Ken Livingstone’s pledges are New Labour ones. This is a campaign no one can sit out, believes Tessa Jowell
Who would you trust to run London in a crisis? According to Ipsos MORI, 43 per cent of Londoners would trust Ken Livingstone while only 32 per cent would trust Boris Johnson. London is in a crisis now and we need a mayor who will act and use all his available powers to protect Londoners from the hardship created by this coalitions government’s cuts.
Unemployment is running at 10.2 per cent and a staggering 28 per cent among young people; thousands of families are living in cramped and fetid accommodation while spending 40 or 50 per cent of their take-home pay on rent; someone working on the minimum wage spends 27 per cent of it on transport because the capital’s transport is now more expensive than in New York or Tokyo; 45 per cent of Londoners say they cannot afford their next fuel bill; and childcare costs are one-third higher in London than the rest of the country, with some parents spending up to £22,000 a year. No wonder so many mums are saying they have no choice but to quit their jobs.
This is London in crisis. We need a Labour mayor, with Labour’s priorities, to get a grip on the situation. Forget the personalities. It is true that Johnson makes us laugh, but the future of our capital is much more important than that. Our job in the campaign until polling day on 3 May is to remind people of the powers the London mayor has that Johnson is not using and that Ken did, can and will.
Can you think of a single thing Johnson has done in his time in office apart from the new Routemasters and ‘Boris bikes’? And his buses are so expensive that two of them would pay for Ken’s entire childcare package, and bikes, which are mainly used by white men on salaries over £75,000, are hardly stories of fairness. Ken’s record was impressive by most standards. He negotiated with government and business to win London Crossrail and introduced the very popular London Overground, not to mention the Oyster card. London gained the congestion charge – a pioneering move which has been emulated by other cities. Popular Safer Neighbourhoods Teams flourished under Ken: he put more than 6,000 officers back on the beat, crime fell and Londoners felt safer.
Ken was instrumental in helping to achieve something very close to my heart – the London Olympics. He was a powerful advocate for London on the shuttle diplomacy circuit we did to win International Olympic Committee support for the bid. Ken loves the capital and understands how its heart beats. His speech, far away in Singapore after hearing the horrific news of the bombs that had gone off in the city on 7 July 2005, was one of the very best examples of a politician leading by example. He captured perfectly the essence of London, saying: ‘This city of London is the greatest city in the world because Londoners live side by side in harmony, and Londoners will not be divided because of this cowardly attack, they will stand side by side in solidarity.’
But we all know that politicians are not judged by yesterday’s record, but by how they represent hope, optimism and a promise to change people’s lives for the better. There is no doubt in my mind that Ken would start to make a difference the second he set foot in City Hall. Our policies are simple, affordable and will have an impact on the vast majority of Londoners.
These pledges are New Labour pledges. They are successful on the doorstep, can be paid for within the current mayoral budget, and will make a difference to the lives of the majority of Londoners whose standard of living has declined over the last few years. The fact is that Johnson’s London is going backwards. Nearly half of all robberies that take place in England and Wales happen in London. Youth knife crime has increased by 29 per cent and last August we witnessed the worst riots to take place in the capital for 30 years. Rents in the private sector have increased by 12 per cent, just in the last year. In the same period, Johnson has only managed to build a pitiful 56 affordable homes. Meanwhile a single bus fare has increased by 50 per cent, causing particular harm to the poorest who use buses the most.
The untold damage that Johnson is allowing to happen on his watch is heartbreaking. So how are we going to win? We do not have the funding that Johnson has, nor the media support, but we do have a veritable army of campaigners and are running the most high-octane campaign I have witnessed in my lifetime. Take a look at these numbers: 2,000 volunteers out at stations across London on 3 January; 1,000 volunteers signed up by text message; 150,000 people spoken to since January; 15,000 calls made in the phone bank; 1.3 million fares newspapers delivered; and more Voter ID completed in our Tory target seats of Bexley, Bromley and Havering since January 2012 than in the whole of 2008.
The electoral system – the supplementary vote – means that London has to be treated as one constituency. This means no voter ignored, no voter uncanvassed, nowhere safe, nowhere unwinnable. It feels like the sort of campaign Labour will have to run if we are to win back government in 2015. Certainly there will be a wealth of information that the wider party can learn lessons from, not least the element of competition we have introduced by Reward to Win targets which have helped to triple the levels of voter contact in just three months.
So our message is strong, our campaign is strong, and Londoners believe that our candidate understands their concerns better than the current mayor does. Anyone who truly cares about the people who live in our capital city and who believes that, to make a difference, Labour has to be in power, cannot afford to sit this one out. If Ken loses, Cameron wins, it is as simple as that. So put on your campaigning boots, pull out your clipboard, and get out on the doorsteps in London. The vote for Labour in London is out there – we just need to put in the hard work and find it.
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Tessa Jowell MP is chair of Ken Livingstone’s campaign and the shadow minister for London and the Olympics
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Photo: Overseas Development Institute
As someone who has worked in London but never worked there, I really don’t see the point in having a mayor – just another layer of Government, and an opportunity for an individual to fulfil their ego needs to the max.
As I recall Ken was kicked out of the party with pretty good reason in the not too distant past. Seems he was re-admitted when his status as Mayor of London became a little embarassing.
Seems to me also that his candidacy this time seems in no small part due to the likelihood that if not selected he would again run as an independent, which would cause no end of further embarassment, and quite probably see BoJo re-elected.
As for Boris it seems that he models his capacity for embarassing his party pretty much on Ken (or f**king liar as he seems to prefer to call him).
Both of them are mavericks, neither of them are particularly close to the central messages of their respective parties. Which is perhaps to be expected in a popularity contest such as this, which encourages people with big egos to push themselves forward. I’m only surprised that George Galloway and Esther Rantzen aren’t challenging.
Your loyalty does you credit Tessa, I hope that it isn’t misplaced – I’m certainly glad that this is one mast I won’t need to pin any colours to.
I’m afraid it is hard to take you seriously, Tessa. There is a convincing case to be made for Ken over Boris Johnson, but this isn’t it. No reference at all to the serious issues raised by the likes of Freedland, Jewish Labour members, LGBT Labour members and our voters on the doorstep. When the election is over, hopefully we will get a more candid asssessment of how it was that we ended up with a candidate who is dragging down the Labour vote and your own role in getting him on the ticket.
I’m afraid that you’ve lost the plot. This election is not about voting for New Labour. Livingstone has never hidden his hatred for New Labour and all that it stood for. The Labour Party deserves to lose for its pusillanimous leadership in allowing this divisive candidate to stand on your behalf; a candidate who has often supported candidates who stand against the Labour Party! You must think that we are all idiots – you want us to vote for someone who has made his dislike for the Jewish and gay community all too clear and who goes out of his way to set one community against another. We have reached the end of the road and would rather vote for a monkey (or Boris) than Livingstone
From memory Jew hatred was never part of New Labour
We have a right to know what passages KL, according to Freedland in the Guardian 23 March, reluctantly excised from his latest printed autobiography (isn’t much of his rambling all about himself?); is there an authoritative and trustworthy refutation (not a mere denial) from KL himself – not one of his teenage groupies who seem to have taken over the GLLP? Comrades might want to look at the Guardian report of his offer of humility to Jewish voters (30 March p 13). His would-be manipulative evasions, typical of his style, seem to me to deepen the offense – not of offending Jewish voters, – but of outright racism. He singles out Jews as he has singled out many other ethnic groups – and others such as gay people. All part of his divide and rule….Yes there is a New Labour whiff – it is called Imperialism. Livingstone is a true heir of the lumpen politics of resentment against “the rich Jews” which vanished from civilized discourse in 1945-6. (TS Eliot bemoaned the fact that Hitler had made rational anti-Semitism very hard to practise….)…When the majority of British Jews were very poor, this resentment flourished. As Jewish average income in this country rose, after 1945 this gutter sentiment decreased. But Livingstone is a hold-out.
Shame on you Progress! Just because an author has MP after her name then is there no quality threshold to an article?
Let’s ignore first the claim for this to be ‘the most high octane campaign that I have ever witnessed’ …. And politicians wonder why members let alone the electorate think they take them for fools …
Ken has never claimed to be New Labour – in fact, I’m sure he’d be horrified to see himself labelled as such. That kind of honesty is about as much as I can say for him.
But Lee Jasper? Press TV? Al Qaradawi? Grubbing Chavez’s oil away from poor communities in Venezuela so London commuters save 5 pence on a bus fare? Casual monthly insults to the Jewish community? Telling gays they would get their penis lopped off in Dubai?
New Labour? Really Tessa?
The only way you might call him New Labour is his popular fares policy which seems to be paid for on the back of an envelope with the holy grail of ‘TFL surpluses’ – but to me that smacks of the ‘Brown-Balls-bogus Golden Rule-end-to-boom-and-bust’ edition of ersatz New Labour – and that’s nothing to be proud of either!
Come on – for the most dynamic city in Europe this is a depressing election whoever wins.
I’m just glad that there is stronger and more visionary political leadership – and talent – at London council level, and in other regions of the country than we get here from too many of our parliamentarians.
Well said, Tessa. As someone who has lived and worked in London, and who works in London now, who lived and worked in London under the GLC, and who saw the birth of the GLA and worked there and in London under the GLA, I feel perhaps slightly more qualified to comment than some on the ‘left’ who trash Ken from the safety of their sprawling acres in the home counties (yes, I’m looking at you, Nick Cohen).
What Tessa may or may not know is that Progress devoted an entire front page and article by one of their leader writers, rubbishing Ken, and Ken’s achievements in office, and calling into question his fitness for the post and candidature. It all smacked of someone completely unable to accept the democratic will of London Labour Party members. Yes, Progress protege Oona King would have crashed and burnt as Mayoral candidate, but AT LEAST SHE’S NOT KEN, seemed to be the theme of the day.
Ken has done more for LGBT members across London, even when it was deeply unfashionable and politically very dangerous to do so. For Progressites and the Evening Nazi to seize on semantics smacks of clutching at very thin straws. It is utter drivel to refer to Ken as a homophobe.
Likewise the almost endless stream of invective about Ken’s alleged anti-Semitism. Again, what has Boris and indeed any other London leader done more than Ken for Jews in London? Progress members covertly backing Boris are prepared to forgive his numerous racist outbursts about ‘piccaninnies’ and ‘watermelon smiles’, but apparently that’s OK. Ken’s records stands by itself.
PZREPRASZM RYSZARD! (excuse me,Richard)… please inform me as to what Ken “has done for Jews” in London? You seem very well informed, so you may wish to give us the text and your interpretations of same. Boris’ pathetic stuff about ‘piccaninnies’ is not exactly something he did for the Jews – unless you are a sympathizer with the (rightly unfashionable) rubbish about ‘Jews were the main slave traders’ or the recyclers of Moses Maimonides’ medieval trash against the blacks… Do Jews want Ken to ‘do things for them’. One thing he could have done for me is to abide by his promise, given when standing against Frank Dobson for the Labour mayoral nomination, that he would never stand against the Labour Party candidate. He did stand. And did he only then discover that the national leadership puts its thumb on candidate selection processes? Any delegate at the Hampstead (/and Highgate) would have heard this droning stuff, all too familiar to those who have endured the Bevanite years, until they went to sleep. The LP has not, and should have no, pretensions to mimic the British state with its ‘Rolls ‘Royce’ civil service (ha! ha! – but Bagehot’s quaint notions linger on amongst the reformist Left…) PULL THE OTHER ONE, Tessa, and use your Olympic cred to pay off the mortgage… just don’t discuss it with David Mills…
Maybe the disaffected will vote for Brian. Or are they secret FoB. Does NL want that? I pay for Boris (and if elected someone else) but have no vote. For the record the Mayor formally controls TFL (including big roads bikes and taxi’s,) the Police, and Strategic Planning, via agencies etc. Most the of heavy lifting is done by Boris’s Deputy (not elected) and of course the Chief Exec (who?).
Ryszard asks
“what has Boris and indeed any other London leader done more than Ken for Jews in London?”
This rather misses the point. I am Jewish and a Labour Party member. I don’t particularly want a Labour mayor to do anything for me on the basis of my ethnic background. As a social democrat I dislike intensely the kind of sectarianism that for example (and what an example!) led to the election of Galloway last week and want my party to have nothing to do with it. I will not be voting for Johnson but had I been of a mind to do so the fact that he had done nothing for Jews would not have been a barrier – with this crucial proviso: that he had done nothing for anyone else.
And that is my problem with Ken. He is so clearly wooing other communities (try the thought experiment of asking if he would have said “I want to make London a beacon of Judaism” – or even Chrisianity – and you will see my point) that it makes his slights on my people so obnoxious. Effectively it looks like the Jews are the whipping boys in the cause of wooing Muslims. Worse it encourages dangerous rifts between different communities. Didin’t we used to think that was the behaviour of the far right?
The whole thing stinks – and it is NOT NOT NOT the way a party of the left should behave. We should cut the infection of sectarianism out now and that is why Ken must lose.
“…and bikes, which are mainly used by white men on salaries over £75,000”
a. Is not true, as anyone living in London knows.
b. Shows that Tessa clearly thinks that saying, “white men on salaries over £75,000,” will work well with the dog-whistle politics of her crowd.
c. Indicates that Tessa finds it hard to see out of the windows and limos she usually rides in.
Seems the only way Labour can fight a campaign these days is to divide us by race, religion, class or wealth. God forbid that white men should make use of rental bikes in London or make more than £75,000. (except Tessa and all her cronies of course). We wouldn’t want ordinary people to have any sort of ambition because Labour only gets votes from the downtrodden they work so hard to create.
I’ve never been so disgusted with the three mainstream parties – and this article and its appalling author just adds to the obscenity.
Does Tessa Jowell know someone called Ken Livingstone whom the rest of us don’t know? f so, we will vore for him. In the meantime, I am interested in the Labour London mayoral candidate who went to Tower Hamlets to support someone who was not a Labour candidate and, unlike what would have been the case with humbler party members, the NEC did nothing about it.
And there is also our Labour mayoral candidate who, in 2005, said on the Today programme and at a press conference, about a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv, that it was “wrong to brand a British Muslim a terrorist if he got involved in Palestinian violence against Israel”. At the same time he blamed “Jewish boys in London” for contributing to the “slaughter” of Palestinians.
Our Labour mayoral candidate is an open supporter of Hamas, a terrorist organisation which does not recognise the existence of Israel. As mayor, he invited to London and publicly and physically
embraced Yusuf Al-Quaradawi, who has condoned suicide bombers in Israel, supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and who believes in executing gays and apostates from Islam. This is a man who also believes that the Holocaust was a divine judgment against the Jews which “put them in their place”.
Whatever Tessa Jowell and the craven party leadership that supported Livingstone’s candidature think, Ken Livingstone is unfit to be mayor of a parish council and unworthy to receive a vote from any Londoner, party member or not.
Another day, another example of Ken Livingstone dragging down the Labour vote. Not very New Labour, Tessa. You’re off your rocker.
I notice that Progress have called this piece ‘the case for Ken’ online, because they realised the intellectual dishonesty of the title in the magazine ‘the New Labour case for Ken’. Not sure how Tessa Jowell submitted this piece with a straight face.