News from the New Party

Ken's trots

Livingstone came to public prominence, and some notoriety, in the early 1980s as the far-left but nominally Labour leader of the Greater London Council. The electorate had no say whatever, even indirectly, in his being GLC leader. The leader of the Labour group who had campaigned in the GLC elections was Andrew (now Lord) McIntosh, a moderate. After the election, the Labour caucus within the GLC deposed McIntosh and installed Livingstone in his place. It was flagrant machine politics, and an indication of the undemocratic instincts of Labour at that time. During his leadership, Livingstone's principal contributions to the life of the City were the "Fares Fair" policy on public transport, which was a straight subsidy to tourists and was judged illegal by the Law Lords in 1981; the creation of numerous sinecures at public expense at County Hall; interventions in national politics for which he held no responsibility; and interventions in international politics for which he held no responsibility and about which he knew next to nothing.

The nadir was reached, for me at least, when Livingstone addressed a demonstration against Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982, and The Observer asked him if he believed the Jews had a right to a state. He answered that they did not. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I opposed the Lebanon War of that year, and have never changed my mind on it. But my reasons were not Livingstone's case. Livingstone's position was - as an SDP member of the GLC and Times columnist, Ann Sofer, pointed out at the time - indistinguishable on that issue from the views of the National Front. It was inflammatory for the leader of municipal government in a great cosmopolitan capital city to utter such views, quite apart from the intrinsic demerits of those opinions.

"To understand why Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London, you have to grasp that he has never moved away from the grimy conspirators of the totalitarian left, who have always despised the democratic traditions of the Labour movement. There is a queasiness about dragging them into the light because so many of the baby boomers now in power wasted their youth in Marxist-Leninist politics. But it is better to overcome queasiness than fail to treat a sickness and Ken Livingstone began by travelling with the sickest sect of them all: the Workers' Revolutionary party."