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Boris Johnson’s return to “traditional Tory values”

tim — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:16:01 +0000

It is only two months since the newly elected Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson promised he would, with a new broom, sweep clean the sleaze and corruption he declared characterised the outgoing administration under the Labour Party’s Ken Livingstone.

Johnson also proclaimed that his mayoralty would be a return to “traditional Tory values.” As it has turned out, it is this pledge that is being realised as his own administration has begun to fall apart amidst accusations of racism and the type of “sleaze and corruption” he promised to root out.

Last week, longstanding allegations of financial and sexual misconduct against deputy mayor Ray Lewis ended in his resignation, and forced Johnson to set up an inquiry.

The media hailed Lewis’s appointment as deputy mayor for young people as a shrewd move aimed at countering adverse reports of comments made by Johnson in an article on Tony Blair in which he referred to “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.”

Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy in Edmonton, London, and its “tough love” ethos of army-style drilling, religion, uniforms and discipline, was proclaimed as the real answer to gang-related violence.

In the past several days, however, it was revealed that the former Church of England Minister had had restrictions placed on his ministry because of a series of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct against parishioners. In 1993 he was accused of “sexually inappropriate behaviour” by two members of the congregation at St. Matthew’s, West Ham and he was banned from preaching for six years.

Two years later he was accused of failing to repay a total of £41,000 borrowed from three parishioners, though the investigation was subsequently dropped. Lewis also faces accusations of assaulting pupils at his academy, all of which he denies.

The Lewis resignation follows that of Johnson’s chief policy advisor, James McGrath. When asked by a journalist if Johnson’s election would provoke a flight of black Londoners back to the Caribbean, McGrath replied, “Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.”

Johnson mounted a feeble defence of both men, but then dropped them fairly quickly.

McGrath was chosen as an advisor by fellow Australian, Lynton Crosby, the architect behind Johnson’ electoral campaign who earlier spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Central to the campaign was a barrage of allegations of misconduct against Livingstone and his leading aides. Almost daily, the conservative Evening Standard newspaper ran stories charging the Livingstone administration with corruption. This claimed its first scalp shortly before the election, when Lee Jasper—the focus of many of the unproven allegations of corruption—resigned his post as Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities following the leaking of sexually explicit emails he had sent to a female friend in an organisation that received funding from the Assembly.

However hostile a section of the Tory press was to Livingstone, he retained the backing of the City of London as its favoured candidate and also had the support of newspapers running the political spectrum from the Financial Times to the Guardian. It is a measure of the widespread resentment and hostility felt towards Labour—and towards Livingstone himself—that this failed to win him re-election and that Johnson’s posturing as “Mr. Clean” was partially successful.

Livingstone’s defeat coincided with the disastrous performance of Labour in the May 3 local elections, as the party continues to lose what remains of its working class base and is deserted by the better-off traditional Tory and “swing voters” it won in 1997.

Johnson benefited on both counts. Turnout among Labour supporters was down while Johnson successfully mobilised his own party’s “natural constituency.”

In addition, Labour’s reputation as a party of big business, sleaze, incompetence, authoritarianism and militarism could no longer be countered by Livingstone invoking his radical past. Labour promoted Livingstone’s support in the City of London, but the Greens, Respect Renewal and the Socialist Workers Party’s Left List, together with the Guardian, promoted him as the “progressive candidate” and sought to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers.

But such claims could no longer be reconciled after two terms in which Livingstone made his peace with Labour after first being elected as an independent. He famously denounced striking London Underground workers as “selfish” and defended Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair after an Old Bailey jury convicted the Met of corporate failure over the killing of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. Livingstone insisted there were no grounds for the resignation of this “incredibly talented officer,” stating that the court’s verdict might make stopping suicide bombers more difficult.

Anyone foolish enough to believe that Johnson’s would be the “clean hands” administration he had promised has soon been disabused. Johnson’s record since taking office has provided a glimpse of what can be expected.

Once in power, he quickly set about appointing his own cronies—an army of consultants and advisors—stating bluntly that “it is not intended that the fees for these (other) individuals will be made public.” Reports suggest that many will receive a salary of more than £100,000.

The chief executive of the London Development Agency (LDA)—which declares itself the “Mayor’s agency responsible for driving London’s sustainable economic growth”—was sacked and Harvey McGrath, former chairman of the hedge fund specialists the Man Group, nominated in his place.

A “forensic audit team” has been set up to investigate allegations of corruption in the LDA and Greater London Authority, headed by the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph Patience Wheatcroft, who had stirred up controversy after censoring a critical article about Conservative leader David Cameron.

Multimillionaire former asset stripper and private equity chief Tim Parker was made first deputy and chief executive, as well as being appointed the new chairman of Transport for London. Full delegated powers over major planning decisions were given to Ian Clement, an unelected advisor from Bexley Council, who became notorious for cutting the “meals on wheels” scheme for pensioners.

Johnson has appointed Simon Milton as director of planning, but had to backtrack after it was revealed that he is also chairman of the Local Authorities’ chief lobbying group. Although losing his title, he will still remain in Johnson’s office in the role of consultant.

Munira Mirza, a former radical, has arrived at the heart of a Tory administration as the new cultural advisor to the mayor, thanks to her opposition to “multiculturalism” and professions that the extent of “Islamophobia” is exaggerated. She writes for the Policy Exchange think tank, whose founder Nick Boles will likely work on marketing for the mayor along with Dan Ritterband, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive.

Policy Exchange, which is described as the most influential think tank “on the right,” is headed by Charles Moore, former editor of the Thatcherite Spectator magazine—a position held previously by Johnson. The organisation was embroiled in controversy only recently over allegations that documents it circulated to prove the influence of Islamic extremists in Britain’s mosques were fakes.

Once in office, Johnson swiftly implemented the right-wing policies outlined in his manifesto. Central to this agenda is to “beef up the police presence on our streets by increasing police numbers and cutting red tape at the Metropolitan Police Service.”

Within hours of his election, dozens of extra police were deployed to carry out random “stop and search” procedures across the city in “Operation Blunt 2,” exploiting the media frenzy over youth-related gun and knife crime in the last few months. This has not been addressed on the basis of tackling the wider issues of poverty, job opportunities and social inequality, but by increased police powers and a zero tolerance policing policy.

In a city with the dubious honour of having the most surveillance cameras in the world, Johnson has also promised more closed circuit TVs.

These initiatives closely parallel those undertaken by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, whose critics have argued that the fall in street crime had more to do with enrolling an extra 7,000 officers than with any strategic master-stroke, and that much crime simply moved to neighbouring districts. Bloomberg made a special visit to London’s City Hall to congratulate Johnson on his electoral victory, but the content of their meeting has remained strictly confidential.

Another indication of the real agenda of the new mayor is in his attitude to low-income earners. Johnson has cancelled the cheap oil deal Livingstone made with the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez last year and declared that he will annul applications for cheap fares, which have benefited more than 80,000 Londoners on Income Support benefits. Livingstone used the deal as part of a handful of populist gestures to buttress his neo-liberal economic policies, making sure they did not conflict with the fundamental interests of the City of London, or compromise his record in promoting London as a magnet for global capital.

It is Livingstone and Labour that have paved the way for a deepening of the assaults they began on the working class in London, only now with Boris Johnson at the helm.

London’s Embarrassment

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:11:01 +0000

“This is the end of political correctness in London,” exulted a Conservative as newly elected Mayor Boris Johnson entered city hall.

Nearly a month after the polls closed, it is still an extraordinary thought that London, of all places, is to be represented in the eyes of the world by a man like Johnson.

The Tory MP from Henley (outside London) first won notoriety as a right wing columnist and sometime TV quiz show guest: a bumbling parody of a right-wing upper class twit. His extramarital affairs also attracted publicity, and he was removed from the Tory front bench.

As a pundit, he struck a brusquely Thatcherite and neo-con pose. In 2005, he described Africans as “pickanninies” and called for the re-colonisation of the continent. He applauded George Bush and the Iraq war. He opposed the Kyoto Agreement and dismissed the threat of climate change. He routinely evoked social stereotypes, casually insulting the entire populations of Liverpool and Portsmouth, among others. After a bombing atrocity, he declared that “Islam is the problem” (there are more than 700,000 Muslims in London).

In the post-modern climate, it was sometimes hard to know how seriously anyone was supposed to take Johnson’s views. But as a Conservative party candidate for the Mayor of London, Johnson could no longer shelter behind the columnist’s lazy excuses, and he waged a careful and mostly dignified campaign, distancing himself from many of his earlier remarks. His central thrust was “against crime”, with the populist touch of replacing the new elongated, uncomfortable “bendy buses” with much loved double decker Routemasters.

And of course he inveighed against the “political correctness” of the incumbent Livingstone regime, including its links with the Chavez government in Venezuela (which benefited poorer east Londoners with cheap fuel).

Ken Livingstone first came to prominence in the early 80s as the left wing Labour leader of the Greater London Council. Here he spearheaded a progressive programme which became a flagship of resistance to Thatcher – so much so that she abolished the Council in 1985, leaving Londoners without any form of representative London-wide government.

Responding to long pent-up demand, Labour re-introduced a modified form of London government in 2000: an elected Mayor and Assembly were to enjoy carefully restricted powers (education, housing and much else was left in the hands of the 32 London boroughs) and a limited tax base. Barred by Tony Blair from standing as the Labour candidate for the newly created Mayoralty, Livingstone ran as an independent and won a historic victory.

In office, he soon made it up with the Labour party, and he and Blair and then Brown learned to live with each other. In 2004, he was re-elected as mayor, this time as the as official Labour candidate.

His major achievement was the introduction of the congestion charge for central London, an effective environmental policy and the first social democratic innovation in this country for more than a generation. He opposed the war on Iraq – and in doing so faithfully represented the view of a majority of Londoners. He denounced Islamophobia and continued to be associated with the rights of ethnic minorities. But he also gave strident support to the heavy handed police tactics that led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the near killing of two others in Forest Gate in 2006. When a London jury found the Metropolitan police guilty of health and safety violations in the course of the de Menezes incident, Livingstone condemned them for exposing London to terrorist attacks.

Socialist rhetoric was reserved for left wing audiences. In practise, his economic policies were dictated by big business and the banks; his sole strategy for London was to compete with other cities to attract multi-national capital. Hence the vast sums poured into the Olympic project, which Livingstone championed. He opposed proposals for a modest tax on non-domiciled millionaires who spend months of the year in London.

As time went on his regime became identified with croneyism and petty corruption. Not all the allegations were groundless. Livingstone certainly ran a closed shop, surrounded by a coterie dedicated to protecting his personal position, and he and they sometimes displayed a very casual approach to the prerogatives of power.

The London election was heavily publicised as a personality contest though both candidates were muted during the campaign. Livingstone, in particular, was lacklustre, relying on his proven competence as incumbent and presenting himself as a safe pair of hands against Johnson’s gaffe-prone naivete. But the the campaign was given lurid fire by the extraordinary intervention of London’s main daily newspaper, The Evening Standard, which waged a ferocious assault on Livingstone. Across the city, the Standard’s familiar hoardings blazoned headlines linking Livingstone to corruption or terrorism or crime.

In the end, Johnson picked up 42 per cent of the first preference votes, against Livingstone’s 36%. After the 2nd preference votes were distributed, Johnson was elected with 53%. While Livingstone’s vote held nearly steady from 2004, the Tory vote was up by more than 14%. Turn outs were higher in Johnson supporting areas in outer London than in Livingstone supporting areas in inner London.

Still, Livingstone fared better in London than Labour did nationally, where it was reduced to third place with 24% of the vote, its worst local election result in forty years. The full story behind this must wait for another column. Suffice it to say that New Labour’s contempt for its core constituencies – crystallised around the abolition of a special lower tax band for people on low incomes – has come home to roost. Across the country, working class voters deserted Labour in record numbers.

It was Labour’s performance in national government that was Livingstone’s greatest handicap in London. Here, the working class revolt against Labour was restricted to the white working class, but it destroyed Livingstone’s chances. These people had benefited little from either Labour nationally or Livingstone locally. They didn’t even get the benefit of the political gestures.

Undoubtedly, part of Johnson’s triumph rested on a veiled appeal to racism and xenophobia. This was confirmed by the alarming success in the London elections of the far right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim British National Party.

In the vote for mayor, Johnson received the second preferences of nearly all of the 70,000 who voted first for the BNP candidate. In addition, some 128,000 mainly Johnson supporters gave the BNP their second preferences.

Most disturbingly, the BNP secured 130,000 votes – 5.3% – in the city wide top-up vote for the London Assembly, and under the proportional representation system won a seat there for the first time. The Green Party, with 8.3% of the vote, won two seats, and the rest were divided between Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Since the Tories are two short of a majority the BNP member could play a significant role, though at the moment he is being shunned.

So one of the world’s most successfully multicultural cities stands naked. In a climate of looming economic crisis, fear, scapegoating and bigotry fuelled the vote for the BNP and for Johnson. People who have been left out by London’s economic boom turn their resentments on their fellow Londoners, who in fact share their frustrations. Now that boom, sustained by cheap credit and high property prices, is ending. Gross inequalities created during the years of wealth have already turned London, for all its marvellous mixing, into a city of parallel universes. As incomes and standards of living are squeezed and jobs are lost, we’ll find out how well we really know each other. Speaking as a Londoner, I’m filled with dismay at the idea of Mayor Johnson, flanked by a BNP assembly member, presiding over this crisis.

When the Conservatives revile “political correctness” they have in mind not merely the gestures associated with Livingstone but any and all claims for equality, any and all resistance to racism. In that respect their celebration of Johnson’s victory as “the end of political correctness in London” is certainly premature.

Police powers increased by new London mayor

tim — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:24:18 +0000

The new Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has announced sweeping measures to ramp up police powers. After a series of highly publicised knifings in central London last month, the mayor called for a policy of “zero tolerance” and “immediate operational response.” This announcement neatly dovetailed with the launch of a £3 million public relations campaign funded by the Home Office.

The measures introduced include an extension of the existing “stop and search” procedures, the introduction of metal detectors at Underground tube stations across 10 London boroughs and scanning of suspects with hand-held devices.

“Operation Blunt” was launched barely days after the attacks with 4,277 stop and searches around the capital over two weeks. Young people are being singled out for particular attention under the new initiative, with police taking their pictures even if they are found to be innocent of any crime.

Since the beginning of 2007, 68 people aged under 25 have been killed in London, including 13 teenagers. But the new policing measures have been enforced with little attention to the actual levels of violent crime that have been recorded in recent years. There was in fact a sharp fall in knife crime in 2007 and overall knife crime has fallen by 19 percent since 2004.

The increases in violent crime that have been recorded this year have been amongst the young—from teenagers up to people in their early twenties. But civil rights campaigners in the capital have urged caution instead of this knee-jerk and heavy-handed response to the recent incidents. They have called attention to the fact that historically the use of “stop and search” has discriminated against black minorities and, more recently, Asian and Middle-Eastern ethnic minorities. Government figures suggest black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, while Asians are almost twice as likely.

Peter Herbert, a barrister and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, was also critical of the plan.

“It will undoubtedly lead to more stop and search, and more racist stop and searches where people are stopped on the basis of their appearance or ethnicity,” he said. “The MPA was not consulted and it should have been. It is another example of policy being manufactured on the hoof for political expediency.”

The Newham Monitoring Project, a group that works against racial discrimination, police misconduct and on civil rights issues, gave a cautionary statement on the mayor’s response:

“If Boris Johnson wishes to address gun and knife crime, he needs to first carefully examine why current police powers, which are some of the toughest in Europe, are failing to deal with this issue effectively. If the police do not have to apply reasonable suspicion, what grounds will they use to determine who they stop and search? Selecting individuals based on appearance and ethnicity is fundamentally flawed, will criminalise and alienate communities and is ultimately likely to fail like the hated Sus laws that were abolished in the 1980s.”

Under the “Sus” laws police were able to stop and search based on suspicion alone, using the precedent of sections of a Vagrancy Act of 1982, making it illegal to “loiter in a public place” with “intent” to “commit an arrestable offence.”

The police singled out young people in the impoverished areas of the city, stoking tensions between youth—particularly poor black youth—and the police in the early 1980s.

In 1981, police launched “Operation Swamp,” involving stop and searches across large swathes of the poorest working class regions. This was a major factor in provoking the Brixton riots in London, and those in St. Pauls, Bristol and Toxteth, Liverpool.

Under pressure from the public backlash, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced new rules for stop and search. Officers would now require “reasonable suspicion” that an offence had been committed.

Stop and search powers were again curtailed in 1999, after a public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found the police guilty of “institutional racism” and negligence in the case.

After the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, the powers were again extended under Section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Under the previous laws, people stopped for the purpose of a search must have the reason explained to them if they request this from the police. The police are then obligated to explain “reasonable grounds for suspicion”—for example, a recent violent crime in the area or the person stopped matching the description of a suspect.

Under Section 44, the exception to this rule is in cases associated with terrorism, in which case the police have no obligation to give a reason for the stop. In other words, the “clause of exception” gives the police powers to stop, search and detain anyone arbitrarily. Similar powers to detain arbitrarily have been given under Section 60 of the Public Order Act.

The official “Stop and Search” web site produced by the Home Office states that these powers “help to deter terrorist activity by creating a hostile environment for would-be terrorists—ensuring it is not easy for them to carry or use explosives.”

It then explains how this “hostile environment” is created: “Police can search anybody anywhere under this law, and they do not need reasonable suspicion to do so. It is under this law that police conduct random searches in train and tube stations.”

The extremely low efficiency of the stop and search laws in combating street crime is revealed by official statistics: In 2004-05, when 100 people were stopped each day, only 455 arrests were made out of 35,776 searches.

In line with Johnson’s ratcheting up of police powers, the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron called on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to scrap forms officers must fill in when they stop someone. This would effectively enable police to carry out a far greater number of stops with even less accountability for their actions.

Cameron’s call to cut “red tape” reflected views expressed in the Flanagan report, published the following week. Ronnie Flanagan, the chief inspector of constabulary in England and Wales, said police were afraid to use their own judgment because of bureaucracy and form filling.

The Conservatives were competing with Labour in backing Flanagan’s report. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith responded with an official letter of endorsement, urging immediate action to cut down on “needless bureaucracy” and extend police powers to stop and search.

Johnson has also held a highly publicised meeting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, in early May, announcing a “new partnership” between the two capitals.

Bloomberg has presided over a city that has experienced an unprecedented disparity of earnings between workers and a parasitic financial aristocracy on Wall Street. His administration has made drastic cuts in social services, including health and education, while increasing police powers.

In Britain, over the last decade policing has seen major increases in funding, rising by 39 percent to £5 billion. The overall police workforce has increased by 25 percent in the same period.

London bus drivers to get DNA ‘spit kits’

Ellie Keen — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:38:27 +0000

London’s bus drivers who are spat at will be able to collect the saliva in a DNA ‘spit kit’ so the assailant can be identified when their saliva samples are sent off to the police national database for analysis. The kits have been used in Tube stations for years.

At the same time, the Metropolitan Police Service’s Transport Operational Command unit is setting up a work place violence unit to investigate violence against bus drivers across London. And new guidelines for courts have recommended tougher sentences for those who assault people working in the public sector or provide a service to the public such as bus drivers and tube staff.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: “We have the finest bus drivers in the world in London and it saddens me that they may find themselves the victims of this disgusting activity. These kits will increase the likelihood of being able to track down perpetrators and sends them a clear message that this foul behaviour will not be tolerated.

“We are determined to make public transport a safer place through measures such as the ban on passengers carrying open containers of alcohol and I am aware that this will ask more of our drivers. However, I hope they will agree that by providing support such as the new workplace violence unit we are fulfilling our pledge to protect them.”

Steve Burton, director of community safety and enforcement at Transport for London, added: “Spitting at drivers is unacceptable and will not be tolerated and with these DNA kits … London’s bus drivers can collect the DNA evidence needed for a successful prosecution.”

• The London Assembly’s transport spokesperson Val Shawcross has accused Boris Johnson of ignoring people with disabilities by replacing bendy buses with a new generation of Routemaster style vehicles. The Mayor’s comment that conductors would help people on and off the platform was “deeply patronising” and offensive to people with disabilities, parents with buggies and elderly people. “It’s a pretty Victorian attitude,” she said.

• Transport unions are not happy at the appointment of Tim Parker as TfL head. Parker was once dubbed “the Prince of Darkness” by unions and has a reputation for cutting costs. He will also become First Deputy Mayor and Chief Executive of the GLA Group and will be paid a £1 salary.

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: “This is a scary moment for London’s commuters. Tim Parker is one of the multimillionaire elite private-equity buccaneers who asset- stripped the AA by cutting jobs and cutting services and raising prices to customers.”

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, said: “The world’s finest metro system does not need an asset-stripper or a Prince of Darkness.”

Elections Analysis from the Left List

Ellie Keen — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:23:46 +0000

This was a watershed election. For the first time since the New Labour election landslide of 1997 the Tories are in the ascendant. The result of the London Mayoral contest demonstrates that New Labour is now in meltdown.

The reaction of the soft left Compass group around John Cruddas, though doubtless an exaggeration, tells us a deal about the likely reaction among old Labour sections of the movement:

“New Labour is now dead. The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished.”

Like the late 1970s an exhausted and socially conservative Labour government is presiding over an attack on working class living standards. Unlike the late 1970s the extra-parliamentary and industrial struggle is not on the retreat.

But if we are to exploit this contradiction to strengthen the left and face new challenges from the Tory and fascist right we need to understand clearly what happened to the left in these elections.

The failure of the Livingstone strategy

Livingstone has moved progressively to the right since he first ran as Mayor as an independent eight years ago. He moved right when he rejoined Labour four years ago – and his vote went down. In this election he moved even closer to the Blair-Brown-City axis – and he lost.

Livingstone’s residual left wing reputation meant that his vote was higher than the New Labour vote for the Assembly and his polling figures were higher than the government’s rating but he was too closely associated with New Labour to be able to effectively combat the Tory tide.

Moreover, Livingstone’s own regime in City Hall was part of the problem not part of the solution. Livingstone had no independent base in the labour movement. Indeed when he had the chance to build one out of his independent campaign eight years ago he deliberately refused to do so.

Consequently, the City Hall developed its own version of triangulation – combining left wing statements on racism and the Iraq war (which cost nothing) and City friendly policies on property development, the Olympics and privatisation (where a left wing policy would cost money).

The Livingstone campaign tried to reproduce this approach by constructing a huge cross party bloc stretching all the way from Blair and Brown to the Greens and George Galloway.

This failed in the face of a hard-line Tory candidate who mostly kept quiet and let New Labour’s unpopularity with its own working class supporters do his work.

The Left and Livingstone

Livingtone’s own clientist approach to the ethnic communities in London and the rest of the left reduced the impact of a really independent radical left. The Greens and Galloway claimed to be critical of Livingstone’s neo-liberal economic policy and his loving up to the City, Brown and Blair~but infact have run campaigns that have traded largely uncritical support for Ken in return for his patronage.

This failed for Livingstone, but it also failed for the Greens and Galloway as well.

The Greens got massive publicity in return for calling for a second preference vote for Ken, but their vote stayed the same and they returned the same two GLA members.

Galloway got even less. A sectarian rally held in the middle of the 100,000 Love Music Hate Racism just a mile away at the end of Brick Lane drew less than 200 people to hear Livingstone give a less than explicit plug for Galloway. This was reported in the local press but then repudiated on polling day by local Labour candidate John Biggs.

Other than that the only fruit of this pact was a front organsiation, Operation Bangla Vote, which issued a leaflet with Livingstone and Galloway’s picture on it.

The Left List took a different approach. The Left List argued that while we prefer Labour to the Tories we will not stop defending working people from New Labour’s neo-liberal policies simply because Labour has made itself unpopular with working people. This approach stressed the need to organise independently of New Labour and Livingstone and not to simply to jump on to a sinking ship.

Anyone who remembers the decay of the Labour government in the late 1970s knows how essential it is to create the widest possible left able to organise independently of the pressure to collapse all points of principle in response to the Tory threat.

The Left List vote was disappointing but the campaign did demonstrate a number of important points:

1. The Left List mounted the only genuinely London-wide left wing campaign. We are the only left force that was able to mobilise enough supporters and raise enough money to stand in the Mayoral race, in all the constituencies and on the London wide list.

2. The Left List campaign was the only campaign that has been able through mass leafleting, canvassing, our entry in the Mayoral booklet, and TV and radio broadcasts to put a left argument to millions of Londoners.

3. In a dramatic final full week of campaigning we were the only force able to effectively intervene in the great joint union demonstration on the 24th of April and in the 100,000 strong Love Music Hate Racism carnival.

4. In husting after husting Lindsey German and our other candidates were able to pull the whole debate to the left. Here is how one contribution to the Guardian online discussion put it:

“Whenever Lindsey German’s been invited to speak, she has quickly become a point of reference: At NO2ID hustings she gave Boris a torrid time. At University of London Union hustings Paddick started mimicking her line on Council Housing. At ULU and Stonewall Livingstone has lied about the name of her organisation to create a naughty confusion between her and former friends. At LSE and Goldsmith College other candidates all used the phrase “as Lindsey said….” at least once.”

We’ve made more impact on the press than any other left candidate, including Galloway who lost out because of the strategic decision not to run a Mayoral candidate at the urging of Livingstone supporters in his group. The Left List appeared on BBC London TV news four times, on ITN news, in the Independent, the Guardian, The Times, BBC radio, BBC News 24, Radio 4’s Today programme, The Evening Standard, the Pink Paper, in local papers, local radio stations and in online broadcasts.

5. The Left List candidates are the only really diverse candidate list in the elections. The Greens only had 3 non-white candidates. In contrast to the unfulfilled promise Galloway made to produce a ‘broad list’ it was actually the Left List that had a mix of trade unionist, Afro-Caribbean, Turkish, gay and lesbian, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, young and old candidates.

The Left Vote

All the left from Livingstone to the Left List were overwhelmed by the massive rejection of New Labour that benefited the Tories and, even more worryingly, the BNP.

The Left List suffered from having a new name. This led to confusion which benefited Galloway. We know that a number of our supporters voted for Respect by mistake. So some of the difference between our 1.3 percent in the Assembly constituencies and the Galloway 2.3 percent on the Assembly list is down to confusion and electoral inertia.

And because voters could vote for the Left List for Mayor, in the constituencies and on the London-wide list the total number of people voting Left List was higher than the total in any one of these categories (ie voters gave us one of three votes).

The Left List Mayoral vote was massively squeezed by the ‘stop Boris’ vote for Ken. But it is worth noting that in 2004 we gained 61,000 first preferences and about the same number of second preferences giving a total of 120,000 first and second preferences. This year the second preferences were much higher than the 16,000 first preferences giving a total of 51,000.

The Left List vote was more evenly distributed across London, while Galloway’s vote was an East London centric vote. Although even here the constituency vote for Hanif Abdulmuhit (the only Galloway constituency candidate) was down slightly from 15 percent to 14.5 percent. And Galloway’s own Assembly list vote fell to 11 percent.

Nationally, the Left List is the only organisation with anything like a countrywide presence and the election results were as good, or nearly as good, as anything the old Respect achieved. In Preston we got 37 percent and missed electing a second councillor by 70 votes. In Sheffield we came second with 25 percent of the vote. In Manchester we won 12 percent and, in a newly contested ward, nearly 10 percent. In Cambridge and Bolton the vote was around 15 percent.

And although Salma Yaqoob’s Sparkbrook ward returned another councillor the vote went down in the neighbouring Sparkhill and Kings Heath wards, both of which would need to see increased votes for her to win the whole parliamentary constituency of which they are a part.

The Left and the decline of New Labour

The crisis will produce two main reactions. New Labour loyalists, not just in the government but in the leadership of unions like UNISON, will argue that we can’t rock the boat and must all stand behind the government or we’ll get the Tories back just as we have done in London. Some of the left will go along or compromise with this view, just as they did with Livingstone (although it will be harder to carry this argument with no left wing banner bearer in Labour). No doubt if we get the Tories back this lot will argue we shouldn’t rock the boat or Labour won’t be re-elected!

The Left List must be part of that grouping on the left, which will contain many Labour party members, who think that fighting neo-liberalism is the best chance of reviving the left’s fortunes irrespective of what the Labour leadership say.

There are some important developments that have been part of the picture of the last few weeks that show that this approach will have an echo. Teachers, lecturers, civil servants, RMT members are very open to this argument~as the united union demonstrations and strikes on 24th April showed.

In London the challenges that a Tory Mayor will throw down to the unions and the left may well provoke struggles on a higher plane than those of recent years – especially as the economic crisis continues to eat into working class living standards.

The LMHR Carnival showed that tens of thousands have already been mobilised against the Nazis – and will be ready to fight a threat that has become even more real in the last week.

Beyond this the anti-war movement remains in strong shape and will need to be deepened as the US presidential race concludes the interregnum in the Washington’s imperial project.

The Left List can become part of this growing opposition to New Labour and play an important part in regrouping the left in the debates that are bound to attend the crisis of the New Labour government.

Olympian Failure

Ellie Keen — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:11:34 +0000

When Ken Livingstone lobbied for the 2012 Olympics he argued that the resulting investment was needed desperately by east London, as it had seen none since Victorian times.

Yet the games have received a chorus of damnation in recent weeks. A study by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank has shown that the regeneration of the East End of London was wishful thinking, at best.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. New Labour tends to see “regeneration” through the prism of how much profit can be made by business, blindfolded by its belief in the “trickledown” system. The report states that the games will mean that small local businesses will be unable to compete with the multinational stampede into east London, while residents will be priced out of the area. Indeed, the 1992 games in Barcelona displaced tens of thousands of low income families, while the 1998 Seoul games displaced 720,000. China is currently going for gold, with an estimated 1.25 million already displaced from Beijing.

Josh Ryan-Collins, the co-author of the NEF report, said, “The regeneration legacy was not just an enlightened addition to the plan for the games – it was central to the bid.”

We will be paying more than double what Tessa Jowell, minister for the Olympics, first estimated. The original budget was set at £4 billion, £738 million of which was due from the private sector. The new budget stands at £9.325 billion, with predictions for private investment down to just £165 million. The extra cost will be picked up by direct taxation and the National Lottery – 20 percent of the lottery’s total “good cause” budget.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee last month damned the original budget estimations, saying they “ignored foreseeable major factors” including tax and security. Policing and security costs have risen by £600 million since the original proposals, with the “delivery budget” up from £16 million to £600 million. The bid also omitted a VAT bill of £836 million.

Is it any wonder then, given New Labour’s notoriety for its anti-Midas touch on white elephants ranging from Wembley Stadium to the Millennium Dome, that three quarters of British people don’t think the Olympics will benefit them?

One of the tests for whether London was to host the games was the level of public support. Perhaps that public support would have been less forthcoming had they known the true cost.

The Colour of London

tim — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:18:58 +0000

We have been here, or somewhere quite like it, before. Britain’s modernising Labour government presiding over a financial crisis; people’s incomes squeezed by a rise in the cost of living; the government afflicted by its close links to an American administration fighting an unpopular foreign war; and many people worried about the effects of immigration. The voters used the opportunity of the local government elections to humiliate the national government. Labour even lost its London stronghold. This would be the precursor to a Conservative victory in the next general election.

Of course, the specifics were different forty years ago. Harold Wilson had a more engaging personality and was closer to the common man than is Gordon Brown. Nevertheless, when Prime Minister Wilson declared in November 1967, following the devaluation of the Pound Sterling: “It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket, in your purse or bank has been devalued”, his credibility crumbled. The people’s mistrust was vindicated when inflation rose from about 3% to over 6%.

There followed, in April 1968, the infamous speech by the Conservative Shadow Defence Minister Enoch Powell, in which he quoted Virgil, a poet of the ancient Roman Empire:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see `the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

Powell appealed to the white-skinned plebians in the home island of the defunct British Empire. He identified the dark-skinned migrants from the other lands of the ex-empire as the cause of the troubles of the native workers:

...they found themselves made strangers in their own country.They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker…

In case anybody should fail to get the message, Enoch Powell quoted from an alleged conversation with a working class man living in his Wolverhampton constituency:...In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

The other leaders of the Conservative Party could not be seen to sanction such inflammatory statements.They did not want rivers of blood to flow, and they did want the additional and relatively inexpensive labour which immigration brought to the British economy. In fact Powell himself, during his period as Conservative Health Minister, had encouraged black workers from the Caribbean to come to Britain in order to fill the low-paid positions in Britain’s National Health Service.

Powell was dismissed from his post. But through this speech, Powell had snatched the political whip from the faltering hand of the Labour Party and put it into the hand of the Conservative Party. As the chronology in the ’1968 in Europe’ Teaching and Research project recalls:

09.05.1968: Local elections in Britain include race as an unofficial, yet important issue. In polls 74% claim agreement with Powell while 15% claim they disagree with him and 11% are undecided.

The Labour vote collapsed, the Conservative Party was triumphant. The Conservatives went on to win the general election of 1971. While the Labour Party’s fortunes would recover, it would always remain vulnerable, especially during periods of economic hardship, to the loss of a significant number of poor and working class voters who are influenced by racist ideas.

And Enoch Powell had inflicted severe damage, not just to the Labour Party, but to community relations in Britain. One of the main figures in the task of re- constructing ethnic relationships was a London-based Labour politician, Ken Livingstone. In 1981, during the dark days of Thatcherism, Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council (GLC). Unable to persuade voters in the capital city to remove Ken Livingstone from his post, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986. However, Livingstone’s successes in his position, which included reducing the price of using public transport, and community development through a multi- cultural approach, left a powerful and positive memory.

In 2000, a locally elected political leadership for Britain’s capital city was re-constituted, in the dual form of the Greater London Assembly and the position of Mayor of London. In defiance of Labour Party leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who saw him as too left wing, Livingstone stood for the post of mayor, and won overwhelmingly.

Vindicated in defeat

We have moved on. Nowadays, most people in Britain would not claim agreement with the divisive racist rhetoric of Enoch Powell, and fortunately, there is currently no figure equivalent to Powell within the mainstream political establishment. But, no less than in May 1968, the outcome of the May 2008 election in London hinged largely on the intersection of ethnicity and class, with the scene for failure set by the inability of the UK government to deal with global economic and political problems.

Ken Livingstone, the incumbent Mayor, graced his defeat after eight years in office with a noble untruth:

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get an extra few points that would take us to victory and the fault for that is solely my own. You can’t be mayor for eight years and then if you don’t at third term say it was somebody else’s fault. I accept that responsibility and I regret that I couldn’t take you to victory.”

Other politicians were right to disagree. The BBC reported:...Justice Secretary Jack Straw said Labour as a whole should shoulder the blame for Mr Livingstone’s loss.

He told BBC News: “I disagree with Ken in one particular only, that we all share the responsibility for the defeat that he suffered yesterday.”

Mr Straw admitted that the row over the 10p tax rate had left some voters “understandably very upset”.

Brian Paddick, the unsuccessful Liberal challenger for the post of London mayor, put it more personally: “Labour suffered because of the failure of Gordon Brown.”

These statements are undeniably correct. In the rest of England and Wales, where the record of Gordon Brown was the matter on which the voters delivered their verdict, the Labour vote fell catastrophically, putting the party into third place, behind the Liberals. In London, where the records of both Prime Minister Brown and Mayor Livingstone were put to the test, it was a much closer contest, and one in which the Labour vote actually increased from its level in the previous contest in 2004.

An examination of the election results in London shows that in every constituency, the vote for Ken Livingstone as mayor was much higher than the vote for the Labour Party candidates for membership of the Greater London Assembly; also, although he lost, the actual number of votes cast for Mr Livingstone was significantly higher than in 2004.

The London election was preceded by a long and intense smear campaign against Livingstone, in which he was accused of having links to Islamic terrorism; making anti-semitic remarks; employing a cabal composed of Trotskyists and financially corrupt individuals; being drunk on duty; and of being an apologist for the murder, by Metropolitan Police officers, of an innocent Brazilian immigrant.

This campaign, led by the capital’s only non-freesheet daily newspaper, the London Evening Standard, rose to a crescendo after the Conservatives adopted a celebrity candidate, the affable Boris Johnson.

As the results demonstrate, the anti-Ken campaign made little dent in Livingstone’s main base of support. Rather, correctly fearing that he would be defeated in a close contest, the social groups to whom Ken Livingstone most appeals turned out in very high numbers; and when they got to the polling stations, most of them also voted for the Labour Party candidates for the Greater London Assembly (GLA). So, although in the rest of the country the Labour vote collapsed, in London it increased. Labour held all its existing GLA seats, and in one London constituency, Brent and Harrow, the Labour Party candidate for the GLA position unseated the incumbent Conservative. Even in defeat, Livingstone proved to be an asset to the Labour Party.

But those who would vote for Boris Johnson, the celebrity candidate of the Conservative Party, turned out in even higher numbers.

Class, race and city

The outcome of the contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson illustrates the enduring relevance of some hugely important political factors. Firstly, those of class and ethnicity; it shows also how closely class and ethnicity are related. The people who surged into the polling stations to support Livingstone included the black and other ethnic minorities, most of whom are working class and / or poor; and also the majority among the poor and working class whites who do not hold racist opinions. These groups, who mainly although not exclusively inhabit the inner-city areas, were not put off by the virulent anti-Ken smear campaign- because not only does Ken speak for them, he has also delivered to them.

Surrounding the class and ethnic aspects was an emotional issue: that of identification with London – not merely as the capital of ones country- but London as ones home city, wherever one was born or ones parents were born; and furthermore as a multicultural city and an international city. Livingstone’s promotion of multiculturalism, during and since his period as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and his promotion of London on the world stage since becoming Mayor, has helped to transform, and to strengthen among many people, the feeling of identity with the city. This has been assisted by a material factor also- the rising global importance of London as a hub of world finance.

Of course, the social groups which comprised Ken Livingstone’s core base are the same groups which have traditionally been the core base of Labour Party support not just in London but throughout Great Britain. As Gordon Brown is discovering, if a party or a leader becomes perceived by their core base of support as no longer articulating their interests or delivering to them, he, she or it will begin to fail.

Livingstone did deliver. His success in delivering, within the limited range of powers available to the Mayor of London, has involved some byzantine compromises; indeed, as mayor for eight years, he demonstrated in practice his mastery of the mixed success: difficult compromises, ensuring that the deals he made had positive effects outweighing the negatives. But, due to the nature of these covert agreements, he could never ask to be judged on this great ability; neither could he escape responsibility for the negative aspects.

One of Mayor Livingstone’s successes was the tackling of racist behaviour and attitudes within the Metropolitan Police Force. To achieve this, Livingstone needed to win over and shore up the faction among the senior police officers who would get on board with his anti-racist agenda. To simplify, one aspect of the de- facto deal was that the police would receive a rise in funding, allowing a generous increase in the number of policemen and women; this- so long as they were not racist police officers- was no bad thing, and it allowed the mayor to claim credit for the overall reduction in crime which has occurred in the capital. But there was another necessary aspect of the tacit compromise- the mayor had to give his unstinting political support to the police, and particularly to the leader of the fragile faction within the force which was with Livingstone’s agenda- Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair.

Fortunately for the Conservatives, disaster struck in the aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist bombing in London. Suspected as a potential bomber merely because he was a man who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong colour skin, the Brazilian electrical worker Jean Charles de Menezes was lynched at Stockwell tube station in South London by an armed unit of the Metropolitan Police on the 22nd of July 2005. There then followed a campaign, opportunistically supported by the Conservative Party, to dismiss Sir Ian Blair from his post. The logic of his position required the mayor to excuse the shocking murder and to defend the Commissioner. For this, Ken Livingstone became the subject of hypocritical outrage.

Manufacturing dissent

Another of Livingstone’s mixed successes was his management of the public transport system. Defeated in the struggle to prevent the part-privatisation of the London Underground rail network (known as the tube), he was left with the responsibility of managing the dire consequence- to get to work using the tube, it costs the equivalent of about ten US dollars a day, thus either excluding or exacting a punitive tribute from lower-paid workers. Those who can afford, or have no choice but to use the tube, face their entry to the tunnels with little hope of a comfortable journey and no certainty of punctual arrival.

However, on the buses- used for short journeys by most people, and even for long journeys by the poor, the lower-paid workers, the nightworkers and also the night revellers- it was a different story. Bus services in England as a whole have been declining since their disastrous privatisation and de-regulation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, thus forcing people into their cars or into isolation; in the English shires and metropolitan areas excluding London, this dismal process has continued under New Labour. But, in an unacknowledged concession for Ken Livingstone’s acceptance of defeat on the issue of tube privatisation, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair permitted the London Mayor to aquire sufficient powers and funds to roll hundreds of new and improved buses out onto the roads. As transport pundit Christian Wolmar wrote: Livingstone… concentrated on a deliberate and systematic policy of improving bus services.

New routes have been introduced, the bus fleet has been modernised, notably through the introduction of 300 bendy-buses that are easier to board and leave than the old double deckers, and frequencies have been increased. This has reaped major benefits in terms of passenger numbers.

The buses were cheap for anyone to use, free for children and pensioners; and thanks to a deal with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, half-price for the very poorest Londoners. Under Mayor Livingstone’s reign, bus passenger numbers in the capital increased by 45%.

Livingstone could not be allowed to get away with this achievement. Ken had produced buses, but the media and the Conservatives could manufacture dissent. The unruly behaviour of some of the children who rode to school by bus was blamed on the mayor. Boris Johnson took up cycling- a means of transport for which Ken Livingstone has been the acknowledged champion; Boris rode out as an enthusiastic exponent of the ‘health and safety culture’, hitherto denigrated by the Conservatives. His foppish blond hair flying in the polluted wind of London’s West End, Mr Johnson declared that the ‘bendy- buses’- a key component of the new public transport fleet- were dangerous, their articulated rear-ends a fearful menace to the bicycling fraternity. He proposed to replace them with an updated version of the obsolete but fondly remembered double-decker ‘routemaster’ bus.

Of course, there was an anti-Boris campaign which sought to match the anti-Ken campaign; pointing out that Boris Johnson is a posh ‘hooray Henry’, an Eton educated buffoon, prone to making remarks that insult poor and black people: a man with not a care in the world and unfit to hold a responsible job. And when pressed, Mr Johnson had no idea what it would cost to phase out the bendy-buses and replace them with his proposed new routemasters.

Paradoxically, the negative campaigning led not to a decrease but to an increase in both the number of votes and the share of the vote for both the main candidates. The attacks on Boris Johnson did not deter the kind of people whose votes a Conservative candidate was likely to attract; and these were in any case people who were unlikely to consider voting for Livingstone: mainly the better off white people, who live in the suburbs and therefore identify less with London as a city, who are more likely to travel in a four-wheel-drive car than a bendy-bus, and who would not be affected by a revival of racist policing. Another group also voted for Johnson: a minority among the poor and working class whites who, believing that they are in competition with immigrants for jobs and social resources, are influenced by racist ideas.

Because it was clear that only Johnson or Livingstone could win, and also because the nature of the ballot allowed voters to spread their crosses between different candidates and parties, a good deal of tactical voting took place. From the results it can be reliably surmised that a large number of Liberal Party supporters voted for Johnson in order to get rid of Ken Livingstone and to inflict a defeat on the Labour government of Gordon Brown. This added at least 5% to Johnson’s vote. Of equal significance, the fascist British National Party (BNP) told its racially- motivated supporters to vote for Johnson, and nearly all of them followed this instruction. The BNP’s support was just over 5%. Livingstone lost by 6%. In the end, it was this tactical convergence by the fascists and many of the Liberals which gave Johnson the edge over Livingstone.

The collapsing compromise

Still, as Jack Straw and Brian Paddick observed, the main political factor in the defeat of Ken Livingstone was the perceived failure of the Labour government and specifically Gordon Brown at national level. Reasons mooted for Brown’s failure include his dour personality and his poor tactical judgement; without doubt, he lacks the ruthlessness and the hypnotic charm of his predecessor Tony Blair.

But Prime Minister Brown has a deeper problem. Like Livingstone, Brown is a man who pursues his agenda through compromise, and the main compromise which worked for Gordon Brown during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer has come unstuck. During the first two terms following the stunning ‘New Labour’ victory in 1997, Chancellor Brown was able to deliver, to nearly everybody, something of what they wanted. Big business, the City of London and the very rich got their privatisation, their de-regulation and their tax cuts, and this attracted huge amounts of international money into the UK. Brown used much of this money to invest in public services, thereby not only improving those services but boosting employment and pay levels; some of the money was also channelled through the state benefits system to raise the incomes of low-paid workers and other poor people. Thus resistance to privatisation and de-regulation was blunted and concern about rising inequality was allayed.

For nearly a decade, the British economy rode high on the back of globalisation and the increasing role of financial services. This was put down to competence, Gordon Brown took political credit for this, and most groups in society drew a dividend, even though the gains were not equally shared. But now the forces of globalisation are delivering higher prices for petrol and food, and the financial services are in crisis.

Perhaps Brown saw this coming. He has certainly sought to create a refuge for himself by advancing the concept of Britishness. But while Ken Livingstone made himself into ‘Mr London’ by bringing the ethnic communities together through multiculturalism, Gordon Brown has been trying to become ‘Mr Britain’ at a time when the components of Britain- England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland- are drawing further and further apart; and while also, Britain’s image as perceived by the people who live in it is badly damaged by the UK’s foreign policy, including the subservient relationship to the USA and the Iraq war.

Can the Labour Party recover? Following the debacle of 1968, Labour had recovered enough by 1974 to be winning general elections. One of the main reasons for this was that the Conservative government of Edward Heath decided to take on the powerful trade unions, and in response the unions used their power to smash the Conservative government.

But, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, most of the industries in which the unions were powerful no longer exist; the remaining trade union members are hamstrung by legislation which, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, makes it very difficult to go on strike effectively; and, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, an ideological atmosphere has developed in which it is impossible for the Labour Party to be associated with strike action.

Nevertheless, even in the darkest days, opportunities emerge, and leaders emerge to make use of those opportunities; as when, in 1981, Ken Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council.

Contours of New Labour Descent

JamieSW — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:58:39 +0000

When Tariq Ali says “New Labour is dead”, you don’t expect him to be matched in his prognosis by the soft-left Compass group. It is necessary to pause for a second and ask who the gravediggers will be. Arguably in this case the assassins are Labour voters who decided to abandon the party for either the Lib Dems, the nationalists, the Tories, the Nazis, the smaller left parties or – probably by far the biggest beneficiary – abstention. (If the turnout was higher in London, it was higher mainly in the dead zones of the Tory suburbs, which will spend the rest of the summer smelling of bigotry and barbecues until some kind of divine Ballardian punishment crashes the party.) It is certainly true, as Jon Cruddas argues, that working class voters are abandoning Labour in both the heartlands and the marginals, and the Tories are expecting to capitalise on that. This is hardly news, and even New Labour commentators like Jackie Ashley are saying as much.

However, for the electoral slaughter of New Labour to be consummated and full burial rites executed in the way that Compass envisions, there would have to be some force within the party that is capable of performing that service. And, as I will not tire of pointing out to those tempted to return to its deathly embrace, there is no such force. Some kid themselves that the stale wreckage of the Labour Left in London, which so assiduously coat-tailed Livingstonite liberalism, has the way forward for New Labour to avoid electoral obliteration in 2010. (Oh, Seumas Milne, you really ought to know better.) It is true that Ken Livingstone didn’t poll as poorly as New Labour in general. 36.38% of the mayoral vote went to Livingstone, but only 27.12% backed New Labour on the Assembly London-wide, and only 24% backed the party nationally. So a vague aura of leftism and independence helped Livingstone. But just over a third of the vote is still pretty poor, particularly when you’ve cut a deal with the Green Party, the Liberals and practically every non-Tory force that will work with you. New Labour is not dead, it is undead. And this is what the zombified party of government will do: it will segment its losses into the middle class, the ‘white working class’, and Muslims and ethnic minorities, and it will contrive a set of concessions for each group, based on a conservative agenda. To middle class voters it will offer to withdraw ‘green’ taxes or reduce them severely; to the ‘white working class’ it will offer a few miserly tax concessions, but try to deflect the main issues with racism by introducing a points system for immigration; to Muslims and other minorities, it will offer a combination of threats, cajolement and ‘integration’. That will not work, not least because the Tories can do this stuff much better. And when New Labour loses again, the best organised forces in the party will be the Blairites and they will take the opportunity to move further to the right and replace Brown with Miliband. Don’t look to a social movement to make any impact on this: if 2 million people marching in London couldn’t find its way onto the conference floor, the party is now almost completely impervious to mass social unrest.

The more aggressive wing of the Tory right is gleefully plotting all sorts of revenge – especially against the unions and against those Muslims who have had the run of the place under the communist tyrant ‘Red Ken’. Boris Johnson is pledging a ‘fightback’ against crime (so I’d keep an eye on Jeffrey Archer’s house), and hoping with his new confederates to force a no-strike deal on the RMT and Aslef, which is highly unlikely. The Tories may be more aggressive than Ken Livingstone’s administratrion, but they’d have to be prepared for an epic combat if they want to break the train unions. No sign of that yet. While Boris Johnson has appeared to accept in public that the PPP on the tube is a failure, his administration is likely to opt for the renegotiation of existing contracts and even sweeten the deal for Metronet rather than accept public ownership. He will keep the congestion charge, but probably protect Tory residents of the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea from expansion, and also guard drivers of ‘gas-guzzlers’ against planned increases in their charges. His plans for increasing the number of police are actually not very extensive – 440 on first blush, and all of these ‘community support officers’ to move around on London’s massive public transport system. The effect will be negligible. He may have to limit his idea of metal detectors and knife archways on the Underground if he doesn’t want millions of pissed-off commuters baying for his blood. These things are not that popular in Heathrow Airport, and I can’t see people appreciating being stopped at fast-moving, crowded public transport hubs for having ordinary metal objects on their person. Seriously, has anyone actually thought this through? In all, I can see Boris Johnson running an unpleasant, aggressive and divisive administration, a test-bed for future Tory politics at the national level, but he will not be allowed to go too far lest he ruins things for his boss.

Both New Labour and the Tories are subject to two overarching global pressures that they don’t get to control. The first is that the capitalist system is entering its most chaotic phase since the 1930s, and may well experience a global collapse (one in four chance, remember?). Rising food and commodity prices has been coterminous with a real-terms contraction in spending power for many. If capitalism could deliver stable growth and rising living standards without accumulating enormous imbalances that lead to global crises, then New Labour would be alive and kicking. Moderate social democracy would probably be hegemonic. As it is, New Labour’s electoral calculus in the face of any crisis is always to move right, throw a sop to middle class voters in the marginals and expect working class acquiescence. That is why they decided to clobber working class taxpayers and give a tax cut to slightly higher income earners. At the same time, their economic rationale is that of neoliberalism: when profits are squeezed, you defend the country’s economic competitiveness by attacking the three main costs for any company – taxes, input costs and wages. This commitment to neoliberalism is tempered by the need to keep the unions on-side, but only marginally. This is why corporation taxes and taxes on profits are lower under New Labour, and why inequality has been allowed to soar, despite the minimum wage and some very modest redistributive measures. The Tories will respond in much the same way as New Labour, except that they don’t have to answer to unions and working class voters, and so can be much more aggressive. In fact, they positively benefit by throwing red meat to reactionaries of all stripes, provided they don’t go too far and alienate centrists.

The second overarching pressure is that the American empire, for which Britain is a big off-shore base, is hurtling toward defeat. It is losing its dollar dominance; it is losing ground economically; it can murder residents of Sadr City and Basra in the hundreds and thousands within days, but it can’t defeat Iraq without a draft, and it can’t attack Iran except through an Israeli proxy which would be hugely risky; Afghanistan is lost, and the commitment of a few thousand more troops won’t change matters. When mainstream American politicians talk about reducing dependence on foreign oil, they tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) appeal to the popular desire to get out of extensive imperial commitments that are costing trillions of dollars and contributing to a great deal of social distress. New Labour’s response to this is much like Old Labour’s. Cling onto nuclear weapons under the American umbrella, try to act as a bridge between America and Europe, back up US military subventions, and try to neutralise and contain antiwar movements. This logic has taken Gordon Brown toward flirtation with neoconservatism, and David Miliband will probably move even further in that direction. The Tories will not necessarily be more aggressive in that respect. Split between foreign policy ‘realists’ and neocons, they are also in the position of having to woo antiwar voters in Shropshire, formerly solid Tories who have experienced the civilising influence of mass street protests. Further, it is hard to see how the Tories could be more right-wing in their global orientations than new Labour. Blair backed Berlusconi, Brown backs Sarkozy, both have been comfortable with Bush – the European and American hard right are the natural allies of New Labour. Meanwhile, Cameron is probably not going to have any difficulty dealing with a Democratic presidency.

The countervailing movements against capitalism and empire that opened the 21st Century and made some waves in the UK electoral system are both experiencing set-backs and crises, partly because while they could mobilise people, there was no clear and commonly held vision about how to translate that success into real power. A whole tradition – call it the classical conception of socialism – has been lost here, and needs to be rediscovered. That conception identified both weaknesses in the system that could be systematically attacked and an agency with the power to challenge the system. For all the ingenuity and dynamism of these social movements, without that understanding, a lot of the steam has been lost amid fractures and mutual recrimination. Two temptations have resulted: one has been to relapse into social democracy (or some apparently more radical substitute, such as the Greens), whose crisis helped produce the movements in the first place; the other, less significant but as mistaken, has been to collapse into ultra-left purism and separation from the movement. We had better get this right, because an almost choreographed sequence of global crises is battering us, and if we can’t intervene effectively it will not be the centre that holds, it will be the far right that gains.

London Meltdown

JamieSW — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:34:44 +0000

What could go wrong did go wrong. Boris Johnson is mayor, with a convincing lead. The BNP got a seat on the Assembly. And the Left List failed to make an impact except in a few concentrated areas. The reasons for the latter are obvious enough: launching a new brand name in the space of a couple of months; set-back by a recent split in the organisation; squeezed by the Tory surge and the desire of many to ‘Stop Boris’ by backing Labour; squeezed by direct competition with those who still had the old name (who did poorly, but better than us overall, and much better in City and East); squeezed by a higher turnout. There were so many things militating against a strong Left List showing. But even I would not have expected last night’s atrophy. New Labour has collapsed decisively not on some right-wing hocus-pocus about crime or immigration (although the media hysteria obviously contributed to this), but on the ten pence tax rate and the economy and the sense that Labour doesn’t even try to represent ordinary working people any more. But the Left has not been in a position to make any inroads as a result. And, in part because of the poisonous climate generated over immigrants and Muslims, the Nazis of the BNP are on the Assembly while their estranged half-cousins from the National Front (who consider the BNP sell-outs) polled strongly in Bexley and Bromley as well as in Lewisham and Greenwich. There are some hard fights ahead.

The Blairites’ advice was evidently no use to Ken, who lost it in the last few days with a series of bizarre declarations, building up to his claim that he wanted to arrest people for littering. Even Boris Johnson didn’t go that far. The Blairite strategy is to move so far to the right on certain issues that even the Tories can’t criticise you, while giving the left some friendly words. More accurately, this is the Clintonite strategy of triangulation developed by the Republican PR man Dick Morris. Livingstone listened to this kind of advice at his own immense peril, but what else did he have to offer? He tried at the last minute to cut a vaguely ‘progressive’ looking deal with the Green Party, but I suspect that most Berry voters would have given him a second-preference anyway. And the Greens didn’t do all that well in the end, despite some locally strong votes. They kept two seats on the Assembly, but gained little from the extensive media exposure. Livingstone didn’t have anything new to offer Labour voters, wasn’t really keen to distance himself too much from the government, had no chance with most right-wing voters – his niche was exhausted and depleted. The Tories have been canny in selecting Boris because, despite his obvious unfitness for the role, his burlesque comedy obscures the memory of the ‘nasty party’. I suspect that ‘nice’ centre-right voters who might previously have lumped for the Lib Dems went back to the fold. It’s been hard to detect much in the way of policy from the Tories, and certainly little distinctive. Johnson did not win on an aggressive platform of clubbing the unions, hammering immigrants and brutalizing petty criminals. This isn’t Margaret Thatcher, the next generation. It is BoJo the Bozo, the clown from hell, all slapstick and bravado. His platform consisted of some relatively unthreatening centre-right soundbites, which is one reason why the (quite legitimate) attempts to make him sound scary didn’t work. One very small contributor to Johnson’s win is highlighted by John Harris in the Guardian today: “the topsy-turvy, faux-progressive politics minted by the self-styled pro-war left”. I don’t credit Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and company with very much influence at all, but they certainly contributed to the reactionary media campaign about ‘Islamism’, providing a ‘progressive’ proscenium for the racist dramaturgy.

What of Labour’s national wipe-out? First of all, we’ve just seen the complete enervation of the New Labour vision of a Whiggish coalition, a ‘progressive’ lib-lab bloc for centre-left hegemony in the 21st Century. New Labour collapsed, but the Liberals didn’t pick up very much of the slack. In Wales, as in Scotland, the nationalists are getting the benefit of the anti-New Labour vote. In England, the Liberals lost control of some councils and gained some, and they seem to have a net gain overall of just one council. It is surprising in this context to see the Lib Dem result being spoken of as if it’s a credible one for Nick Clegg. Commentators have been quick to draw comparisons with 1983, but the last time Labour’s share of the vote was this low was in 1968, shortly after Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech and at the height of Harold Wilson’s unpopularity over devaluation. Wilson’s government had also, despite some moderate reformist pledges, reneged on many commitments at the behest of the IMF. What is different this time round is the extent of Labour’s collapse in its heartlands. It didn’t just crumble in the marginals. It lost core votes across Wales, in Hartlepool, and in Wolverhampton. It lost a strong presence in Reading, by no means a marginal seat. It was kicked out of Bury in Greater Manchester after 22 years. The rapid erosion that began under Blair is now an avalanche. Blair’s 2005 election victory was more of a loss for the Tories than a thumbs-up for New Labour, with just over a third of voters backing the government and with less voters than supported Labour when it lost in 1992. It is now obvious that the Labour Party will crash to a poor second in 2010, while the Tories will pick up around 40% of the vote. The Lib Dems will not match their 22% vote in 2005.

Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with ‘In Place of Strife’) and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn’t contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don’t think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.

For socialists, however, elections are not our main kind of activity. Saying that, I run the risk of appearing to diminish the hard work put in and the hopes invested in the campaign, and that is not my meaning. However, while we should spare no blushes in being directly honest about what just happened, we should not allow ourselves to disappear up our own ballot-boxes. How we intervene in the coming crises over pay, the economy, and the rising threat of racism and the far right, is far more significant than how many votes we rack up. One of the first things we can do is turn out for the protest against the Nazi BNP outside City Hall, this coming Tuesday at 6pm.

The end of New Labour

JamieSW — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:15:17 +0000

I knew it was going to be rough last night but not even the deepest pessimist in me thought it would be on this scale. Whoever thought that in our most solid heartlands like Northumberland, Hartlepool, Blaenau Gwent, Wolverhampton and Merthyr Tydfil Labour councillor after Labour councillor would lose their seats.

Simply expressing disappointment and blaming the world economy makes Gordon Brown appear to be in denial about how serious the political situation is for the government. The new PR team in Number 10 can’t spin its way out of this electoral disaster. The announcement today that in response to Labour’s worst local council results in 40 years the prime minister is to re-launch a draft Queen’s speech borders on the delusional.

It’s not just the recent debacle over the 10p tax rate, the reality is that on the doorstep in increasing numbers people just don’t believe Labour is on their side any more. The 10p issue was important because it symbolised the unfairness of our taxation system which Gordon Brown as both chancellor and prime minister has failed to address. Increasing the tax burden on the poorest whilst non-doms and company directors pay less tax than their cleaners grates against our supporters’ sense of fairness.

New Labour has systematically alienated section after section of the coalition we need to win and retain power. The teachers and civil servants strike was an indication of the depth of anger about the pay cut strategy being imposed by the government. When 15,000 aggrieved police officers march through London and prison officers defy the law and come out on strike, the message of public sector workers discontent was loud and clear.

It is the same frustration felt by pensioners forced onto means tested benefits, students saddled with debt by loans and tuition fees, and families trapped on housing waiting lists for years because councils are not allowed to build the homes anymore.

In this climate of discontent and disillusionment Labour’s core vote is crumbling and the era of New Labour is coming to an end. The question that has still to be decided is whether the party is able to jettison New Labour and its outworn ideological baggage before the electorate does at the next election.

New Labour’s credibility was entirely based on its claim to electoral appeal. But now that voters are deserting us in their droves it has nothing to offer but electoral defeat. If we are unable to radically change direction and start to address our supporters’ key concerns, the party’s future is bleak. Our activist base is demoralised and disintegrating and we no longer have the foot-soldiers on the streets in many parts of the country to get our vote out. You only survive as a governing party in these circumstances as long as the opposition remains in disarray but as soon as that changes you’re in trouble.

It’s no use Gordon Brown saying that he’s going to listen and then carry on as if nothing had changed. We’ve got to demonstrate that we are back on people’s side once again. People just want fairness; fair pay, rights for workers, decent pensions, a fair and progressive taxation policy, access to secure and affordable housing, free good quality education and we need the government to start attacking poverty rather than the poor. Actually, all we need is a real Labour government.

London Olympics terror threat used to vastly increase surveillance powers

tim — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:53:47 +0000

The threat of terrorism at the 2012 London Olympics is being hyped up in order to justify a vast increase in the surveillance powers of the British state.

According to a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph, Home Office officials are planning to expand the police DNA database to identify suspects and use greater powers to track individuals through advanced closed circuit television (CCTV) technology and the Oyster card used by millions of people on London’s bus and rail network.

The memo discusses different means the government could use to persuade the British public to accept these measures. It asks, “To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?” and concludes, “Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics.”

To that end, ministers, police chiefs and officials have stepped up their demands for more security measures, utilising the Games. Last month, Lord Dear, the former Scotland Yard head of operations, made a public announcement expressing his doubts over present police capabilities to deal with the event. He said that the police force is too short of manpower to deal with the extra security needed and likened it to a “Sixties car in the 21st century,” adding, “If the model is flawed now, it will certainly be flawed in four years’ time.”

“It’s fairly obvious to anyone that major terrorist groups will not be particularly interested in attacking the Beijing Olympics,” Dear said. “But in four years’ time they will have the London Olympics as a target and we need to be best positioned to counter that well in time.”

Dear’s announcement was made despite the fact that there are a record 140,000 police officers in service and the Olympics security budget has risen sharply by £238 million in the last few months. At the end of last year, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell released figures that showed that the initial security budget of £200 million in 2005 had spiralled to more than £1 billion.

Dear’s comments reflect those of the most senior officers in the police. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, has also expressed concern over existing security arrangements and outlined a plan for them to be beefed up in readiness for the games. He has also said that special security and training will be required for athletes and the 200 heads of state expected for the opening ceremony. These proposals will inevitably involve extending the budget still further.

As well as increasing the number of police, the proposed scheme involves an elaborate and sophisticated security system spanning the whole of London. According to a BBC report last month, the Metropolitan Police Service wants to pool its 10,000 existing cameras with the thousands of traffic and congestion cameras already in operation across the city.

This would give the police control over a vast network of up to half a million CCTV cameras, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The network would then be controlled by a central £100 million bomb-proof command bunker operated jointly by the military, police and intelligence services brought together under the umbrella of the Olympic Security Directorate.

The Olympic security coordinator, Assistant Police Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, has made several statements over the last few weeks that indicate just how huge the increase in surveillance will be. Speaking at an international security conference in Abu Dhabi, Ghaffur outlined new ticketing technology to be used on the London transport system to track the movements of every individual, as well as “second-generation” computer technology that can track individuals through face recognition. The computers can use identity-recognition techniques to compare video against a database of digital faces.

A pilot scheme involving 750,000 mugshots has already been completed. Using the facial-mapping software connected to the CCTV cameras, an alert will flash up as soon as a known person appears on the screen. He added, “We will have the most secure and transparent ticketing system. Tracking technology is being developed—a spectator will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets.”

Other measures outlined by Ghaffur include dividing London into three security zones, three extra helicopters to carry out close surveillance, an increase in the automatic vehicle number plate recognition system, and checks using biometric fingerprints on the 50,000 workforce being used to build the venues.

Currently, the police can only check fingerprints and photographs from suspects after they have been arrested. Under these new powers, the police will be able to carry out these checks instantly with hand-held devices that are connected to the security database. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, said, “We are trying to get a really disciplined understanding of how to use these tools before the Olympics. That is a really important time scale for us.”

As well as increasing the size of the British police force to 9,000 for the major Olympic events, there are also proposals to draft in extra manpower from private security firms and foreign armed police. Scotland Yard has called for these measures on the basis that too few British police have firearms training to cope with the events, and the costs of training them are prohibitive. The contracted armed police will be used to guard dignitaries, athletes, the main Olympic Park and other sports venues.

Ian Blair told a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, “The principle must be that we don’t want armed foreign police, but there’s a ‘but’—and the ‘but’ is twofold. One, you may not be able to get any foreign police unless they are armed, because they won’t feel easy being unarmed in public scenarios like that. Two, do we actually have, in this case, sufficient capacity to have enough armed officers to do the job?”

All of these extra resources will mean that the security budget for the games will mushroom in the next four years. Denis Oswald, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s London 2012 coordination commission, has admitted that it is “impossible to predict” how much money will need to be spent when the games are still four years away. He said, “It’s a very difficult area but if we want to have occasions like the Olympic Games, where hundreds of thousands of people meet, then you have to make sure they are safe, otherwise you just give up and the terrorists will win.”

This refusal to draw up a fixed budget on the basis of a terrorist threat that is “impossible to measure” amounts to a blank cheque that Londoners and the British people will ultimately have to pay. More importantly, the machinery is being created that is necessary to impose a highly integrated police/military apparatus in Britain’s capital city, under the pretext of keeping the country safe from terrorism.

Dog Whistles and Guard Dogs

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:53:53 +0000

‘I opposed the idea of a directly-elected mayor,’ wrote Ken Livingstone in 1998, because it tends to personalise debate and thus obscure the issues at stake.’ Ten years on, Mayor Livingstone is engaged in a bitter battle with Boris Johnson that comes straight out of Have I Got News For You.

It is a fight that Johnson could win. And while the image of buffoonery can be endearing, his politics are less so: in favour of the war on Iraq, railway privatisation, nuclear power, public schools and staghunting. The left-leaning Compass pressure group labelled Johnson ‘a type of Norman Tebbit in clown’s uniform’. They are right.

Behind the casually racist turn of phrase that has seen Johnson describe black people as ‘picanninies’ lies a more consistent playing of the race card, orchestrated by his campaign strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby was behind the 2005 Conservative campaign that denigrated immigrants, then asked voters ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’

Thankfully, they weren’t. But this same style of ‘dog-whistle politics’ has been successful elsewhere. The trick is to speak in a code that chimes with racist assumptions, without making ostensibly racist statements. In this case, the Tories are building on a discourse established by the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail’s London stablemate, which has vilified Livingstone for lavishing money on anti-racist groups. Crosby may or may not have orchestrated these attacks, but his campaign message feeds off the racist fantasy that Ken ‘gives all the money to minorities’ just the same. And it is not just Johnson who benefits: come 1 May, there is a strong chance that the BNP could gain seats on the Greater London Authority.

The mud slinging also comes from a neo-con ‘left’ that sees Livingstone’s engagement with Muslim groups as a threat. Martin Bright of the New Statesman came to this position off the back of writing a report on Islamism for the Cameronite think-tank Policy Exchange. Nick Cohen has also taken a break from Iraq war cheerleading to argue that ‘Ken Livingstone is not fit for office’.

These claims are backed up by accounts of Livingstone’s bullying advisers. ‘Vote Ken Livingstone, get Socialist Action,’ as Bright put it. But the real scandal is not that a left- wing mayor has left-wing advisors or that they oppose racism. The problem, as any left or anti-racist activist who has encountered Livingstone’s guard dogs will tell you, is that they have consistently denigrated community struggles, grassroots activism and anything that veers from whatever they deem politically correct or opportune.

Socialist Action does not represent ‘the most successful Trotskyist entryist operation since Derek Hatton’s Liverpool’, as Bright argues, but the futility of entryism itself. The state is far better at transforming entryists than vice versa – although what remains unchanged, in this case, is a distaste for democracy in line with the worst of left traditions. The problem is exacerbated by the flawed structure of London government. Livingstone once denounced the mayoral system as ‘barmy’ because it concentrates power without accountability. His advisers have set out to prove him right.

The resulting politics are highly contradictory, as was dramatically embodied in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings. Livingstone admirably steered clear of inflammatory rhetoric by referring to it as an attack on all of London’s ‘diverse communities’. Two weeks later, Jean Charles De Menezes was killed by the Metropolitan police, and Livingstone offered unblinking support to the police chief who sanctioned a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy.

On the economy, Livingstone’s positive endorsement of a London ‘living wage’ contrasts favourably with Johnson’s rejection of even the minimum wage. But this has to be set against his extended love- in with the Corporation of London, whose ‘trickle down’ economics have proven so successful that the gleaming towers of London’s finance district back onto some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country.

Despite this, Livingstone continues to project London as a ‘world city’ built on finance capital. In January, he went to the World Economic Forum to hawk an Olympic Games that will distort development prospects in the east end way beyond 2012. In February, Livingstone attacked the government’s plan to tax millionaire tax-evaders £30,000 a year for fear that it might drive away investment. Such policies have effects beyond London, as the City is a key node of global neoliberalism. Livingstone, like Johnson, supports it.

So whichever way you vote, the mayor always gets in. But sometimes there really is a lesser of two evils, and the electoral system makes this a relatively simple choice. A first preference vote for the Greens’ Sian Berry would send Ken a clear and progressive message. But a second preference for Livingstone remains an important signal that Johnson’s dog- whistle racism has no place in London politics.

This article is reposted from the Red Pepper website. They have a lively debate on the elections at this page

Why Greens should vote for Ken

tim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:31:58 +0000

Whenever I hear cynics complaining that politicians nowadays are all in hock to vested interests and unprepared to show leadership, I respond with two words: Ken Livingstone. London’s mayor has made the UK’s capital a world leader on environmental and transport issues – often in the teeth of determined opposition from the media and the political Establishment. If he loses the 1 May election to the charming Tory buffoon Boris Johnson, it will be a tragedy both for London and for global environmental politics as a whole.

Ken is that rare thing in today’s world: a politician who is prepared to lead rather than follow public opinion. If the congestion charge had been put through new Labour’s focus groups it would never have happened. Opinion polls were dead set against the scheme right up until it became a success, at which point most people switched allegiances or argued that they had actually been in favour all along. In 2004, the Conservative Party’s mayoral candidate, Steven Norris, pledged to abolish the congestion charge – and lost. Now, even Boris says he wants to retain the scheme, although in what form remains unclear. The progress of the congestion charge has been keenly watched from abroad: New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is planning to introduce a similar scheme in Manhattan.

Livingstone has been much attacked – particularly by such critics as the London Evening Standard and the NS’s Martin Bright. But Livingstone is by far the best-qualified candidate to run London – and from an environmental perspective, this is even more the case.

While Johnson is on record as opposing the Kyoto Protocol – as the Green candidate, Siân Berry, has repeatedly pointed out – Livingstone helped bring together big cities in the United States to keep the Kyoto flame alive during George Bush’s disastrous presidential reign. Livingstone has forged partnerships on all sides. His London Energy Services Company, which aims to make decentralised energy solutions mainstream across Greater London, is a partnership with EDF Energy, whose parent company operates nearly 60 nuclear reactors in France (Ken is strongly anti-nuclear).

As mayor, Livingstone set up the London Climate Change Agency to co-ordinate the capital’s response to what he identifies as “the biggest long-term challenge facing humanity”. The mayor’s Climate Change Action Plan aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2025 – to my knowledge the toughest targets adopted by any major political entity anywhere in the world. These targets would – if emulated by governments internationally – go most of the way towards solving the global warming problem. That written targets are already backed up with practical achievements makes them doubly valuable: London is the only major city in the world to have seen a shift from car use to public transport, and with large-scale investment in bike lanes cycling has increased by a heady 83 per cent. (In the country as a whole, cycle use is still flatlining.)

The contrast with Johnson could hardly be starker. The Tory candidate is still waffling on about recycling and planting trees, suggesting he is stuck back in the light-green era of the 1980s, despite his much-trumpeted credentials as a cyclist. Though he says he will “make London the greenest city in the world”, this turns out to be more about parks than emissions. Johnson’s manifesto says that he will keep Ken Livingstone’s climate-change targets – but there is a lack of both consistency and enthusiasm running through his statements. While both Ken and Boris oppose a third runway at Heathrow – today’s litmus test for climate-change credentials – Boris supports the construction of an entirely new airport somewhere in the Thames Estuary, on the grounds that “London’s airport capacity has to expand”. That doesn’t sound very climate- or environment-friendly to me.

While loyal Greens will no doubt wish to support Siân Berry’s candidacy, I wholeheartedly endorse her and Livingstone’s call for Labour and Green voters to put each other’s candidates down as their second preference.

Let’s keep Boris in the TV studios by all means – he’s a gifted entertainer – but let’s keep him out of City Hall.