18.02.1999

‘Red’ Ken shadow boxing with Blair

Left needs its own candidate for London mayor

Ken Livingstone’s so-called campaign to win the Labour Party’s nomination for mayor of London reached new heights this week at a packed and enthusiastic ‘Let Ken Stand’ rally at Westminster’s Central Hall on Monday February 15. With a platform of minor celebrities - Jo Brand, Peter Tatchell, Lee Jasper, Diane Abbott, Mark Seddon - and a 1,000-strong crowd, the former leader of the Greater London Council skilfully turned up the pressure on the Millbank machine. He won himself two standing ovations for his populist rhetoric. Yet, as far as Livingstone’s actual candidacy goes, it is all shadow boxing.

Despite being the favoured candidate of a very broad electorate - from Labourite Trotskyists to City property developers - there is simply no way Livingstone will be the name New Labour puts forward in 2000. The Blairites have made it clear since ‘devolution’ for London came on the agenda that Livingstone would be blocked by a bureaucratic stonewall. He is just too ‘off-message’. This is despite Livingstone’s grovelling statement that all he wants to do is help New Labour. Paradoxically then, as Livingstone’s campaign intensifies, Millbank simply becomes more determined to oppose him.

While there will be a direct ballot of members to choose the mayoral candidate, the process foisted on Labour’s London regional committee entails a vetting process for the short list. No doubt newt-fancying MPs from north-west London constituencies will be speedily consigned to the ‘rejected’ file.

Yet even this stitch-up is not tight enough for Millbank. The latest bureaucratic twist turns Livingstone into his own hangman. New Labour officials have now let it be known that Monday’s ‘Let Ken Stand’ rally will in all probability disqualify him. In the Kafkaesque world of Blair’s Labour Party, potential candidates for the Greater London Authority are debarred from canvassing except in an official letter to be sent to party members with the ballot papers. Senior Millbank figures are also adopting good, old-fashioned red-baiting tactics, raising questions about the financing of Livingstone’s campaign - supposedly from ‘anti-Labour parties’: ie, the Socialist Workers Party. So the more Ken tries, the harder away is his declared goal.

Even with the success of the February 15 rally, Livingstone knows as well as Blair that he will not be Labour’s candidate. So what is he playing at?

With the purging of Militant, the rise of the Kinnock-Smith-Blairite ‘modernisers’ and the triumphant Blairisation of Labour, many have written off the Labour left as a spent force. The Socialist Party needs to maintain this as an axiom for its own sectarian ends: having dropped the name ‘Militant Labour’ and now operating in exile, it now claims that Labour’s transformation into a unadultertaed bourgeois party is complete, leaving itself as the nucleus of the future mass workers’ party. The old Labour left of Tony Benn has been eclipsed but a New Labour left of one variety or another is inevitable. While the supposed ‘radicals’ in cabinet such as Robin Cook and Clare Short are barely distinguishable from the Blairites, the success of the Grassroots Alliance in last year’s elections to the national executive committee shows that the emergence of a viable New Labour left is a real possibility in the short term.

However, this time the game has changed. With proportional representation looming for Westminster elections and Blair pushing on to turn Labour into a ‘great’ liberal party - with or without the Liberal Democrats - an electoral space to New Labour’s left is opening up. Even Paddy Ashdown noted: “Under our current voting system, a breakaway of the left is not impossible. They could be pushed into it, for Mr Blair would not miss them.” While for the party’s remaining left elements the main goal is still to bring Labour ‘back’ to its mythical socialist roots, there is now a growing realisation that an existence outside the Labour Party is not a matter of sect politics.

But such a possibility of leading a left split from Blair is at the moment not on Livingstone’s agenda. While he knows he has no chance of winning the mayoral candidacy - and these are not the conditions in which he would even contemplate standing as an independent - he is using the occasion to expand his support base within and without the Labour Party.

Livingstone is a devious political character. Claiming that the CPGB were MI5 agents on national television during the 1992 general election is small fry for this Labourite schemer. Throughout his current campaign around the mayoral candidacy, Livingstone has made it sufficiently clear that he is prepared to stop it all for a nice cosy junior ministry. He has even been taking special classes in economics to prepare him for such a job. But anyone prepared to bargain over their supposed principals needs to carry some collateral. Livingstone’s perceived threat to cohere a New Labour left around himself his bargaining power. He can either direct his supporters to remain within the New Labour fold - as he has up to now - in return for a job, or he can appear to hold out the threat of taking them elsewhere. So ‘Red’ Ken can cause Blair considerable embarrassment and a little worry.

Livingstone’s prostration before the Millbank machine - his promise to stand on a full Blair programme and allow Millbank to run his campaign - has been causing ructions on the revolutionary left. For the SWP in particular - trying on its new electoral clothes - there has been a tactical revolution.

The SWP originally came out in support of Livingstone as Labour’s candidate. Tentatively, Paul Foot let it be known - Blair be damned - there would be a ‘socialist’ candidate: for if Livingstone was not allowed to stand, then he would. Where before the SWP called Livingstone a socialist, it now says that “Livingstone ran away from providing ... a leftwing alternative to Blair with his [recent] comments ... that he had no disagreements with the government” (Socialist Worker February 13). It seems the SWP might now be prepared to back a socialist candidate against ‘Red’ Ken. This is a very positive development unless they still hope to impose Foot on the rest of the left. Despite itself, the SWP is being forced out from under the coat tails of Labour.

The task of revolutionaries is to split the mass of the working class not only from Labour, but from Labourism. For this reason developments in and around the Labour left remain important. But there must be no more talk of giving Livingstone a blank cheque. The left should consider backing him only if he breaks with Blair and stands as a socialist - every speaker on Monday apart from Livingstone used the ‘S’ word. We support his right to stand, but whether he does or does not, our energies will be directed towards agreeing our own united left candidate, to be chosen after open and democratic debate.

Marcus Larsen