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Weekly Worker 548 Thursday October 14 2004

A man of all seasons

Left radical or “bog-standard New Labour politician”? Eddie Ford takes a look at the history and practice of the ‘red’ mayor of London

As extensively detailed in these pages, the preparations for this year’s European Social Forum have been characterised by successive rounds of underhand manoeuvrings and shadowy wheeling and dealing. Essentially, this has seen comrades from Socialist Action and the Socialist Workers Party try every trick in the book in order to squeeze out all dissident/independent voices from decision-making and influence.

Nothing new there, you might say: regrettably, control-freakery is just second nature to such groups. However, this time round we have seen the SWP-SA, along with their fellow-travellers, work overtime to transform the ESF into a massive publicity stunt for the London mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thanks to their bureaucratic twisting and turning, Livingstone’s imprimatur is stamped all over this week’s proceedings.

Clearly, Livingstone is using the ESF as a launch pad for his own further ambitions, which no doubt stretch to No10 Downing Street. But in many ways we should not be surprised by such a turn of events: Livingstone is an accomplished political operator, with a near genius for manipulation and backroom freewheeling.

So how best to sum the man up? Commonly used words by those who have seen Livingstone close-up include ‘brilliant’, ‘charming’ and ‘charismatic’ on the one hand, and ‘smarmy’, ‘self-regarding’, ‘vain’ and ‘egotistical’ on the other. And bridging the two extremes are terms such as ‘chameleon’, ‘mercurial’, ‘populist’, ‘maverick’, ‘individualist’, ‘opportunist’, and so on. Livingstone himself cheerfully admits: “I love meetings and plotting. I didn’t get where I am today without plotting” (see The Guardian special report, January 19 2000).

Here we get nearer to the truth. Though his talent for near effortless ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘tactical’ ideological flip-flopping might bewilder (or disappoint) some, it is not too hard to discern a consistent thread to Livingstone’s political history - a ruthless combination of Machiavellian scheme-mongering and naked careerism, shot through with his carefully-cultivated ‘cheeky chappie’ image.

For Livingstone, if for no one else, it has proved to be a winning formula. One day he will be penning praises for the utterly unlamented Gerry Healey of the Workers Revolutionary Party (in his foreword to C Lotz, P Feldman Gerry Healy - a revolutionary life London 1994). The next he will be writing well-remunerated restaurant reviews for Esquire or the London Evening Standard. It was not entirely for nothing that Livingstone’s ‘official’ biographer, John Carvel, entitled his book Turn again Livingstone (London 1999).

In 1999 the political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, astutely noted: “He has learnt from New Labour how to be all things - all Kens - to all men.” He added: “There’s more. With a ruthlessness which might even attract the grudging admiration of Peter Mandelson, our Ken has been dumping any ideology, ditching any previous commitment and dropping any policy that might stand between him and power” (The Observer October 24 1999). Instructively, shortly after taking control of the ruling Labour group on the Greater London Council in May 1981, Ken Livingstone told a journalist from The Observer over lunch that “it is very difficult to dislike me” (special report - November 14 1999). You could say, then, that Livingstone is a man for all seasons.

However, it would be a mistake, as some have intemperately done, to simply conclude from all this that Livingstone is not, in the broadest sense of the term, a man ‘of the left’. Hence it was perfectly correct for the CPGB to call for a critical vote for ‘Red Ken’ when he was deprived of the chance of becoming Labour’s official candidate for the post of mayor in 1999 by the control-freaks in New Labour’s high command. Those leftists that self-righteously denounced our call as ‘unprincipled’ contemptuously turned their back on the possibility that Livingstone’s unofficial candidacy and campaign might produce a left split from Labour.

More than that, though, in terms of Livingstone’s own political origins and ‘thought-world’, he clearly identifies himself with ideas and values which are closely associated in the popular mind, and The Sun (for which he was once a columnist), with ‘socialism’ or ‘the left’ - whether loony or not. Livingstone has gone on record as saying, “I call myself a radical socialist, with the emphasis on ‘radical’. Not a Marxist” (The Observer November 14 1999). There is no reason to think that Livingstone is being either disingenuous or cynical here.

GLC years
It is important to remember that the comprehensive-school-educated Livingstone was born and came of age during the long, dull Harold Macmillan years, when he felt the country was being run by “bumbling country gentlemen”, to use Livingstone’s own words (The Observer November 14 1999).

Naturally, the grouse-shooting, aristocratic Tory prime minister, Macmillan, was the living embodiment of everything that Livingstone detested. By contrast, the mayor of London’s vision is of a modern, efficient, bureaucratic-technocratic ‘socialism’. According to Bill Bush, his then chief of staff at the Greater London Council, Livingstone was “an astonishingly good bureaucrat. He read papers fast and got the point. He was good at delegating” (ibid - somewhat ironically, Bush is now employed by Downing Street, where one of his claims to fame was helping to compile a ‘dodgy’ dossier of semi-scurrilous material to be deployed against Livingstone).

Livingstone’s skill at “delegating” has proved invaluable throughout his political career - first as GLC leader, then as mayor. Nor can any impartial observer of the machinations surrounding the ESF deny that he has chosen his ‘delegates’ well, seeing the degree of success his henchmen in SA et al have had in stitching up the whole show.

Significantly, the Tory-hating Livingstone joined the Labour Party in the turbulent and politically symbolic year of 1968 - just as the more revolutionary-leaning elements were deserting it (some to later skulk back in, of course). In certain respects Livingstone found an empty husk, making it a near perfect vehicle for this ambitious and energetic man.

Subsequently, he earned a reputation as an opportunist and carpetbagger by moving swiftly through spells on Lambeth and Camden councils, and on the GLC in Norwood, Hackney and Paddington. However, it does have to be borne in mind that these accusations of opportunism, carpetbagging, etc are probably no more than envious sour grapes from those staid rightwingers in the Labour Party who were so easily out-manoeuvred by Livingstone.

He became a full-time councillor in the London Borough of Camden in 1973. For most Londoners, however, his name meant next to nothing until the day after Labour won control of the GLC in May 1981. Livingstone ousted the rightwing leader of the Labour group, Andrew (now Lord) McIntosh, who narrowly lost the vote. With the throne now empty, the 35-year-old Livingstone was anointed the new prince.

Livingstone’s ascension to power on the GLC has been a matter of some controversy. Indeed, Livingstone’s victory has often been described as a “coup” or “putsch” - that is certainly how McIntosh sees it, fairly unsurprisingly. Though communists shed no tears for the defeated rightwinger - good riddance, to be frank – the noble lord’s account of how he was unseated supply us with a valuable insight into how Livingstone works - then and now. McIntosh recounted: “Livingstone came to power as a complete machine politician, spending his time on internal battles within the Labour Party rather than fighting the Conservative Party”.

McIntosh also recalled in 1999: “Whenever he was asked whether he would stand against me, he equivocated. He’s been doing exactly the same thing [about] whether he would stand as an independent if he were not to be a Labour candidate. A few people, a few leftwingers, some of them Trotskyite (not Ken - he never had the ideological commitment to be a Trotskyite) they met together, they decided a common line. They then got into larger groups and decided a common line. They then got into the Greater London Labour Party and by having a common line they often outvoted the trade unions and more moderate people” (The Guardian January 19 2000).

Hideous Healey
McIntosh’s rueful observations certainly have a ring of truth to them. More importantly, they point to one of the less savoury aspects of the rise and continued rise of ‘Red’ Ken - that is, his often unscrupulous use of various semi-secretive British far left groups in order to help achieve his aims.

Having said that, this unedifying history, and political practice, reflects far more badly on these organisations than it does on Livingstone. After all, he does not claim to be a Marxist, unlike those who used to staff the International Marxist Group or the grotesque Workers Revolutionary Party. In truth, the sometimes amoral antics of many of these IMGers and WRPers - not to mention the current-day behaviour of the furtive SA sect inside the ESF - besmirches the name of Marxism and communism.

As alluded to by McIntosh, prior to his GLC “coup” in 1981, Livingstone had been busy building connections and alliances with the numerous Trotskyist entryists burrowing away deep inside the bowels of the Labour Party. As Livingstone told John Carvel, “I have always operated within the Labour Party and was prepared to work with any left groupings inside or outside it on a series of policy issues. The relationship goes hot and cold” (J Carvel Turn again Livingstone London 1999, p27).

Many of these hard-bitten entryists and allies of Livingstone were anticipating the sudden, if not apocalyptic, collapse of the entire capitalist system, which could be ‘sparked off’ by even the smallest economic dispute. This ‘spark’ would plunge the country into revolutionary turmoil and, if the masses foolishly ignored or spurned their visionary leadership, a military coup or bloody fascist counterrevolution was inevitable – all as foretold, of course, by Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme. No wonder the comrades slept with their boots on.

In reality, what this belief in historical immanence promoted was a cynical ‘anything goes’ culture, where political openness and honesty came to be seen as a frivolous - possibly ‘bourgeois liberal’ - luxury. The revolution is just around the corner, comrades: follow me, and be quick about it. In this way every factional deal and backroom manoeuvre could be justified. Here is where the schemes of the Trotskyist left intersected with the ambitions of the up and coming Ken Livingstone - summed up by the old maxim, ‘You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours’. Livingstone’s far left political relationships were built up during these days of febrile revolutionary-bureaucratic plotting and phantasmagoria: exactly the sort of atmosphere - by his own admission - that Livingstone so revelled and excelled in.

Livingstone’s most famous, or notorious, relationship from this period was of course with the ‘dirty old man’ of British politics, the hideous Gerry Healey of the WRP. Obviously there is no space here to go into all the details, but Healey, in the late 1940s was encouraged by the leadership of the then Fourth International (essentially the American-based Socialist Workers Party) to go into the British Labour Party. In 1950 he formed the faction known as ‘the club’ and then in 1953 joined the split in the Fourth International instigated by James P Cannon and became the nominal leader of the International Committee of the Fourth International. He reconstituted ‘the club’ as the Socialist Labour League in 1966, and then in 1973 as the Workers Revolutionary Party.

What is germane to our examination of Livingstone is that, although from 1974 onwards the WRP was steadily losing members and became ever madder and more isolated from the rest of the broader labour movement, eventually to implode, it remained wealthy enough to produce a daily colour newspaper, the truly diabolical News Line. Much of the monies for this printing enterprise coming from subsidies and printing contracts with various Middle East regimes (such as those great revolutionary proletarian stalwarts Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and Muammar Gaddafi).

During these flush times Healey sponsored the production of Labour Herald - also in colour - which included Livingstone amongst its leading lights. This ‘arrangement’ proved invaluable for Livingstone during his constant factional battles inside the Labour Party and for that service he remained eternally grateful. He repaid his debt to Healey with kind words in his foreword to Gerry Healey: a revolutionary life where he reveals that, though the two had “fundamental differences” (all unexplained), it had been “a privilege to have worked with Gerry Healy” (pviii). What is more, News Line had always been “thorough and objective” in its coverage of the GLC, according to the fulsome Livingstone. Tellingly, in his review of the Healey biography for The Guardian he claimed that MI5 was “responsible” for the demise of the WRP (September 6 1994).

Red Ken’s later relationship with those now in the Socialist Action grouplet took on similar contours to his involvement with Healy and the WRP - and has proved to be equally rewarding for all concerned, it seems. SA was launched when the International Marxist Group entered the Labour Party in 1981. Officially named the Socialist League, it became universally known by the name of its publication, Socialist Action. Its character changed after a wave of splits in the late 1980s, which in 1985 produced the International Group, later to merge with what was to become the International Socialist Group. With the collapse of the Soviet Union disillusionment set in and, rather than attempt an honest political evaluation of its own history and of Trotskyism in general, Socialist Action opted instead for even ‘deeper entryism’ inside the Labour Party.

An essential aspect of this strategy was the fine-tuning of a paranoiac political secrecy and the obsequious nestling up to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs - one Ken Livingstone in particular. SA ceased publication of the journal of the same name in 2001, but that does not mean for a moment that the comrades have decided to close down for business and spend more time in the garden. In fact, quite the opposite. The comrades have popped up in prominent positions in organisations like the National Abortion Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, etc, and played a active role in the various ‘stop the war’ type movements that sprung up around Iraq, Afghanistan and ex-Yugoslavia. The SA also acts as a tight, disciplined faction inside the student Broad Left organisation and, as can be seen this week in London, has assumed leading roles - under Livingstone’s guidance - in the ESF.

We have a clear political pattern here. Since his GLC days, Livingstone has been adept at building up systems and networks of political patronage and surrounding himself with loyal courtiers, turning individuals and groups into his more than willing supplicants. At times this can take on the ugly shape of naked jobbery. For example, comrade Redmond O’Neil of SA was rewarded with a cushy £111,000-a-year job as Livingstone’s adviser on transport.

Populism
Another distinctive, and utterly consistent, feature of Livingstone’s politics is his undoubted populist touch, combined with a good feel for the dramatic headline and eminently quotable ‘sound bite’. Over the years this has allowed him to present his left face.

Thus, one of his first gestures as GLC leader was to scandalously dispense with the official leader’s car and he continued to live in his humble Maida Vale bedsit. He refused to attend the 1981 royal wedding, choosing instead to spend the day in the office. He welcomed the mother of an IRA hunger striker to County Hall and spoke often of the struggle for “a free united Ireland”. He doled out money to scores of gay, black and women’s groups, famously announcing: “Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything” (The Guardian January 19 2000). Naturally, such utterances and practices provoked paroxysms of rage on a near daily basis amongst the rightwing media - as intended, of course. This enabled him to build up his left credentials, both inside and outside the Labour Party.

Nor did Livingstone’s flair for populism desert him when he became the Labour MP for Brent East. In his maiden speech he accused MI5, quite correctly, of carrying out state-authorised assassinations in Northern Ireland. On another occasion he went on to describe the House of Commons as being like “the Natural History Museum, except not all the exhibits are stuffed” and denounced MPs for spending too much time “at the bars and brothels of Westminster”. Additionally, Livingstone has long championed all manner of politically correct causes like multiculturalism, feminism, anti-fascism, green environmentalism, pacifistic anti-nuclearism, etc. It is with some justification that Livingstone can argue that many of his policies were ahead of their time, such as when in 1982 he caused uproar for calling the Metropolitan Police “insensitive, reactionary and racist” (quoted in The Observer November 14 1999 - after the Macpherson report, of course, this point of view became virtually official government policy).

Yet, as we have seen time and time again, in the hands of Livingstone nominally progressive campaigns are drained of all democratic content, being organised and developed in such a way as present no challenge whatsoever to the system of governance in the UK. This is surely inevitable though, given the palpable fact that Livingstone does not advocate or articulate anything which remotely resembles a working class programme.

Left councils
Take the still fondly remembered GLC policy of ‘Fares Fair’, a policy of subsidy for London Transport in 1981 that saw ticket prices reduced and passenger numbers rise. Livingstone became forever associated with this policy, though it is often forgotten that all he was actually carrying through was Labour’s pledge to bring in a massive cut in bus and tube fares - the Labour election manifesto promised a 25% reduction. Livingstone went one better and actually delivered a 32% cut.

Predictably, the Fares Fair policy proved to be extremely popular and it did manage to reduce car numbers in London by some 15%. It lasted for a mere three months before it was challenged by the Tory Bromley council, who wretchedly argued they were ‘unfairly’ subsidising a transport system that did not even reach them way out there in the leafy suburbs. In December 1981 the law lords - or “vandals in ermine” to use Livingstone’s apt words - overturned the Fares Fair policy (The Guardian January 19 2000).

Given the subsequent wellspring of discontent and anger directed against the Tories - and their friends in the House of Lords - Livingstone certainly had the raw material to organise and front a militant, self-empowering working class campaign of resistance, which could have truly rattled the Tory government. However, he did no such thing. Given the choice between direct confrontation with the government, or Labour local government business as usual with a few added leftwing frills and poses, ‘red’ Ken chose the latter.

This was most dramatically highlighted during the GLC’s campaign against its proposed abolition - effected by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. It made no attempt to forge closer link with the union rank and file or energise the working class as a whole. Rather, it resorted to a mushy and pathetically ineffectual cross-class appeal to ‘all Londoners’, which was akin to signing its own death warrant. Furthermore, the GLC opposition to the pernicious rate-capping laws introduced by the Tories was non-existent.
Then again, this was hardly astonishing, seeing how the local government Labour left in 1981 had opted for the disastrous strategy of rate rises as its answer to Tory cuts in public spending.
Livingstone’s GLC had not dissented from this course. Naturally, the rate-rise ‘strategy’ was presented by various people - including, amongst others, the editors of London Labour Briefing - as the rebirth of radical leftwing politics. In fact it sent out the unmistakable signal that the labour left had raised the white flag even before the battle had begun for real.

Lambeth, where the left had taken control in the late 70s, pioneered the general retreat. Ted Knight opted for cuts within two months of the Tory victory in 1979. The local Labour Party forced him to rescind them; but in April 1980 he pushed through rent and rate rises, and in April 1981 introduced a 10% cut in public spending. Ken Livingstone said in Socialist Organiser - the paper of what is now the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who were then also close allies of Livingstone - just before his election to the leadership of the GLC that a left GLC would, “wherever there is an industrial dispute in London, go down and support it” (see John Bloxam London Labour Briefing August 1985). Within weeks of coming to power Livingstone led the GLC into a bitter conflict with the National Union Railworkers, a striking precedent for his current vendetta against the RMT - which has disgracefully seen him urge union members to cross picket lines.

Obviously, rate rises were, like cuts in services, another attack on the working class. They were not a preparation for, but an alternative to, a strategy of using the left Labour-controlled councils as a temporary fortress around which to rally and galvanise the working class and local communities into battle against the hated Tory government. Instead the local government left became locked into a futile and unwinnable war of attrition that eventually resulted in inevitable rout. The working class were reduced to the role of passive spectators in the bureaucratic-legal guerrilla warfare between the Tories and the Labour lefts. This culminated in the grotesque spectacle of the Militant Tendency-controlled Liverpool council hiring taxis to deliver redundancy notices to its employees. Instead of coordinated resistance across the country, we had wholesale collapse and demoralisation.

During the 1980s the labour left, including Ken Livingstone, had proved themselves to be politically bankrupt, and in many ways they prepared the ground for the Tories’ relatively painless imposition of rate-capping and general erosion of local democracy throughout the country as a whole.

Red-baiting
His devotion to the eternal spirit of Gerry Healey notwithstanding, we cannot ignore Livingstone’s ignoble history of red-baiting. Indeed, his tendency to accuse MI5 of targeting him when in a political fix of some sort has to be one of his most unattractive traits. This was seen when we in the CPGB had the temerity during the 1992 general election to stand against him in his local Brent East constituency (we had offered to withdraw in his favour if he would just agree to support a raft of elementary pro-working class demands - an offer he ignored - but this did not stop our SWP comrades from levelling the curious charge of “third period Stalinism” against us).

In the end our candidate, Anne Murphy, stood against Livingstone to expose his then left posturing, particularly on Ireland. During a public debate with all the election candidates, Livingstone got seriously rattled when heckled on the question. Almost comically, this resulted in BBC TV’s Newsroom South East screening prime-time shots of Livingstone accusing the CPGB of being “MI5 agents”.

This was a disgraceful outburst, revealing contempt for what should be the basic working class norms of debate. Nor do we communists put it past him to repeat such a trick. Also, such remarks are astoundingly hypocritical, given the fact that Livingstone has publicly stated that “we should ban the British National Party” and “defeat them using all the powers of the state” (The Independent April 28 1999). Presumably, “all the powers of the state” would include MI5 and special branch?

None of this is to deny, of course, that the Labour Party establishment and other “dark forces” used every trick in the book to prevent Livingstone winning the mayoral nomination. Nor is it to deny that over the years Livingstone’s affairs have been subject to far more media scrutiny than your average bourgeois MP. It is also reasonable to surmise it would fit an MI5 spook agenda to keep this little pot boiling.

Darren Johnson, the former Green Party candidate for London mayor and disillusioned ex-‘Ken-ist’, recently told Andrew Rawsley: “Cut away Livingstone’s radical rhetoric and you find a bog-standard New Labour politician” (The Observer June 6 2004). To adopt such a viewpoint would be a big mistake. Livingstone is a left populist with lofty ambitions. In no way should partisans of the working class and the oppressed underestimate his well-honed political skills and undiminished ambitions.