A mouthful of Sugar makes Livingstone more than palatable:
Although I’m conscientious about my civic responsibilities and I always vote I’ll be utterly frank when I admit this London Mayor’s election hasn’t really engaged me.
Perhaps I’m too old to be excited by Boris. Perhaps I’m too jaded to be tickled by Ken. I’m certainly too sensible to be persuaded by Mr Brian Paddick – though he’s is a nice enough gay man and there are those straight and gay who reason that to be enough for another gay man to vote for someone.
All in all I was going to vote on 4th May and leave matters there….
Then, earlier this week Lord Sugar tweeted his 100,000 followers and advised them (and the rest of us) not to vote for Ken Livingstone in the London Mayoralty elections.
The one thing you can say about Lord Sugar, without running the risk of being sued for slander, is that he is never short of an opinion. And the social media ensure he’s never short of an opportunity to voice it.
Lord Sugar suffers that delusion of most self-made entrepreneurs that running government – local, regional, national or supranational – is rather like running a successful business.
Sugar misunderstands that voters are not as easily cowed as employees.
That’s one of the blessings of the secret ballot.
I’m sure Lord Sugar would like all his employees to vote as he directed. Lord Sugar likes to be thought of as an unerring Cassandra with a unique gift for picking winners – always the sorcerer to some dumb apprentice. But I’m afraid when Lord Sugar speaks he does not always utter the sweetest truths.
But I’m pleased he spoke out because it made me consider what’s really on offer to those Londoners who may decide to use their vote in ten days or so…
I say may vote, for, despite the coalition government’s promises to the contrary, London remains a region where there are tens of thousands fewer voters on the electoral register than are entitled to vote.
This disenfranchisement of the poor underclass is one of the gravest failures of the political class to Democracy of my lifetime.
Neither Mayor Johnson nor the Deputy Prime Minister Clegg and his cohort of constitutional reformers have done a single thing to change that two years after they assured us that once the Electoral Reform Act was made a statute it would become their highest priority. But they spend fine words with a profligate’s ease.
The polls are telling us that Boris Johnson the blonde charmer of city hall will win tidily on second preferences. He may well. Whether he will deserve to do so is a matter of opinion.
Boris Johnson has a big personality. He is likeable. He likes to clown about. He likes to be noticed.
Personally, I’m as cold to Mr Johnson’s artless charms as his artless charms are stranger to any sustained achievement – save this political celebrity.
Boris has a talent to amuse and that’s a talent in its way. In the dull world of politics it shines brightly but often to no great effect. Take for example take Miss Anne Widdecombe’s dancing her way not the nation’s affections; or George Galloway in the Big Brother house playing pussycat; or Lord Boothby who made a fine career out of his serial infidelities with discretion; and not least Sir Cyril Smith who made being big into a big asset.
I’ve read Johnson is ferociously intelligent and that he plays the buffoon in part to hide his cleverness. Playing the fool is playground stuff. I’d rather Johnson as Mayor just played straight with the electorate. And after four years it should be straightforward to see how he has used his remarkable gifts on our behalves.
On becoming mayor he immediately banned alcohol on the Tubes (not altogether successfully judging from my ride home from the Barbican to Oval last Saturday).
There’s the end of bendy-buses and the new route master….
With Private Sponsorship from Barclays Bank he has created a network of rental bikes – that isn’t integrated into Oyster and the integrated transport system.
He took out half London’s bus lanes and painted them blue and called them cycle lanes; he abolished the Charging Zone in leafy Chelsea and Kensington and points West.
He sacked one police chief and replaced him with one forced to resign.
He has made a number of dubious appointments to his personal office; and there, I’m afraid I’ve run out of things to say.
However, on that basis of this thin guel he has decided to run for a second term by offering us more….
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Boris Johnson came in at a difficult moment in 2008 but his four years might be best summarised as neither making things much better nor much worse.
And I’m wholly unclear what it is he wants to do in the next 4 years beyond preside over the opening of the projects which Livingstone started and for which Livingstone obtained the funding.
One way or another this will be a landmark election for London.
It will almost certainly be the last time – lose or win- that Ken Livingstone will play a leading role in a metropolitan election in this city.
Livingstone and Greater London have been synonyms since 1981.
Along the way there have been ups and downs. Sometimes London felt used by Livingstone and sometimes it was the other way around.
And if Ken’s relationship with Londoners has been fraught, his relationship with the Labour Party has been almost dysfunctional.
Famously Ken Livingstone was leader of the GLC in high pomp of Thatcher’s premiership. Livingstone did not actually win the election in 1981 as the Labour Leader. Andrew McIntosh was the then leader of the Labour Group and having won the election with a small majority in London, the new boys of the left engineered a sort palace coup…
I think before he was elected in Camden, Livingstone had been a Labour councillor in Lambeth in the early 1970s – the days before Ted Knight, a former Trotskyite, became the Labour council leader.
Ken’s coup in the GLC coincided with Knight’s time in Lambeth.
The loony Left was the label employed as these two rose to public prominence. The soubriquets ‘Red Ken’ and ‘Red Ted’ were coined by the savvy Murdoch Press and they stuck.
And today it is to that past that the press and Lord Sugar return our attention. But that rhetorical simplification short changes history and fact.
Ken went on to be an London MP and represented Brent for a decade before Blair’s even more famous victory in 1997. The then New Labour leadership viewed Livingstone with deep suspicion as the embodiment of all Labour had done wrong in the 1980s.
Strangely, and I was wholly out of sympathy with those politics that pervaded Labour then, strangely that actually was quite wrong of Blair and Brown and very unfair on Ken.
If the politics Livingstone had played to get to the top were not pretty he turned out to be rather good a running things….perhaps even gifted.
Fare’s Fair changed London Transport forever and for the better and had Livingstone not got under the skin of Mrs Thatcher and her acolytes on the right it might well have been that his transport policies would have been adopted as the future model by all governments.
He was simply right when the rest of them were wrong. Blinded by blind prejudice instead the conservatives turned transport policy into the blind alley of privatisations – buses first; railways later and always making things worse for passengers – or customers as we become known in the Thatcherite ‘New-Speak’.
So, when the Labour Government found no place for Ken he turned back to London; and the government turned on him.
Livingstone resigned from Parliament with noisy éclat.
The press saw their chance to give Blair’s New Labour a bloody nose. To great popular acclaim – led by the tabloid press – most notably the Evening Standard and Sun – he ran as an Independent and was elected London’s first Mayor in 2000.
Once again he proved much better at the job than many in the then cabinet were at theirs.
The network of new buses I cynically thought wouldn’t work. I was wrong. It’s brilliant and has changed London. From the East London line to the Overground; from Cross Rail to the Olympics; from city Hall with its strange amalgamation of an Assembly and executive Mayor Livingstone proved able to make something out of nothing very much.
Livingstone ran again (once more under a grateful Labour banner) and won again in 2004 before finally losing out to another political maverick, Boris Johnson, in 2008. The consensus then was that Livingstone had indeed been a good mayor for London and for Labour.
And so far as the facts are allowed to trump opinion we Londoners should not forget that it’s Livingstone’s name should be on the East London Line; the Overground; the Olympics and Cross Rail. They were and are his legacy.
But fair-weather friends in the press have since changed their minds about Ken. Once again, Ken is vilified as an out of touch extremist who couldn’t run a whelk stall. And his left wing past is once again used against him.
We all have pasts and some of us have to live them down. So let it be with Livingstone.
His past mistakes also included Fares Fair; supporting the unpopular cause of Gay rights and allowing Gay Pride to take place on the Embankment Gardens; being for negotiating with the IRA for peace in Ireland…as well as many other unfashionable causes we now all embrace.
He was also a critic of the Private/ Public Partnerships that are now vilified by coalition ministers.
He has got things wrong but in office he’s been pragmatic doer who has worked with the grain of reality to achieve bigger goals.
And that is why effective politicians are better at running governments than business men.
Ken Livingstone was a good mayor last time and actually he did rather well for London… particularly in the second term…He also that made a bit of a hodgepodge of a devolution work better than it might have in less political hands than his…
And what, I ask myself, beyond blue bike lanes, is so great about Boris?
It’s true, electing him Mayor didn’t bring an end to life on the planet or the world as we know it but his re-election will be more of this mediocre.
And if this election is an exercise in re-cycling….then I’d rather take a spin with Ken than listen to four more years of spin from Boris.
Based on experience let’s hope we can all say on 4th May when asked who is London’s mayor….It’s Mr Livingstone, I presume….
Yes, We can Vote for Ken Livingstone