18.11.1999
Back Livingstone
As we go to press, the Labour Party’s fabled machine is in open disarray. Whatever the eventual outcome, Tuesday’s failure by the party’s London selection panel to come up with a short list of names to present to the electoral college in next month’s ballot to choose a mayoral candidate has caused unquestionable embarrassment and damage, perhaps most of all to Tony Blair. However much the prime minister may try to dissociate himself from this shambles, however much his spokesmen may try to depict the farce as part of a complex ‘democratic’ process, Blair has only himself to blame, for the fact remains that it was his latest attempt to hobble Ken Livingstone that was the proximate cause of the debacle.
At the centre of the panel’s decision to call Livingstone for a second, “clarificatory” interview was his stated refusal to give an undertaking that, if elected as the party’s candidate, he would commit himself a priori to an election manifesto not one word of which has yet even been written. Specifically, Livingstone reportedly made it clear that he could not and would not stand on a platform that includes a plan for the privatisation of the London underground, under the so-called Public Private Partnership, a scheme which would hand over something like a third of the tube’s infrastructure to Railtrack.
The 12-month history of Millbank’s attempts to fix the mayoral ballot was rooted in a single problem: how to prevent Livingstone emerging as the official candidate. When the electoral college stitch-up began to unravel, and Frank Dobson began to look like a loser, desperate measures were called for, measures that present us with vivid proof, if such proof were needed, of New Labour’s utter, cynical contempt for democracy.
As recently as Friday last, Blair and his team of special advisers were letting it be known, through leaks from “senior Labour figures” and “one well-connected insider”, that “Mr Blair would prefer an independent Livingstone mayorship or even a Jeffrey Archer Tory victory to Mr Livingstone as a Labour mayor” (The Guardian November 12). The implication was that the theoretically “independent” selection panel would do what Blair wanted and, after going through the motions, bar Livingstone from the short list, probably on the grounds of chronic disloyalty. If that led to his standing as an independent and even winning the mayorship, then so be it.
Twenty-four hours later, the same sources were leaking a diametrically opposite story, according to which the prime minister had decided to take a gamble and “allow” Livingstone onto the short list. The rationale behind this volte face was revealed on Monday, when The Guardian, under the headline, “Blair plans all-out war on Livingstone”, reported that he proposed to launch a “withering assault” that would make Livingstone unelectable by depicting his victory as a return to the days of the ‘loony left’. Blair made the strategy explicit by stating that, “The Labour Party has come a long way since the early 1980s and I will never ever let the party go back to those days - not while I’m in charge”. As one “insider” put it, “the tactics are now to let him run and then blast him” (The Guardian November 15).
According to other reports, the change of heart had been occasioned by “secret figures compiled by Millbank”, which suggested that Dobson was ahead in the contest and would win. On the basis of these poll returns, Labour’s general secretary, Margaret McDonagh, persuaded Blair to let Livingstone stand, thus overriding the advice given to Blair by his political secretary, Sally Morgan, who argued strongly that the selection board should be used to bar Livingstone from the contest.
To make assurance double sure, the Blair team devised two undertakings which all candidates would be required to make to the selection board: the first, an ‘oath’ of loyalty to the party, whereby the candidates had to agree that they would not stand independently if they failed to make the short list or in the event of being defeated in the eventual ballot. Livingstone, with characteristic cheekiness, unhesitatingly accepted the first precondition, saying that he would be prepared to “swear on the bones of a saint”. In reality, of course, he had no choice in the matter, since, had he declined, he would have brought about his immediate exclusion from the short list on the grounds that he was, after all, planning to go it alone.
Even as the selection panel was continuing its deliberations, Livingstone was telling a 500-strong audience in London of his commitment to Labour: “I don’t want anyone tearing up their party cards,” he told the ‘Listen to London’ event, organised by the rail unions. “You don’t walk away just because you’ve had a bad day.” Pat Sikorski of the RMT, and formerly Socialist Labour Party vice-president, asked him what he would do if he was not selected: “Will you support us and stand anyway?” Comrade Sikorski described himself as a supporter of the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation, which intends to stand a slate of candidates for the GLA elections. Livingstone did not reply directly, but stated that he would rather have any Labour candidate as mayor than a Tory one: “This is not about seeing the government brought down. It’s about making the Labour government represent the movement that put it where it is.”
The second ‘oath’ involved a blanket prior agreement to stand on whatever manifesto the party produced. It was Livingstone’s refusal to jump this hurdle which brought about Tuesday’s impasse.
The panel’s decision to seek clarification was puzzling in many respects. On the face of it, they had no room for manoeuvre - if Livingstone persisted in his refusal, his name could not go forward. Allowing him on to the short list would have amounted to their acquiescing in his defiance of Blair’s will. Charitable souls might have been inclined to see the board’s action as reflecting a determination to see fair play or as an expression of genuine uncertainty about Livingstone’s stance on the manifesto question. At the time of writing, such an interpretation seems rash indeed.
A glance at the composition of the selection panel, themselves very carefully selected by the Millbank machine and rubber-stamped by the NEC, tells another story. It was perforce reduced from 13 members to 12, when Baroness Uddin was obliged to resign, after being unable to restrain herself from publicly denouncing Livingstone on Radio 4’s The world this weekend (November 7). Of the dozen remaining members, three - Jim Fitzpatrick, Clive Soley and Ian McCartney, the latter a ‘leftwing’ cabinet officer minister - were Blairite loyalist MPs; four - Richard Rosser of the TSSA, Paul Kenny of the GMB, John Hannet of Usdaw and Margaret Wall of MSF - were safe rightwing trade union officials; three more - Lady Gould, Margaret Payne and Les Eartle - were known ‘modernisers’, with a record of grudges against the left; the remaining two - Mari Williams and Margaret Sinclair - were careerist figures who could be relied on to do the right thing. In total, therefore, the panel included not a single member who could have been regarded as even vaguely sympathetic to Livingstone’s cause, which was no doubt why they were chosen in the first place.
By the time this paper reaches our readers, there presumably will be no need for speculation as to what this sorry mess was all about. If Livingstone is allowed on to the short list, it will represent a major defeat for Blair and New Labour. If he is not, then he must surely abjure his prior undertaking and stand as an independent - not to do so would mean effectively resigning himself to remaining an outcast MP for as long as the electors of Brent East wish to have him represent them in the Commons. Accusations of double-dealing and untrustworthiness will doubtless follow hard on the heels of an independent candidacy, but it seems improbable that they will do Livingstone much damage in the eyes of the millions of Londoners. His accusers, after all, have hardly behaved decently themselves.
Unless the prime minister’s press secretary and a small regiment of ‘sources’ have all been lying through their teeth, Blair himself stands revealed as a dictatorial and increasingly desperate manipulator, and, what is worse, a manipulator who has brought great damage on himself and his party.
Whatever happens, Livingstone’s prospects look very healthy, as the results of a Guardian-ICM opinion poll published on November 16 amply demonstrate. According to a poll of some 1,000 Londoners conducted between November 11-14, it would make little difference to the outcome of next May’s election whether Livingstone stood as Labour’s official candidate, or as an independent. In the former capacity, he would beat Jeffrey Archer by almost 40 percentage points; in the latter, he would still be 27 points ahead of Archer, his nearest rival, with Dobson consigned to a humiliating third place.
Of the prospective Labour candidates, as voted on by Labour supporters in the poll, poor Dobson - who has had a disastrous campaign so far and who cannot escape giving the impression that he never wanted the job in the first place - finds himself actually in third place behind the no-hoper Glenda Jackson, having evidently failed to pick up any of the seven percent of votes which went to Trevor Phillips before he graciously consented to become Dobson’s running mate. So bad has been Dobson’s showing hitherto, that there is talk of putting off the planned December party ballot until the new year, on the grounds that voting could be disrupted by the vagaries of the Christmas post. All this is alarming news indeed for Millbank and New Labour, but exactly what they deserve.
As we have said before, the issue at the heart of this controversy is one of democracy. Whoever becomes mayor of London will command one of the biggest direct electoral mandates in the whole of Western Europe. The increasingly desperate attempts by Blair and his entourage to prevent Livingstone seeking to secure this mandate - notably the crude gerrymandering embodied in the electoral college ‘solution’ and the blatant use of ‘loyalty’ oaths and the like - constitute a contemptuous affront to Labour’s 70,000 London members, not to mention the millions of ordinary Londoners who have consistently voiced the desire to see Livingstone in charge of their city. Democracy is a weapon that we must wield against Blair. Labour’s vulnerability is the left’s opportunity.
If the events of recent days have made one thing clear, it is that, if Livingstone does emerge victorious from the Labour party ballot, he will be the party’s ‘official’ candidate in name only. His victory in this contest, followed by victory in the mayoral elections themselves, would be a real body-blow to everything that Blair and New Labour stand for. Hence, our already declared support for Livingstone - albeit critical support, given without illusions as to the man’s politics, but condemned in some quarters as ‘opportunism’ - is more than justified. Needless to say, if Livingstone does go it alone, our position would be even more strongly supportive. Such a move would likely precipitate wholesale defections from the Labour Party in London and beyond and could realistically be expected to act as a catalyst for the revival and realignment of forces on the left - our stance was singled out by Peter Kellner in a desperate attempt to find Livingstone guilty by “association” (Evening Standard November 15).
In the event of Livingstone reaching the short list, our first priority must be to support the struggle of such unions as RMT - barred from participation in the electoral college on the spurious ground of late payment of dues - to regain its members’ franchise in the election. Similarly, such anomalies as that presented by the undemocratic allocation of 50,000 votes to the London region of the Co-op - 200 votes for each of its members - must be exposed and ruthlessly criticised. Perhaps most importantly, we should back up efforts to secure the support of the party’s activists, whose votes look like having a crucial impact on the outcome of the ballot.
To stand back from giving Livingstone support, on the self-evident grounds that his politics are entirely inadequate from the point of view of the working class and the struggle for socialism, would be a profound mistake. As comrade Mark Fischer observed last week,
“For revolutionaries [a Livingstone challenge] creates the possibility that a mass working class movement, independent of Labour, could rise and take very different political forms from the past. This is not something to observe passively. If we are communists, we will be active, fighting agents in the process” (Weekly Worker November 11).
Michael Malkin