Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone is a left-wing member of the United Kingdom's Labour Party, and a former Member of Parliament. He was Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008 and is a prospective candidate in 2012. He is a colourful and outspoken politician, known for his sharp wit and for his willingness to speak openly on controversial issues. He was a vigorous opponent of the policies of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and of many of those of Tony Blair, especially of the war in Iraq. His willingness to openly express his opposition to Labour Party policies have made him often unpopular with senior figures within the Party, but has won him considerable support from "grassroots" Party members and also from an electorate attracted to the idea of an independent-minded leader.

Ken Livingstone first came to attention as leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981; the Labour Party of that time had been out of government for a decade, and was regarded by many as too left-wing to be electable. As a strong supporter of the recognition of gay rights and of measures to address the inequalities faced by women and ethnic minorities, and as a supporter of dialogue with Sinn Fein and the IRA, he became a frequent focus of attacks from tabloid newspapers. He was a prominent anti-apartheid activist, and at a 1985 rally calling for the release of Nelson Mandela, he accused Thatcher of racism, Yet Ken Livingstone's left-wing, confrontational approach to the Conservative government of Thatcher proved popular with voters in London, and his power there ended only when the Thatcher Government abolished the GLC.

Career in Politics

"If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it." (Title of Ken Livingstone's 1988 autobiography/political tract)

Ken Livingstone joined the Labour Party in 1969 and became secretary of the Norwood Young Socialists. He was elected to Lambeth Council in 1971, and to the Greater London Council (GLC)in 1973, becoming its leader in 1981. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher's government abolished the GLC - a decision that the Labour Party pledged to reverse. In 1985 he was elected to Parliament as Labour member for Brent East, and in the 1987 general election he retained the constituency for Labour.

In the general election of 1997, the Labour Party under Tony Blair's leadership swept into power with a landslide majority. In 1999, the new government created a new Greater London Authority, which for the first time in the UK established a key role for a directly elected Mayor. To Blair's consternation, the first election in 2000 produced a win not for the official Labour candidate, but for 'Red' Ken Livingstone. Livingstone had been nominated as Labour candidate for Mayor by local London Labour parties, but was unsympathetic to "New Labour" and was regarded by Blair as a potential electoral liability for the party nationally. Blair repeatedly predicted that Livingstone would be a "disaster" for London and unfavourably recalled Labour's more left-wing years (see quotations, right). Accordingly an electoral college weighted in favour of MPs over ordinary members rejected Livingstone's nomination; Livingstone refused to accept this and declared that he would stand as an independent candidate against the official Labour candidate, the Blair loyalist Frank Dobson. Livingstone was expelled from the Labour party, but won the election. As Mayor he proved successful and popular, and was re-elected in 2004 - standing as the official Labour candidate, having been re-admitted to the party shortly before.

In November 1999, he was defeated in a contest to select the Labour party's candidate in the election for the newly-created post of Mayor of London by Frank Dobson, the candidate favoured by Tony Blair. He responded by leaving the Labour Party and standing as an independent, and in May 2000 he was elected Mayor of London, a post that he held until 2008, when he was defeated by Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party's candidate. He is again the Labour Party candidate for Mayor in the next election, to be held in 2012.

His previous performance as Mayor was generally regarded as satisfactory, although his introduction of congestion charges has had a mixed reception. However, in matters other than his conduct as Mayor of London, he has been a controversial figure. He has been a supporter of the communist regime in Cuba and the strongly socialist government of Venezuela, an opponent of New Labour, and of Gordon Brown's economic policies (having said in 1998 that "Gordon is not up to his job... Britain is now heading towards a recession entirely of Gordon's making".) In a 2007 interview, he defended the Islamic cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is banned from entering the USA and UK, as a progressive force who preaches about an engagement between Islam and the west ("I’m not going to take stuff off a website run by a former Israeli intelligence officer as a literal interpretation of what al-Qaradawi says, nor am I going to believe what I read in the Sun when I meet the man myself and I hear him"). He criticised Israel's 2009 actions against the Hamas organisation in the Gaza Strip In 2009 he interviewed the leader of Hamas for The New Statesman and was criticised by a Foreign Office ministere for doing so.

Livingstone has been a recurrent "hate figure" for the tabloid press; the Sun once described him as 'the most odious man in Britain'. And Livingstone has been outspoken in his contempt for tabloid journalism: "What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.” In 2005, he received a four-week suspension from office for comparing a Jewish journalist working for the Daily Mail newspaper group (which supported the Nazis in the 1930s) to a concentration camp guard (saying, "You're just doing it because you're paid to, aren't you?”)

"When you go to Moscow, the only thing the bloody religions can agree on—the patriarch, the local chief rabbi and the local imam—is that they all don’t want a gay rights march in Moscow." In interview with Simon Parker, 2007