08.01.2004
Back in Labour's fold
Ken Livingstone's reinstatement into the Labour Party is at one level a significant defeat for Tony Blair, says Ian Donovan
Ken Livingstone's reinstatement into the Labour Party is at one level a significant defeat for Tony Blair. It represents a climbdown and loss of face for the prime minister, who in early 2000 resorted to a combination of denunciation and ballot-rigging of the most blatant type to ensure that Livingstone was defeated in the selection for mayoral candidate.
Indeed, Livingstone was considered so inimical to the New Labour project that Blair equated him with such other Labour left bogeymen as Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill and expressed the view that a Livingstone mayoralty would be a "disaster" for London.
It was this kind of perception of Livingstone's Bennite past that explained the class polarisation in the London labour movement over Livingstone's candidacy in the first place. A series of what amounted to rank-and-file rebellions on the electoral level took place within London's trade unions; this accounted for much of the momentum behind Livingstone's campaign. Conversely, it was the blatantly undemocratic delivery of the AEEU's vote to Livingstone's opponent, Frank Dobson, by the ultra-Blairite bureaucratic clique around Sir Ken Jackson which was the major factor in ensuring the failure of Livingstone to secure the nomination within the official structures. It was a crude stitch-up, involving the effective disenfranchisement of large battalions of London workers to bring it off.
Given both Livingstone's left reputation and the concrete major issue that divided the two sides in the conflict - whether or not the projected upgrading of the London tube should take place through privatisation or through Livingstone's plan to borrow through issuing municipal bonds and raise funds for an upgraded municipalised (ie, state-owned) tube - there was a clear class difference between the appeal of the candidates.
This was the case despite Livingstone's rhetorical playing down of the differences between himself and Blair on many other questions, as well as his 'tactical' manoeuvres as an independent in seeking to 'make use' of individuals from all parties in running his administration (in practice, this was largely a dead letter). Livingstone always was, despite his expulsion from the party itself, an organic part of the then-battered and isolated Labour left, and his candidacy, however flawed, was an act of rebellion by forces organic to that left wing of a bourgeois workers' party.
Therefore it was a legitimate tactic for the revolutionary left to give critical support to his candidacy in 2000 - and indeed it could be argued that it would be a legitimate tactic today. Whether it would be a wise tactic today is quite another question, however: this article will attempt to address this question.
Livingstone's record in office as mayor has certainly rubbed a lot of the antagonism off the relationship with the Blairites that existed at the beginning of his term. Given the massive support he enjoyed within the trade unions for his electoral position against tube privatisation, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that he could - launching with the aid of the RMT, Aslef, etc a union-centred campaign using industrial action as a weapon - have made the part-privatisation of the network impossible to carry out. Though he continued to fight in his own way against the government's plans, his method of doing so was a complete loser.
From appointing a hot-shot American boss, Bob Kiley, as his underground supremo-in-waiting to his repeated impotent legal challenges, his means of fighting the government on this question consciously sought to remain within the bounds of the most pathetic, self-defeating, rightwing social democratic respectability. Livingstone could quite easily have made up for his lack of formal, legal powers over the tube network by such an alliance in action with the unions; indeed, in view of the overwhelming popular support for the mayor in the aftermath of his election, and the equally overwhelming popular opposition to tube privatisation, it would have been extremely politically difficult for the Blairites to use the anti-union laws against such a strike-centred political campaign.
But it was not to be: instead of placing himself at the head of the real, if sometimes sporadic, militancy that has developed on the underground, and delivering what could easily have been a massive blow both at the government and the enforceability of the anti-union laws, he in effect chose to act as a safety-valve - a means for the population to harmlessly blow off steam.
A recent indication of his relationship with the trade unions was his condemnation of an RMT strike in defence of a tubeworker who was accused by management and the bourgeois press of taking unjustified sick leave - in an industry whose onerous working conditions and shift patterns are themselves a major cause of ill health among its workers. Then there is transport more generally, and in particular the congestion charge.
This is Livingstone's big success; understandably, given the horrendous situation in central London that pertained before the measure was introduced, it has, despite some of its regressive features as a flat-rate tax, achieved a wide popular acceptance as an environmentally rational measure that has had a real impact in curtailing some of the wilder extremes of socially damaging traffic overload in London. It really is the measure that has, barring some freak occurrence, produced the situation where his re-election looks a near certainty.
In conjunction with noticeable improvements in London buses, overseen by the mayor, it contrasts sharply with the already deteriorating London Underground - part-privatised, as everyone knows, against the will of the mayor by a central government that pointedly ignored Livingstone's 2000 election in what amounted to an informal referendum on tube privatisation. All these things make it hardly surprising that Ken has benefited enormously from his clashes with the government over transport in London.
On these kinds of questions, as well as with such things as his opposition to the Iraq war, Livingstone has managed at least partly to maintain his left image. But something of the gloss has rubbed off as well; before his election he supported imperialist military action in the former Yugoslavia; so he can hardly be called a consistent opponent of imperialist wars (few reformists are, of course: there is always the odd 'anti-fascist' war that can seduce the best of them). More damning of him as a putative left is his courtship of business - hardly as ostentatious as the Blairites', but nevertheless a key part of his strategy. What with his proud boasts about increased police staffing, Livingstone today really bears a certain resemblance to the Roy Hattersleys of this world: in a situation where official Labour can sometimes be criticised from the left even by Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, it really does not take much to appear more left than Blair and co.
In reality, it is highly doubtful that many in the Labour movement regard Livingstone these days as any kind of hardline leftwing socialist. Obviously, he has considerable political ambitions, but the fact that Blair, who considered him a "disaster" in 2000, took the lead in pushing for his readmission to Labour, is not simply a result of Livingstone's electoral threat. The Blairites have good reason to believe that they will be able to coopt him in some way - his 'leftism' has in reality proved much less politically harmful to them than they once feared.
Even though Ken is still highly ambitious, the Blairites may reason, his is an ambition that can be contained within the broadest parameters of Labour as it is today: ie, a party politically dominated by the politics of neoliberalism. No doubt he will be allowed something of a free rein - Blair really has no choice on the matter and Livingstone himself has already indicated, despite romping through the so-called 'loyalty test' of Labour's national executive, that he will continue to operate as a loose cannon. For example, in order to maintain his left image, in or out of Labour, Livingstone is unlikely to back down on the holding of the European Social Forum in London later this year.
Certainly, if Livingstone was still regarded by the Labour hierarchy as some sort of representative of red-blooded socialism, he would have been much less likely to be readmitted. So for Blair, taking Livingstone back into the party is something of a gamble, albeit for him a reasonable one. How exactly he will interact with the slowly reviving Labour left (as expressed by developments over the Iraq war, the rise of the 'awkward squad' in the trade unions, etc) remains to be seen. In terms of dealing with a slippery character like Livingstone, with a less than fully deserved left reputation, but a real following among class-conscious sections of the working class, complex tactical questions are often posed for socialists.
It was self-evident that the rebellion and polarisation among Labour's working class base in London over the Livingstone candidacy in 2000 meant that socialists needed to give Livingstone's candidacy critical support, despite his many obvious failings, as a means of exploiting and intersecting this antagonism. Today, however, things are rather different. His readmission, notwithstanding the electoral gun being held to Blair's head this June, is also in part a product of Livingstone's own new respectability. Standing on the official Labour ticket, in no sense will Livingstone be giving expression to any rank-and-file rebellion against Blairism in these elections. It is highly doubtful that, given his tepid and barely left record since 2000, whether it would be appropriate to call for a vote to him, even were he still standing as an independent against the Blairites.
His candidacy made it pointless and tactically inept to stand a Socialist Alliance candidacy for mayor in 2000 - but a certain political space has opened up since then that today makes a leftwing challenge to him a much more feasible proposition. Which is why it is doubly unfortunate that the Socialist Alliance itself has retreated from the relative high point that it reached in 2000 and 2001 over the Greater London Authority elections, leading up to the general election.
The problematic emergence of the Respect coalition may well offer a possibility of running a candidate against Livingstone, but if that happens it is likely to be on a political basis that is a good deal inferior to the bold but still (by omission) left-reformist programme adopted by the SA.
Given the apparent political reality that the SA has been subordinated by the Socialist Workers Party-led majority to this new formation, revolutionary socialists and communists must fight for Respect itself to take on this task - the task of waging an independent working class campaign, tapping into the anti-war movement that has shaken Blair's Britain. We must fight for such a candidacy to be based on a platform of working class socialism, seeking a rounded and progressive alternative to neoliberalism and capitalism as a system. Ian Donovan