26.07.2000

Livingstone backtracks

Just one month after taking office as mayor of London, Ken Livingstone has announced that he is being "forced" to raise tube fares. After making the pledge to freeze all fares in London a central feature of his campaign, Livingstone claims he has been "dumped" with an unexpected demand from the treasury to pay the outstanding bill to complete the Jubilee line extension.

The move came as the mayor also reined back on promises to investigate the possibility of introducing cheaper bus fares for low-income families, and other discount tickets. This is against the background of a lower than expected transport settlement for London in Gordon Brown's spending review.

At the height of his election campaign, Livingstone distributed a 'pledges' card to his supporters, saying, "Keep this card as a guide to Ken's key policies". The number-one pledge was: "Four-year fares freeze". But it turns out that we did not read the small print. His fuller policy document says that, if elected mayor, he will "freeze tube fares in real terms for four years" (my emphasis). And Livingstone's new announcement is to keep the rise in tube fares "in line with inflation over the next two years".

These are weasel words, and typical from a man who - at the end of the day - puts his own career first. This classic opportunist method is to make promises in a way that allows you to break them - which only shows that we cannot trust Livingstone, nor any other careerist leader on high.

All this underlines the necessity for militants and the rank and file to stand firm. The July 27 meeting, called by the underground unions to oppose privatisation of the tube, features the mayor as the key speaker. This shows that while he incorporates Greens and LibDems into his administration, while he makes concessions to Prescott and the government over fares, Chameleon Ken still finds it necessary to display a left coloration. It seems he is attempting both to keep the unions on side and smooth the way for his future return to the Labour Party fold.

While Livingstone has organised a cross-class alliance to run Transport for London, the underground workers - and their unions, the RMT, Aslef and TSSA - must not give an inch to any concessions that Livingstone and TFL may make - either on fares or on the funding of the tube through public-private financing, or other forms of privatisation. Further, the rank and file must organise from below across union lines - an action which, incidentally, could only but aid moves towards a single industrial union for all railworkers.

When Livingstone announced he would run as an independent, he said he would not hide behind clever words if he ended up breaking a pledge. Now that he is in office, he is certainly using clever excuses over tube fares. This shows that we cannot rely on him, even though he was elected through a groundswell of popular discontent. The task for communists, socialists and militant trade unionists in the London Socialist Alliance is to turn the passive, atomised rebellion against Blair, expressed in the huge vote for 'Red' Ken, into a real force for change - and that means organisation, organisation, organisation.