Livingstone made the weather against the odds. Millions now enjoy better and cheaper public transport. When we look around London we see a public realm that has been transformed with renovated squares, parks and river banks for everyone to enjoy and share. It is a London at ease with its multi-cultural identity, and Livingstone has played a decisive role in that. Not least because he opposed the war in Iraq. This is the politics of equality and real opportunity.

Yet Livingstone went down with hardly a whimper.

One explanation is that Ken was the victim of a relentless campaign by the Evening Standard, the only London evening paper apart from the free sheets. But ‘Our Ken’ has a unique record of withstanding tabloid assaults since 1981 and even benefiting from them. Another is that Livingstone himself failed to make the case for his distinctive politics and for the first time in his life failed to offer novelty and freshness. But this was the case in the London election in 2004 after he had rejoined Labour and stood as its official candidate. To explain his defeat, then, we must look more deeply at what Ken has stood for.

Ken Livingstone has meant many things to many people. But in almost all contexts, what he has ultimately represented is the possibilities, the potential, and the threat, of politics itself. His election as mayor in 2000, running as an independent after being a Labour MP, despite all of the efforts of the Labour leadership and when Blair himself was at the height of his influence, was a striking example of popular opinion democratically exceeding the limitations imposed on it by bureaucracy and institutionalised power. Earlier in his career, Livingstone as leader of the GLC drew the fury of the Right for daring to accept, even to encourage, the public politicisation of issues like race, gender and sexuality: issues which had previously only been addressed by movements cut off from the official political process. His promotion of gay rights, feminism and anti-racism as explicit policies of government was once seen as, at worst, dangerous extremism, at best lunatic idealism.

Very few political figures have ever been prepared to acknowledge themselves explicitly as racist, or sexist, or even homophobic. In this country, the dispute between radicals and conservatives on these issues has never really been about whether racism or sexism or homophobia were bad things. Almost everyone schooled in the British liberal tradition – which includes most Tories, as well as all of the ‘centre-left’ – has always accepted that they were. No, the argument has rather been about whether such bad things actually exist as distinct social phenomena, or whether they are merely accidental character defects, shared by an insignificant minority of individuals.

Historically, the country’s powerful have propagated the view that there is really no such thing as ‘racism’ at all in our government, instead viewing discrimination against non-white people as an unfortunate but unsystematic manifestation of the casual, ignorant prejudice of the unenlightened (i.e, normally, the working classes…). Until well into the 1990s, bodies such as the Metropolitan Police refused to entertain the legitimacy of ‘institutional racism’ as a concept, and certainly resisted any suggestion that it might be endemic within their own organisations. It may seem incredible from a contemporary vantage point, but prior to the publication of the Macpherson report in 1999, the Met – which every Londoner with open eyes knew to be guilty of routine and vindictive harassment of black people – insisted that police racism was merely incidental, the unfortunate peccadillo of ‘a few bad apples’.

The idea that ‘racial’ and similar issues can be considered as proper subjects for political intervention, is one that has had to be fought for over decades, and one which lots of people would still like to deny, given half a chance. Here, in an area much more important than traffic jams, Livingstone – almost alone amongst UK politicians – “socialised” the human injustice which millions felt everyday. But what comfortable white citizen or well cared-for husband really wants to be bothered thinking about their own potential complicity with a systemic culture of discrimination, when it’s so much easier just to sneer at any concern with such issues, dismissing it as ‘political correctness’ and insisting that anyone can succeed if they really want to, no matter what their gender or the colour of their skin?

Such sneering or mockery is often a way of trying to shut down public conversations on issues such as race, sexuality and gender. By contrast, believers in democracy – in its broadest sense – have always sought to expand the realm of politics: that is, the realm of public discussion and collective decision-making. This isn’t just a question of expanding the power of the state. Indeed, it very often means the reverse, when public opinion decides that long-held privileges of the state ought to be revoked. Rather, it is a question of expanding the range of issues which are up for grabs in our culture and our society as public issues over which individuals and groups can potentially be held accountable and about which proposals for change might be put forward, be they suggestions about how men and women might better share domestic chores or suggestions as to how government should dispose of taxes.

Ken has historically embodied this democratic willingness to politicise. As he put it in his account of his GLC years, those who formed the left group which he headed “shared a common belief that the personal was political and politics affected every aspect of our daily lives”. (p 93) Of course, everything should not be politicised. Taken to extremes, making the personal political becomes totalitarian and leave no room for personal life or the private: this is the kernel of truth which hides inside the myth of the ‘politically correct’ liberal conspiracy. But Ken was different from both the sectarian leftists, such as the Trotsykists with whom he associated, and from mainstream Labour culture, in his permissive insistence on people’s political right to be different. The left he led was distinguished, in its early days at least, by its view that “no one was allowed to set themselves up as the judge of who was or was not a ‘real’ leftwinger”, (p. 92) and his leadership of the GLC was marked by openness and remarkable decentralisation (“I believed that the wider and more open the decision-making processes were, the more likely we were to come to correct decisions” (p. 141). Livingstone protected difference rather than, in traditional Labour style, seeking uniformity. In this way he politicised the claims of the oppressed as well as the poor.

Resistance to such politicising comes for the most part from those who have the most to lose if existing arrangements become proper subjects for discussion. Both social conservatism and economic liberalism can be pressed into service towards this goal, maintaining existing power relationships – between rich and poor, white and black, male and female – and implying that any attempt to change them would be either futile or obscene. Today, at the level of formal politics, this conservative tendency most obviously takes the form of the desire to ‘roll back’ the welfare state – to reduce the power of state institutions to intervene on the public’s behalf in the economic and social spheres – while retaining the powers of government to protect private property and criminalise dissidents. At the level of everyday culture, it can take the form of an amorphous mistrust of politics in general, and a casual belief that things work better if people are largely left to ‘run their own affairs’. It is just such a general rejection of politics itself which Boris has tapped in to.

Jeremy Gilbert is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Discographies: Dance music, culture and the politics of sound (with Ewan Pearson, Routledge, 1999); and Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour (ed. with Timothy Bewes, Lawrence Wishart, 2000).

Also by Jeremy Gilbert from OurKingdom: Who is the Democratic Candidate for Mayor? (30 April 2008)