Ken Livingstone | ukwatch.net

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.

What Boris Johnson Signals for the Left (Part 2)

eddie — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:26:27 +0000

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

Boris and celebrity capitalism

Anti-political sentiments tend to be bound up with a belief in the power of individuals and a concomitant scepticism about the power of collectives – be they nations, villages, or organisations – to achieve anything much. At the level of popular culture, its obvious manifestation is an obsession with the doings of celebrities: those pure ‘personalities’ whose notable achievements in any meaningful field are negligible. Famous for ‘being themselves’, contemporary celebrities appear to make few compromises with the everyday demands of collective or civic life; let alone the commitments that working in groups demands of scientists, nurses, builders or even serious actors.

At the same time, the producers of reality TV shows go to great lengths to convince audiences that living together is impossible, and that competitive, selfish values naturally dominate all human relations. They fall over themselves to prevent or subvert attempts at co-operation when these emerge in contexts like the Big Brother House or the Young Mums’ Mansion, and they demonstrate a relentless invention in the introduction of arbitrary mechanisms and carefully-selected sociopaths to situations where any ordinary group of people would just figure out a way to discuss things and get on with the job of living together. The implicit message is clear: don’t believe in democracy, collectivity, or society; realise instead that the natural state for human beings is the mind-set of a neurotic, cocaine-addicted TV producer, whose colleagues of today will be tomorrow’s competitors for the next 6-month contract with Endemol.

Like it or not, these have been the defining cultural phenomena of our time. In this context, the belief that commerce and competition are the only legitimate sources of authority, and that fame and personal charm are the only real measures of value, is bound to thrive. Without any countervailing cultural force, the chief criterion for winning Big Brother – possession of a distinctive and likeable TV persona – starts to inform voters’ attitudes in selecting candidates, while “being political” comes to seem both incompetent and inherently untrustworthy. Within this universe of values, Boris Johnson appears as the one honest man: unashamed of his lack of principle, contemptuous of the whole political process, indifferent to the public distaste for racist language (although Boris the mayor, as distinct from Boris the candidate, is sensitive enough to this issue to have appointed a black deputy already).

Unembarrassed by the personal privileges which he has exploited so effectively since leaving Eton, Johnson presented himself explicitly as a celebrity who had achieved little of substance and promised more of the same: his editorship of The Spectator, his most significant real achievement to date, was hardly one of the points on which he sold his candidacy to the voters of Bexley, and nor was his policy-light manifesto. Boris’ persona resonates with the sense that politics itself is a futile circus, that collective action is impotent, that media notoriety and personal wealth are the only really effective forms of power in contemporary culture.

However, this is not a situation which can simply be laid at the door of the evil ‘Media’, because the government itself has been sending out much the same message throughout the tenure of New Labour. Even in recent months, Brown’s self-defeating promotion of figures such as Digby Jones, Alan Sugar and David Pitt-Watson has manifested precisely this set of assumptions. More fundamentally, New Labour’s attacks on the core values of the public sector and its efforts to commercialise and privatise public services all work to reinforce the idea that the world of commerce, with its emphasis on competition and profit, is a fit model for every possible sphere of human endeavour and interaction. The PFI programme, foundation hospitals, city academies, retreats from collective pay bargaining and the massive outsourcing of various strands of service delivery all point in this one direction.

Indeed, such policies do not only imply that the values of the market are the only values that matter; they actively make this true by forcing public servants to play by commercial rules even when they do not want to and when their clients derive no obvious benefit from them doing so. In the process, relationships between service ‘users’ and ‘providers’ are re-engineered on the assumption that such relations must be inherently antagonistic, that only market disciplines can protect the interests of ‘consumers’ from the lazy, self-serving ‘producer interests’ (i.e. public sector professionals).

How can government and politicians expect to be trusted when they organise their entire policy agenda according to the assumption that all other public servants are untrustworthy? Johnson’s victory surely emerges from this matrix of assumptions. His persona resonates with these beliefs because of his unashamed privilege and contempt for the post-Macpherson anti-racist orthodoxy. Surely the reason the Tory leadership allowed Johnson – widely regarded as a political liability – to run at all, was that they recognised this, if only on an unconscious level (so much of politics, like the other expressive arts, is about intuition, inspiration and unconscious genius).

In voting for Johnson, some must experience the pleasure of letting go of their lingering resentments against the privileged caste to which he belongs and they never will. In doing so, they assent – blissfully – to the anti-political world view, according to which we shouldn’t worry at all about such issues as social justice, elite power, the divide between the publicly and the privately educated, the persistent realities of racism. To ignore the social politics of a figure like Johnson is a self-permission to accept that nothing can be done to alter a society which produces such anomalies,to stop worrying and get on with the business of running up credit-card debts.

The message that we don’t have to bother with politics, that it’s frustrations and compromises merely mask an empty reality in which individuals struggle for personal gain – just as they do in the workplace and on the high street – is comforting for people who can no longer relate to the idea of a positive public realm. The seductive message of Boris, the insouciant adventurer who finally made Ken seem earnest, however effective: don’t worry, it’s all nonsense, just have a laugh, have a drink and go shopping.

At the same time, for some a vote for Boris clearly meant a vote ‘for change’, however unspecified. Again, it’s an easy mistake simply to dismiss this as a generic effect of disillusion with Labour, or the consequence of the Evening Standard’s relentless anti-Ken headlines. Clearly these factors played a role, as did opposition to Ken’s radical cosmopolitanism, and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the BNP. But it is more important to understand this apparently empty vote ‘for change’ as a protest against the apparent impotence of the kind of democratic politics which Ken has come to represent, expressed in the anti-political values embodied by Boris.

Ken himself then compounded his vulnerability by failing to renew or articulate what had been his hallmark. Instead he traded on his “experience”, presenting himself to voters as a safe pair of managerial hands rather than as a campaigner for their collective empowerment. As a result, voter turn-out in those areas which backed him was significantly lower than in those which backed Boris. The enthusiasm with which suburban voters rejected the idea of themselves as cosmopolitan Londoners with a stake in the democratisation of society was not matched by any equivalent defence of this ideal by those with the greatest stake in it. Livingstone had made no obvious effort to mobilise such a constituency; but if he had tried, there is no reason to assume that he would have failed.

The Realities of Power

Overall then, a deplorable situation. Government and media elites collude to produce a culture which generates disdain for real politics and a veneration for irreverent celebrities. Mayor Boris is the result. But is that the end of the story? Here is where I want to depart from the chorus of voices on the ‘centre-left’ who have bemoaned the devaluation of politics in recent years. For while bodies like Demos, the Fabian Society, the IPPR and the Power Commission have produced reports diagnosing and deploring this state of affairs, they have almost entirely missed the central point. What most of these documents have in common is a narrative which blames government for failing to engage the citizenry, or sections of the public for failing to engage with politics. Incompetence on the part of government and bad faith on the part of journalists seem to be the usual imagined culprits. But major cultural shifts do not happen merely because of bad faith and incompetence. They happen also because someone, somewhere benefits.

The legitimacy of politics itself has been undermined from within and without, to the point where the most effective progressive politician of his generation can be defeated at the ballot box by a figure better known for his punch-lines than his policies. Who gains? The right-wing press, perhaps the most biased and under-regulated in the ‘free’ world, which New Labour has not made the slightest move to check after 11 years in power, is one clear winner. The other, most importantly, is the super-rich elite of ‘non-doms’, city bonus-earners, PFI-profiteers and public-school alumni, tied together by their involvement with key financial institutions, corporate media and the speculative property market. What would be required to work against this array of interests would be something much more than a few well-meaning voter-participation initiatives, but the rebuilding of social forces strong enough to challenge corporate power.

A society which lacks a strong labour movement – another situation which a Labour government has done nothing to remedy – also lacks a strong sense of collective empowerment and political possibility. It will need a revival of democracy, a genuine attempt to reconfigure and reinvent local government, trade-unionism and political participation for the 21st century, to reverse the trend which has so demeaned the very idea of democracy in contemporary culture. But such an effort could only be meaningful if it was led by politicians who recognised the obstacles such a project faces, and the fierce conflict with powerful vested interests which it would require. With the defeat of Livingstone, we have lost the last prominent British politician who understood this political reality.

Despite narrowly losing his election, Livingstone did much better at the polls than the Labour Party nationally, which suffered massive defeats in local elections across the country on the same day. He remains the most popular and successful radical politician of his generation, and Johnson beat him in part because he was even more populist, irreverent, outspoken and seemingly-authentic than Ken became in his last, more diplomatic years. The implication is clear: at least among the crucial swing constituencies of Southern England, the kind of ponderous self-righteousness embodied by Gordon Brown, his presbyterian purposefulness barely concealing his deference to hedge-fund managers and media moguls – is unlikely to convince anybody of anything. On the other hand, an uncowed populist Labour leader, willing to tell people the truth – that corporate profits do not equal social benefits – might yet be able to capture the imagination of voters as Johnson did last week.

The way to engage with the anti-political ‘common-sense’ which has brought Johnson to power is not to preach about the virtues of civic participation: it is to acknowledge that in fact the public is right to disengage from a process which does not offer it any scope for meaningful participation. Politics today is thoroughly corrupted, and democracy is often a meaningless sham, because those charged with administering it will not defend it from the encroaching power of corporations, commercial media and US militarism. We need politicians with the nerve to admit this, and to take on the vested interests which maintain this state of affairs. Only then will the voting public start taking them seriously again.

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

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

What Boris Johnson Signals for the Left (Part 1)

eddie — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:51:04 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Originality of Ken

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

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

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

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

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

Yet Livingstone went down with hardly a whimper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Labour’s electoral meltdown continues to worsen

tim — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:21:42 +0000

The meltdown suffered by the Brown government in last week’s local elections, coupled with Ken Livingstone’s defeat by Boris Johnson in the contest for London Mayor, is a major staging post in the ongoing collapse of New Labour.

The party’s share of the vote fell to a 40-year low of just 24 percent, compared with 44 percent for the Conservatives and 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. But its eclipse by the Tories is only part of the picture. Turnout was just 35 percent, confirming the widespread alienation from all the major parties.

Labour has long ago lost most of the support it once enjoyed in working class areas. The May 1 poll demonstrated that it has now also lost much of those sections of the middle class electorate it had won from the Conservatives in 1997.

In England, these twin factors found expression in the Conservative victory in Bury, in the north, for the first time in 22 years, and Labour’s loss of Reading, one of its few strongholds in the southeast.

The picture in Wales is even more devastating. Long considered Labour’s heartland, the party has continued to hemorrhage support and lost control of Merthyr Tydfil, Blaeau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly and Newport councils. No one did particularly well, least of all Labour’s coalition partners in the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru, as Labour’s vote dispersed across the political spectrum and resulted in victories for the Liberal Democrats, Tories and independent councilors.

Even so, the rise in support for the Conservatives amongst those who turned out to vote would be enough to secure them a general election victory. The poll has been compared with the situation that faced John Major’s Conservative administration in the local elections that preceded Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.

Just as devastating for the government was Livingstone’s defeat in London. Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has a high media profile, having cultivated his image as an eccentric plain speaker. He is in fact an arch right-winger, whose racist and anti-Islamic statements, and denunciations of people from Liverpool, has necessitated him making public apologies and made sections of the Tory party extremely nervous about his candidacy. In the final weeks, he was told to keep his mouth shut and maintain a low profile, leaving his campaign firmly under the control of Lynton Crosby who had spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian prime minister John Howard.

The pro-Labour press and the party apparatus—along with Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greens—had all urged support for Livingstone. Labour promoted Livingstone’s support in the City of London, but it also hoped, with the aid of the nominally left and socialist parties, to be able to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers, by portraying Livingstone as the “progressive” candidate.

Labour’s vote did rise slightly in these areas, but not by nearly enough to counter Johnson’s gains in the outer suburbs. The more fundamental problem for Livingstone and his left apologists was summed up by journalist Andrew Gilligan, who led the pro-Johnson offensive in the pages of the Evening Standard.

Responding to accusations that he was backing a reactionary, Gilligan retorted that, “Livingstone is the ally of some of the most reactionary forces in this city. I’m thinking of [Police Commissioner] Ian Blair, I’m thinking of property developers he’s in bed with, I’m thinking of City big business.”

The reaction in Labour circles to its electoral meltdown centred on disaffection with Gordon Brown’s premiership. He was condemned privately and publicly for his performance since taking over from Tony Blair in June 2007.

Martin Kettle, a personal friend of Blair, wrote in the Guardian that “the answer that stares these [Labour] MPs in the face is that, echoing Cromwell, they should tell [Brown]: ‘in the name of God, go.’ ” And there was widespread speculation as to whether a leadership challenge would be mounted and if so, when. Others more loyal to Brown urged him to “reconnect” with the electorate and Labour’s traditional supporters, or to “renew” New Labour’s “coalition,” supposedly marrying economic efficiency with social justice.

All that this produced was the pathetic spectacle of Brown seeking to emulate former US President Bill Clinton by telling the media how he felt “the hurt” of people struggling with rising prices and mortgage repayments.

In reality, Labour’s performance under Brown has only deepened a crisis that began under Blair. When Blair left office, he was widely hated and led a government condemned for the war against Iraq and viewed as a corrupt party of the super-rich. Its previous electoral showing in May 2007 gave it a predicted 27 percent of the national vote in a general election—just 3 percent higher than last week.

With Brown’s successions to leadership, there was a concerted campaign to claim a new era for Labour. The Daily Mirror described him as a man “on fire,” with a new “moral purpose,” while the Guardian wrote of a new “dawn” for a “new government.”

What actually took place was that Brown continued the big business agenda of Blair, bringing into government figures such as Sir Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, and praising Margaret Thatcher as a “conviction politician.”

The deluded belief within Labour circles that the new premier would somehow restore the party’s popularity found finished expression in Brown’s humiliating retreat from plans to hold a snap election as early as November last year when it became clear that, at best, Labour’s majority would be slashed and that it might even lose.

Brown’s climb-down at that time took place in the aftermath of the collapse of Northern Rock, amidst scenes of savers queuing up to withdraw their money. Since then, the economic crisis that began in the US subprime mortgage market has spread throughout the world and had a particularly severe impact on Britain.

Brown admitted, “What people are most worried about…[is that] petrol prices are going up, food prices are going up, they are worried about utilities bills, they are worried about their standard of living, there is an uncertainty about the economy…. People’s immediate priority is how to deal with the family budgets and the problems we face as a result of what is an economic downturn which started in America.”

But while Brown claimed to understand the “anxiety” over economic insecurity, his government suffered particularly badly at the polls because of its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band for lower-income workers. The move, which had been announced by Brown when he was chancellor in 2007 and took effect this year, hit millions of people earning less than £15,000 per annum. In the same budget, Brown had slashed the headline corporation tax rate by 2 pence.

Under these circumstances, how could anyone believe that Labour’s support would not continue to plummet?

Since it came to power, New Labour has functioned as the political representative of the oligarchy, presiding over a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the fabulously rich and the City. Only the flooding of the economy with cheap credit and rising property prices helped to partially conceal this process. Now that this possibility no longer exists, the full scale of Labour’s decline becomes apparent.

There had been calls for the prime minister to modify the 10 pence tax rate change or make some kind of recompense. But, beholden as it is to big business, Labour’s room for manoeuvre is strictly limited. Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, Peter Riddell warned that “the real danger is that the government will find it hard to resist calls for relaxing spending controls and public sector pay limits in order to respond to the worries of Labour MPs and core working-class voters.” This is equivalent to instructing Brown not to do so.

Neither does Brown face any substantial unified opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party, let alone one that in any way advances the interests of the working class. Speculation that the leader of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, John McDonnell, would stand against Brown was quickly dashed by McDonnell himself. In any event, McDonnell could only count on a few MPs and was unable to mount a leadership campaign last year.

For his part, Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas, who has the support of the Compass group and is portrayed by the media as a more traditional Labourite, limited himself to calls for Brown to “learn from Boris Johnson and from [Tory leader] David Cameron as well…. They seem to be more emotionally literate than us. Boris Johnson is connecting with people emotionally.”

Aside from that, there are merely reports of 40 or so MPs supposedly considering the possibility of making their unhappiness with Brown public, Brown being “safe” from direct challenge for at least a year and Labour’s Frank Field speaking about a sense of “private despair” amongst MPs.

What is unfolding is not simply the crisis of a premiership, but the crisis of a party. Labour’s fortunes cannot be restored by changing leaders. It is dead on its feet due to the impossibility of securing a popular mandate for policies that serve the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of working people. Labour is not merely exhausted and in need of reinvigoration. From the standpoint of the working class, it is a hostile entity that must be replaced by a genuine party of socialism.

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.

Questions for Ken

Ellie Keen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:54:04 +0000

London mayor Ken Livingstone can justifiably boast that he has done much over the last 30 years to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Londoners. As leader of the Greater London council in the 1980s, he was the first major politician to speak out publicly in support of gay human rights. His funding of previously unsupported LGBT welfare and advice agencies was trailblazing and immensely positive.

In his first term as mayor of London, Livingstone set up the UK’s first same-sex partnership register, which paved the way for the subsequent legislation of civil partnerships. But during his second term as mayor, he caused widespread dismay in the LGBT community when he welcomed to City Hall as his “honoured guest” Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The mayor subsequently repeatedly excused and defended the viciously homophobic and murder-inciting cleric.

Qaradawi supports the execution of gay people in Islamic states, the killing of Muslims who abandon their faith, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, forcing women to wear the hijab, terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in Israel and the flogging of women who have sex outside of marriage. He also said the 2004 Asian tsunami was punishment by God because the people who died had allowed their countries to become centres of “sexual perversion”.

Together with many other people, I criticised Livingstone over his embrace of Qaradawi. He responded with the wholly untrue claim that I am an “Islamophobe” and a person with “a long history of Islamophobia”.

Since then, despite an occasional pro-gay initiative, like opposing Westminster council’s attempt to ban rainbow flags in Soho, Livingstone’s record of supporting the LGBT community has been somewhat patchy.

LGBT Londoners are, of course, not only interested in LGBT policies. Like the rest of London, they are also concerned about transport, crime, housing and the environment, as well as the candidates’ stance on matters that specifically affect lesbian and gay people.

On four issues Livingstone needs to explain why he has let down the LGBT community. The other mayoral candidates also need to state where they stand. What are the Conservative, Lib Dem and Green policies on these questions?

Refusal to fund the gay football world championships in London

Livingstone has refused to contribute to the funding of the 2008 international gay and lesbian football association world championship, which is being held in London in August. London has won the honour of being the host city, and the UK’s Stonewall FC team is a strong contender for the world title, but the mayor is withholding financial backing.

Livingstone also refused to sign a letter of support for the associations’s grant application to the lottery fund. Having the high-profile support of the mayor would increase the likelihood of the grant succeeding. It costs nothing to sign a letter of support.

The unexpected lack of financial assistance from the mayor has contributed to the association being left with a funding shortfall. How does the mayor justify this denial of a few thousand pounds to the gay football world championships when he has showered billions on the 2012 Olympics? Where do the other mayoral candidates stand on funding the gay football world cup and similar gay sporting events? And will they offer financial support to increase youth, women’s, disabled and ethnic minority participation in sport?

Lesbian and gay museum

During the 2004 Mayoral election campaign, Livingstone promised to fund a lesbian and gay museum, which is now called Proud Heritage. The idea is to add to the diversity of London’s museums by creating a new institution dedicated to documenting and celebrating the lives and contributions of LGBT people, in a similar way to the existing specialist Jewish, children’s and slavery museums.

It took until 2007 for Livingstone to grant a rather modest start-up grant of £5,000. Further money was pledged. Proud Heritage made a bid for an additional £10,000, so it could launch the first stage online version of the museum this week. The mayor eventually agreed a further £5,000. This money has been contracted by Livingstone but not delivered as of 15 April. Why not?

On the basis of Livingstone’s contracted £5,000 grant, Proud Heritage organised development work. This work on the website, which opens on April 18, has not been completed because Livingstone’s money has not materialised. This has created needless last-minute stress for the Proud Heritage organisers.

Why has Livingstone delayed his election pledge on the lesbian and gay museum? Why, four years after his promise, has the Proud Heritage project been underfunded by the mayor? What will other candidates pledge towards this project?

Proud Heritage is, so far, only an online museum. Will the mayoral candidates support and help finance a physical LGBT museum as well?

Mayor’s LGBT forum

The mayor’s LGBT forum was set up to liaise with the LGBT community. But from the outset it has been structured in a wholly undemocratic way.

Why isn’t the forum allowed to elect its own chair? Why did Livingstone impose as chair one of his own people, a straight woman, Anni Marjoram? Why is the LGBT forum banned from proposing resolutions or holding votes on policy recommendations to the mayor?

Attempts to propose and vote on policy issues are ruled out of order by the chair. This has disillusioned many of us who proposed and backed the forum as an open, democratic space for dialogue and consultation.

The forum is now widely dismissed as a PR exercise, with no real power or influence. Many grassroots activists no longer bother to attend. What is the point? Anything that questions mayoral policy doesn’t get on the agenda and uncomfortable debates are curtailed by the chair.

How does the mayor explain the fact that many grassroots LGBT campaigners in London no longer participate in the forum? What does he say to allegations that it has become an unrepresentative forum attended mostly by pro-Livingstone factions and LGBT groups hoping to get money out of the Greater London authority? What would other mayoral candidates do to rectify this democratic deficit?

Underfunding of LGBT groups and events

The mayor has given millions to black projects, which is a very good thing. The empowerment of ethnic communities is vital to redress social exclusion and discrimination. But Livingstone has granted comparatively little to LGBT projects. The mayor keeps promising LGBT funding but he seems rarely to deliver. He is quite good at verbal support, but little more.

How does Livingstone justify the millions of pounds he and the London development agency have given to black community groups and the largesse provided for the St Patrick’s Day events, compared to the much smaller grants that he has given to Pride London and LGBT community organisations?

In 2006, the mayor gave £175,000 to the St Patrick’s Day festival and £288,000 to the Rise festival – but only £100,000 for the LGBT Pride London festival.

I don’t begrudge support for Irish, Black, Hindu, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and women’s groups and events. The mayor has duty to support all of London’s wonderful diverse communities. He is right to do so. It helps create a more liberal, tolerant and cohesive city.

But shouldn’t there be a more equitable distribution of mayoral funding, with all community events receiving roughly similar levels of financial backing? Or at least there should not be such huge disparities in the mayor’s financial support. Where do the other candidates stand on this question?

Livingstone’s mishandling of these four issues has implications way beyond the LGBT community. It is symptomatic of a style of governance that adversely impacts on many Londoners. As well as Livingstone, all the mayoral candidates need to address this issue, so Londoners know what they will do if they are elected mayor on May 1.

London Mayoral Elections (Part Two)

Ellie Keen — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:59:27 +0000

Labour as the party of neo-colonial intervention

New Statesman Editor Martin Bright is unabashed about his adoption by the neo-conservatives. In a July 2006 Observer article, he explained how he was being “feted by the right” after his exposure of “Whitehall’s love affair with radical Islam” had earned him plaudits from “none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining ‘axis of evil.’” But it “is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name”—a disingenuous statement given Bright’s willingness to ally with the most fervent advocates of American global military power.

Another contributor to the Evening Standard’s campaign against Livingstone is Nick Cohen. A one-time Labour supporter and Observer columnist who postured as a left critic, Cohen is one of the most prominent signatories to the Euston Manifesto, first published in the New Statesman. A paean to “liberal” imperialism, it called for a “new progressive democratic alliance” to defend the policy of military intervention so as to safeguard “democracy.” The manifesto won support from a number of pro-Labour journalists, such as Will Hutton and Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, and was endorsed by William Kristol in the US, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading advocate of war against Iraq.

Writing in the Standard January 9 under the headline “You can do it Boris—just wow us with your true grit,” Cohen informed his readers that he had been through Conservative candidate Boris Johnson’s policies “and found much to admire.” This despite Johnson, an unreconstructed Thatcherite, having had to make a public apology only recently for a 2002 article in which he referred to “piccaninnies” and “tribal warriors” with “watermelon smiles”—the same inflammatory terms utilised by Enoch Powell in his notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech defending racial discrimination and advocating an end to immigration.

The accusation that the government has not been sufficiently resolute in prosecuting the “war on terror” at home is extraordinary. Under Labour, the threat of terrorism has been used to overturn fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Organisations have been banned and people, mainly Muslim students, jailed for reading material on the Internet said to be linked to terrorism.

Bright and Cohen’s evolution underscores the profound rightward shift within a layer of former “leftists” since the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and in response to the decay of the old social democratic parties and trade unions.

Analysing the rush by former pacifists and radicals to demand military intervention against Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the December 1995 statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International, “Imperialist war in the Balkans and the decay of the petty-bourgeois left,” explained how these profound changes had “removed an essential prop for those who engaged in protest politics in a previous period.”

The leftism of this social layer, the statement continued, was based not on the independent capacity of the working class, but on the apparent strength of the Stalinist and social democratic or Labourite bureaucracies. The demise of the latter meant that the “workers movement no longer provides the petty-bourgeois left with the same sources of employment or paths to political influence,” while the policies of free-market deregulation and privatisation had provided a powerful social impulse for their conversion to the side of the bourgeoisie.

For a time, this embrace of Thatcherite economic nostrums could still be combined with a liberal stance on sexual and racial issues. The Labour Party especially promoted identity politics, based on race, religion and sexual preference, as it sought to junk any connection with the working class and social reforms and refashion itself as the preferred party of big business.

Now sections of the bourgeoisie have determined this policy is no longer sufficient and acts as a fetter on its broader, long-term ambitions. If British imperialism is to intervene determinedly in the fight to control strategic markets and resources globally, and particularly in the Middle East, the government must recognise that this will provoke opposition and prepare accordingly. Increasingly, the new mantra is that at home, just as abroad—you are either with us, or against us.

“Leftists” groups sign up to defend Labour

That some of the most vociferous proponents of this doctrine have emerged from the likes of the New Statesman and the Euston Manifesto group is proof of the political putrefaction of the Labour Party. This hollowed-out, bureaucratic apparatus, entirely divorced from any democratic control by the populace, much less the working class that once formed its primary constituency, has functioned as the main political representative of the neo-conservatives in Britain for more than a decade. As such it has become the incubator of the most right-wing, antidemocratic tendencies.

No mention of this is made by those now lining up to defend Livingstone. Rather than alerting working people to the dangers posed by the absence of a genuinely progressive alternative to Labour, they argue that a “progressive alliance” means supporting the very same party that has spawned Bright and his cohorts.

Labour’s Compass group issued a statement signed mostly by Labour MPs and National Executive Committee members—“Progressive forces unite behind Mayor.”

“Livingstone is a standard bearer for real progressive politics,” it claimed. “Of course, like all of us, Livingstone operates in the here and now. For London that means the domination of the Square Mile in the form of financial capitalism. He cannot be expected to address such forces at once or alone….

“The battle lines are clear. It’s them and us. And Ken Livingstone is us. We urge every progressive voter, activist and organisation to get behind the campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone.”

Writing in the Guardian, Seumas Milne argued, “A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.”

Despite the increasingly personal character of the attack on him, Livingstone has said little about the fact that the opposition campaign is led by individuals associated with Labour and its periphery—arguing instead that he should be judged on his record. London is booming, he argues, and the key test is “whether London is ahead of New York” in the “contest for number-one city in the world.” As the official Labour candidate, it is not possible for Livingstone to identify the pronounced right-wing trajectory of his own organisation without its damaging his electoral chances.

As it is, the Economist forecast that Livingstone’s candidacy for the Labour Party was damaging his ability to trade on “Brand Ken.” In the Guardian, February 27, 2008, Sunder Katwala expressed similar fears over Labour’s ability to mobilise a sufficient vote: “In a low-turnout election, Johnson’s ability to mobilise the suburban vote and those uneasy with London’s diversity and openness could take him across the winning line,” Katwala wrote. Livingstone needed to be able to “mobilise London’s broad progressive majority, winning enough support from Lib Dems, Greens and others to see off” the Tory challenge, thereby offering “a major reason to be cheerful about Labour’s chances of political recovery nationally.”

In the drive to engineer such a “recovery,” declared opposition to the “neo-cons” is being used to support the very party that has championed the Bush doctrine of military intervention, the further redistribution of wealth from working people to the rich and the dismantling of democratic rights.

Yet again, the various petty bourgeois left groups have signed up en masse to this political charade.

George Galloway, whose Respect Renewal group split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last year, has announced he will not challenge Livingstone for mayor. “There is an urgent need for change” in London, Galloway has said. “Just not the change from Livingstone to Boris Johnson.”

“In these new and developing circumstances, it would be self-indulgence, a luxury the left can no longer afford, to stand a candidate of the left against Livingstone for mayor.” Galloway has said he intends to form a “progressive slate” for the assembly, with himself as a candidate, to act as a check on the mayor.

The SWP is in the somewhat difficult position of having declared months ago that Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German would run for mayor. But in a statement on her campaign, German went out of her way to stress “I have many points of agreement with Ken Livingstone—his anti-racist and anti-imperialist policies are a credit to London and he has seriously attempted to cut car use in the city…. We should defend Ken against attacks from the right, and we should support him against the Tory candidate Boris Johnson and his right wing agenda.”

“However that does not mean that we can or should be uncritical.”

But what does this mean for the SWP’s campaign? With some relief, German explained that “Everyone has two votes for mayor, for their first and second preferences, so the second votes of the smaller parties can be distributed between the two lead candidates…. It is very important that we don’t let the Tory in, which is why I will be calling for all my voters to give Ken their second preference.”

According to reports, at one election meeting, German dismissed charges that her candidacy would damage Labour’s chances, stating that it would actually help Livingstone because the Single Transferable Vote system meant “we will gain votes for Ken.” In other words, the SWP doesn’t take its own campaign seriously and knows that it will not hurt Labour.

Similarly, for the Socialist Party (formerly the Militant), the elections pose “an invidious choice between a former left who has embraced a big business agenda and a Thatcherite throwback. Both offer neo-liberal policies and will continue to preside over obscene poverty and social deprivation while the City wallows in wealth.”

“The situation is crying out for a new workers’ party but, unfortunately, once more an opportunity has been lost,” it complained, following the decision of unions such as the Rail and Maritime Transport not to stand candidates. This meant there was “no coherent working-class alternative.”

The “Socialist Party is normally opposed to policies of ‘lesser evilism,’” it stated. “But there are occasions when different factors, especially working-class consciousness, compel us to modify our approach. In this case, through gritted teeth, like many London workers, we recommend a second-preference vote for Ken Livingstone.”

There is nothing new in the line-up of the former radical groups. When Livingstone stood as an independent in 2000 they came together to form a joint slate, the London Socialist Alliance, which promoted his candidacy. At the time, they argued that Livingstone’s success could be a force for reinvigorating the party or providing the nucleus for a new workers’ organisation. This was despite Livingstone’s stipulation that he intended to rejoin Labour at some future point. Even when he was readmitted to the party in time for the 2004 elections, these groups called for second preference votes to be cast for Livingstone.

Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party all claim to be involved in the fight to construct a new workers’ party. But when the chips are down, they immediately back Labour as the “progressive” choice. No matter how far Labour goes in its attacks on the working class and its support for neo-colonialism, the various left groups insist that it remains the “lesser evil,” which workers must defend if they are to beat back the attacks of the right.

But if support for Labour is truly a means of defending the essential class interests of working people, then why is there a need for a new party?

In truth, none of these groups believe it is possible to fight for a politically independent workers’ organisation. That is why, whenever the right rears its head—and even if substantial sections of that right are identified with the Labour Party—their response is always the same: defend Labour. One thing is guaranteed: as the election looms ever closer, their currently limited criticisms of Livingstone and the Labour Party will become even more circumspect.

The furore around the London mayoral contest does raise important issues. There is no question that a factional fight over political policy is raging within broad layers of the ruling elite, and within the Labour Party itself. Faced with the significant setbacks suffered by US and British imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospect of economic recession, some are demanding a drastic realignment of domestic politics in line with the battle being waged for global hegemony, which must entail even greater “sacrifice” from the population—especially as regards its democratic rights.

As always, the left groups claim that this can be dealt with by tactical manoeuvres on the electoral front. While warning of the threat from the right, they treat this development as if it can be resolved by putting a cross in the correct place on a ballot paper. But the bitter furore surrounding the London election is not a temporary, conjectural episode. Its roots lie in the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system and the growth of inter-imperialist antagonisms and social tensions this is generating.

The absence of a socialist alternative is not a secondary factor in this situation. It is the fundamental issue confronting working people. So long as the working class does not have any independent means of articulating its opposition to social inequality and the threat of war, the ruling elite are determined to resolve the crisis on their own terms.

London Mayoral Elections (Part One)

Ellie Keen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:03:36 +0000

Labour’s neo-cons and the left apologists for Ken Livingstone

With less than two months to go to the May 1 elections to the Mayor of London and the London Assembly, the contest is becoming ever more super-charged.

The last weeks have seen a barrage of allegations of misconduct against Mayor Ken Livingstone, Labour’s official candidate who is running for his third term in office, and his leading aides. These range from the “wasteful” use of funds, to excessive drinking. The allegations claimed their first scalp last week, when Lee Jasper—who had been the focus of many of the unproven allegations of financial impropriety—resigned his post as Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities when sexually explicit emails he sent to a female friend in a body that receives funding from the Assembly were leaked.

The accusations, spearheaded by the right-wing Evening Standard newspaper, have led to counter-charges of a smear campaign designed to further the political prospects of Conservative candidate Boris Johnson. In turn, a so-called “progressive alliance” has been launched to back Livingstone’s re-election, which is deemed essential in order to safeguard democracy and the rights of ordinary Londoners.

The degree of rancour directed against Livingstone seems extraordinary. Having been forced to run as an independent for the first Mayoral contest in 2000 after he was blocked by the party hierarchy (and then expelled from the party), Livingstone successfully exploited anti-Labour sentiment to defeat the party’s official candidate.

Livingstone’s former reputation as “Red Ken,” built up during his leadership of the Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s, and his preparedness to defy the leadership when it conflicted with his own self-advancement, had convinced Tony Blair that he was too much of a maverick to be trusted with administering the capital’s newly created regional assembly. Having won election, however, Livingstone was at pains to prove his fidelity to Labour and its backers in the City of London. So much so, that the party—at Blair’s behest—bent its own rules in order to smooth Livingstone’s readmittance to membership in early 2004, just in time for him to run successfully as its official candidate.

Livingstone continues to enjoy the support of the Labour leadership and many of the city’s financiers based on his record in building up London as a magnet for global capital. Bloomberg reported that “Growth in London’s financial district, known as the City, has fuelled the UK capital’s biggest economic expansion since World War II, and the Labour Party’s Livingstone, 62, has helped make it happen.” The Mayor “has earned the admiration of many of London’s business people and bankers,” it continued, citing Harvey McGrath, former chief executive officer of the hedge fund Man Group Plc. Livingstone, “works quite hard to get closer” to the needs of financiers, McGrath stated. “He’s done a better job and is more business-friendly than people would have thought.”

“He’s been a very pro-business mayor,” said Nigel Bourne, director of the London office of the Confederation of British Industry.

The evidence bears out such claims. London is the world’s largest international banking centre, with the sixth largest city economy on the globe, generating an estimated 30 percent of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product. Home to 49 billionaires—the greatest concentration in Europe—it is the most expensive city in the world for prime real estate (another reason why the business elite were so enthusiastic about Livingstone’s role in the campaign for the capital to host the 2012 Olympic Games—a significant portion of the costs of which will be born by working people through higher council taxes).

If anything, Livingstone has proven himself even more attuned to the interests of big business than his allies in the Labour leadership. Only last month he denounced the government for its now aborted attempt to tax wealthy “non-doms” (officially not resident in Britain for tax purposes), claiming it would drive investment away from London. Otherwise he has marched in lockstep with the government under both Blair and Gordon Brown—attacking striking London Underground workers as “selfish” and defending Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Condon and the police shooting of Brazilian worker Jean Charles de Menezes.

Only in April 2007 Livingstone stated, “I used to believe in a centralised state economy, but now I accept that there’s no rival to the market in terms of production and distribution” and dismissed any talk of “great ideological conflict.” It is no surprise then that the Economist magazine described Livingstone only last month as a “formidable politician.”

But the Mayor has also sought to buttress his neo-liberal economic policies with radical gestures—such as last year’s oil deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to provide lower-cost fuel for London’s buses—and the assiduous cultivation of relations with the various leaders and groups representing ethnic and religious minorities in the capital.

Such policies have been generally tolerated by the powers that be. There has been a recognition that such an apparently “inclusive” agenda is necessary if Livingstone is to be able to pass himself off as someone sitting “squat on the centre of the political spectrum”—his own description—and not firmly on the right. This is especially true in a city where one-third of the population were born outside the UK and more than 300 languages are spoken. Moreover, Livingstone has been careful to ensure that his populist posturing only applies on international matters and where it does not conflict with the fundamental interests of the City of London.

At any rate, neither the Mayoral post nor the London Assembly are exercises in genuine popular control. Conceived as part of Labour’s regional development initiatives aimed at encouraging international investment into the UK, they function as a means of coordinating and administering the strategic interests of the major corporations. The London Assembly is comprised of just 25 members, 14 from each of the London constituencies (for a city of some 10 million people) and a further 11 from party lists. Its powers are largely confined to “scrutinising” the power of the Mayor, whose own remit concerns budgeting and planning for transport, the police and emergency services, economic development and “cultural strategy.”

Labour’s “liberal” imperialists

The undemocratic character of this set-up, however, combined with the absence of any significant base of support for any of the official parties represented, makes it a focal point for the backdoor political intrigues and vendettas of small numbers of rich and influential people.

In March 2006 the unelected Adjudication Panel—which oversees the Assembly—agreed to suspend Livingstone for four weeks over a private exchange he had with Oliver Finegold, an Evening Standard reporter. The exchange, in which Livingstone referred to Finegold’s journalistic technique as similar to that of a Nazi concentration camp guard, followed a long-standing campaign by the Standard and right-wing Zionists against the Mayor for his condemnation of Israeli violence against the Palestinians and his relations with various Muslim organisations and individuals, such as the Egyptian-born Muslim cleric Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Standard is again prominent in the current allegations against Livingstone. Apparently convinced that the Conservatives may finally have a credible opponent to run against Livingstone in the Mayoral race in Boris Johnson, the newspaper has run almost daily stories charging that taxpayers money has been wasted on funding defunct black organisations, with links to Livingstone’s key ally Jasper. Standard reporter Andrew Gilligan, who was at the centre of the political scandal over the outing of whistleblower and leading nuclear expert Dr. David Kelly, alleged that “at least £2.5 million of public money has been given to a shadowy network of businesses and NGOs directly linked to Mr. Jasper and his close friends and associates, many of them supposedly operating out of the same small room in Kennington.”

Although the police ruled out any criminal investigation, the Standard has kept up its stream of accusations including the claims of Atma Singh, a former high-level adviser to Livingstone, that members of Socialist Action (SA) —a tiny group of former radicals that long ago buried themselves in the Labour Party—had infiltrated city hall and were working to fashion the capital as a “beacon for socialism.”

Far from having uncovered a long-kept secret, both Jasper and the Socialist Action Caucus are known political quantities with nothing to do with socialist politics. Jasper, a long-time ally of Livingstone dating back to the days of the GLC, is a longstanding Labour Party member and black nationalist who has utilised racial policies to cultivate relations with the police and business groups. Socialist Action, which supports the largely defunct Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, has also worked with Livingstone for years. And—as befits an organisation that has remained true to Labour regardless of the Iraq invasion and its big business agenda—neither SA leader John Ross’s former position as economic adviser to Livingstone, nor Redmond O’Neill’s post as deputy chief of staff, have contradicted the right-wing political trajectory of either Livingstone or the party generally.

It is doubtful that any of the Standard’s latest “revelations” would have been seen as anything other than a continuation of its long-running vendetta—even the staunchly Conservative Telegraph noted that “one need only scan the Labour benches at Westminster—and the Cabinet table—to find numerous former revolutionaries”—were it not for the addition of a new political factor in the anti-Livingstone campaign, concentrated around the pro-Labour New Statesman magazine.

It was New Statesman editor Martin Bright who presented the Channel 4 “Dispatches” television programme, charging the mayor with “financial profligacy, cronyism and links to a Trotskyite faction conspiring to transform London into a ‘socialist city state,’” in the words of the Guardian.

Writing in the Standard last month under the headline “I now believe Ken is a disgrace to his office,” Bright said he felt it was his “duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours.”

Bright says that he arrived at this insight in the course of his investigative research for Channel 4 Television. Until then, he had believed “Ken Livingstone was a flawed but charismatic leader of the capital. We had fallen out over his support for radical Islamists, but I thought much of what he had done was refreshingly bold.” Faced with evidence to contrary, “the scales finally dropped from my eyes. I am only ashamed it took me so long.”

Bright is not the objective bystander he makes out. Over the last months, he has emerged as a strident critic of what is described as Labour’s “appeasement” of Islamic “extremists.” He has authored numerous reports pointing to the Labour government’s inconsistency in its prosecution of a “war on terror” while maintaining political relations with groups associated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Bright complains that the government’s policy towards Muslim groups in Britain is driven “by the Foreign Office’s determination to engage with Islamist radicals.”

Several of these articles have been compiled as a pamphlet by Policy Exchange. The think tank, which is described as the most influential “on the right,” was itself embroiled in controversy only recently over allegations that documents it circulated to prove the influence of Islamic extremists in Britain’s mosques were fakes.

Policy Exchange is headed by Charles Moore, former editor of the Thatcherite Spectator magazine—a position also held previously by Boris Johnson. Another leading light is Anthony Browne, again a contributor to the Spectator, who has claimed that Labour’s immigration policies will mean whites becoming a minority in the UK by 2100; evidence Browne claims of a government “whose intellectual faculties are [so] crippled by political correctness.”

The think tank’s research director is Dean Godson, who worked as Special Assistant to John Lehman, a signatory to the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, from 1987 to 1989. It is alleged that when Godson was sacked by the Daily Telegraph, Editor Martin Newland explained, “It’s OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel, it’s OK to be pro-American but not look as if you’re taking instructions from Washington.”

Writing in the Times in 2006, Godson had attacked the government along lines similar to those employed by Bright. Labour’s failure to ban the radical Islamist Hizb-ut-Tahir had exposed “Whitehall’s greatest weakness—the war of ideas,” he wrote, calling for a revival of the type of political propaganda employed during the “Cold War, [when] organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers.”

To be continued