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Boris Johnson pulls out of Mayors for Peace

Ellie Keen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:43:21 +0000

Last month, Boris Johnson announced the withdrawal of London’s membership of the global ‘Mayors for Peace’ initiative. This was founded by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1982, in an effort to prevent any other city going through similar suffering.

In 1945, atom bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US air force, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the devastating consequences of radiation poisoning affecting subsequent generations. Since that time, mayors of those cities have felt a responsibility to make sure people understand the consequences: ‘to prevent any repetition of the A-bomb tragedy, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have continually sought to tell the world about the inhumane cruelty of nuclear weapons and have consistently urged that nuclear weapons be abolished.’

Mayors for Peace is hardly an extremist organisation. There are currently 2,277 member cities in 129 countries, including Paris, Berlin, Rome, Ottawa, Los Angeles and Sydney. Members are drawn from across the political spectrum. Tadatoshi Akiba, the Mayor of Hiroshima, believes that the role of city mayors in raising awareness of nuclear weapons is key, given that cities are the targets of nuclear weapons.

We were aware when Boris Johnson was elected that he supported Britain’s nuclear weapons system Trident, as well as the war on Iraq, but there is no reason for him to reject participation in an international body committed to the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

Every Conservative government has supported Britain’s participation in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the goal of which is global nuclear disarmament. This decision suggests that Boris Johnson is retreating from that common goal.

This decision is insulting to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the work of their mayors for global peace, and goes against the views of the majority of the British people, who support global nuclear disarmament.

So why has Boris Johnson pulled out? Does he have no concern for peace? Mayors for Peace was established so that cities and their residents need no longer fear nuclear annihilation — that cities should no longer be the targets of nuclear weapons. Is Boris Johnson giving up on that goal?

Johnson’s approach is in marked contrast to that of the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Ken is a strong supporter of the peace movement and was a staunch ally during his terms in office and his moral commitment to peace and disarmament helped to work towards a culture of peace in London. This was demonstrated in many ways, not only on the nuclear issue, but also on the anti-war issue and — drawing this more widely — on building constructive and harmonious relationships between London’s many communities. In all of these areas, I believe he was in line with the majority opinions of London’s residents and working in their best interests. As Tadatoshi Akiba says, it is the residents of cities that suffer most in war.

In very stark contrast recently, was the different experiences of the two visits of President Bush, firstly in 2003, and secondly just a few weeks ago. In 2003, Mayor Livingstone supported our protests against Bush’s visit, and he welcomed the disabled US Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic to City Hall, to pay tribute to his work for peace. Our rally and demonstration proceeded peacefully and unimpeded. During Bush’s recent visit, the anti-war movement was prevented from demonstrating in Whitehall — signalling unnecessary restrictions on our right to protest — and a number of protestors were on the receiving end of police brutality. It is to be hoped that these incidents are not symptomatic of a new attitude in London, contemptuous of those who struggle for peace and disarmament, and cavalier with our right to peaceful protest.

London’s Embarrassment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police powers increased by new London mayor

tim — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:24:18 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actions do not match

tim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:55:15 +0000

Those behind the demand for a third runway and a sixth terminal stress the jobs that would be created, but what really motivates them is the profits that they foresee.

That might be bearable but for the severe effects that the development will have on the environment and on the lives of the people living in the region of the airport.

Pressing ahead with expansion puts the government in a difficult position, given its frequent verbal commitments to combating climate change.

Unfortunately, its actions do not match what it says.

The government claims that the planned development meets noise and air quality targets, but it discounts the reality that the entire village of Sipson, with about 700 homes, would be utterly destroyed.

Nor will that be the end of the matter.

An expanded Heathrow, with a new runway and increased passenger numbers, will put greater strain on the already existing M4 and M25 motorways that serve the airport.

It is inevitable that the roads lobby will already be preparing the case to expand these motorways or to create another, leading to the further concreting over of another part of the overcrowded south-east of England.

The government ought to reject the short-sighted short-termism of the motorway and airline lobbies.

It should expand and modernise the environmentally friendly railways, with exclusive high-speed tracks to obviate the need for short-haul flights and take a conscious decision to drive down rail prices to encourage passengers to switch their means of travel.

Tube chaos

Tory Mayor Boris Johnson owes an apology to all London Underground staff who suffered physical and verbal assault at the weekend.

He should also apologise to all citizens in the capital for the chaos to which their Tube system was reduced by a minority of anti-social elements who took advantage of the mayor’s political stunt.

What happened on Saturday night should not have surprised anyone.

It was the logical result of too much drink taken in the midst of crowds too big to control by Tube staff and police.

Rail union RMT leader Bob Crow had already pointed out the impossible task handed to staff of carrying out the mayor’s unthought-through plan to ban alcohol on public transport.

The main problem for staff is not someone who opens up a can of beer or who sips from a hip flask on a Tube.

Problems arise when people roll into stations already steaming, after hours spent in pubs or City clubs, and look to have a go at staff carrying out their duties.

The mayor’s “Look how tough I am on yobs” gimmick is useless in tackling the anti-social behaviour witnessed on Saturday night and the similar misconduct that public transport staff suffer every other night of the year.

Instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head, he, like government ministers, would be far better served listening to the people who are at the sharp end of this problem.

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)

London bus drivers to get DNA ‘spit kits’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

London Meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The political choice facing London could not be clearer

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:15:13 +0000

It’s as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we’ve been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone’s manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers’ cooperatives, read the Arab women’s network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London’s Muslims.

Leading the charge until now has been the capital’s only paid-for daily newspaper, the Evening Standard, which is to all intents and purposes running the Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s campaign for the mayoral election in May. But now most of the national press has fallen in behind, as stories have multiplied of Livingstone’s whisky tippling, alleged dodgy grants to black businesses and a “secret Marxist cell” of advisers intent on turning London into a “socialist city state”, or maybe fomenting a “bourgeois democratic revolution” – the specifics were never quite clear.

The trigger for this retro onslaught was Monday’s almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it 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”. Quite how Channel 4 managed to describe an hour of primetime vilification as a “fair and balanced investigation” with a straight face will be a mystery to most of those who watched a programme without a single supportive interview. Instead, we were treated to a hotchpotch of allegations and denunciations from disgruntled ex-employees and political opponents, ranging from the bizarre and sub-McCarthyite to the more serious but unproven.

Among them was an attack on Livingstone’s deal with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to subsidise half-price travel for London’s unemployed, his dialogue with non-violent Islamist groups, the use of public funds to commission research for his dispute over multiculturalism with the then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the well-aired fact that several aides have been members of the one-time Trotskyist group Socialist Action – though since they have been working happily with the police and City grandees for the past eight years, that might seem to be of somewhat specialist interest. Most of the real issues that will dominate the mayoral elections – housing, transport, crime, the environment – barely got a walk-on part. But the programme was certainly an effective party political broadcast on behalf of Johnson.

What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain’s main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the “war on terror” – though Bright opposed the Iraq invasion – and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: “I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.”

As the most powerful British politician to have opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars and supported engagement with mainstream political Islam, Livingstone has naturally attracted the enmity of the neocons. After hearing Bright dismiss Chávez’s administration as a “government with links to Iran and cocaine-smuggling guerrillas and accused of human rights abuses”, it should come as no surprise that he, Cohen and their friends prefer to see a high Tory elected mayor of London rather than the radical Labour incumbent.

To the rest of London, it’s scarcely news that London’s mayor has his faults, or controversial that he should be held to account. It’s right that the less than 1% of the London Development Agency’s budget that went on grants to failed business startups should be properly investigated, even if that isn’t a bad record compared with the private sector. You’d never know it from all the chatter about Bolshevik cabals, but there’s also a strong left critique of Livingstone: for his embrace of the City and property developers, for example, and defence of the Metropolitan police commissioner over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

But that’s not what will be at stake in May’s election. The choice will be between two candidates: one who has pioneered congestion charging and cut traffic by 70,000 cars a day, pushed up the supply of affordable housing, boosted bus ridership by one and a half million journeys a day, abolished fares for under-18s, is preparing to introduce emissions charging and free public transport for pensioners and has played a key role in cutting crime and maintaining community relations during a tense and dangerous period. On the other hand, you have a Thatcherite who thinks it’s witty to refer to Africans as “piccaninnies” and regrets the end of colonialism, is an enthusiastic Bush and Iraq war supporter, opposed the Kyoto treaty, and is against the welfare state and the “teaching” of homosexuality in schools.

The choice could hardly be starker. No other candidate is in with a shout. Despite his record, Johnson’s media profile and geniality mean he is the first serious challenge the mayor has had to face. With Livingstone and Johnson only one point apart in the latest opinion poll, the Tories have scented blood. Johnson’s decision to hire the ruthless Lynton Crosby, who masterminded four election victories for John Howard in Australia, should be a warning. The Tory candidate knows he’ll make little headway among the non-white third of London’s electorate, so expect some dog-whistle appeals to white voters, perhaps dressed up as broadsides against political correctness. 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.