On 26 June, 14:31, Mizter T wrote:
On Jun 26, 12:00*pm, MIG wrote:

On 26 June, 11:47, Tom Barry wrote:

David Cantrell wrote:

Yes, I was quite shocked to realise that I'd prefer a Tory, but when the
only alternative is someone who approved of Tony Blair, then there was
really no choice.

Sorry, who approved of Tony Blair? *Remind me of Boris and Ken's
respective positions on the Iraq War for a moment, will you?

When Ken decided that he needed New Labour's resources for his second
campaign, he rejoined and became born-again New Labour. *That's got to
be a stronger statement than simply staying in Labour through inertia.

Get the history right at least. He left the Labour party after failing
to get selected to be the Labour Mayoral candidate in 2000 - but that
was the result of a total stitch-up of the selection process by the
Labour leadership. Leaving the party you've been a member of for your
whole political life is hardly inertia.


No, I used that term as a contrast to Ken's position. He left and
chose to rejoin. Most just stay there.


He spoke of wanting to rejoin the Labour party *even before* he'd won
the first ever election - this story is from Friday 28 April 2000,
less than a week before the first Mayoral election on Thursday 4 May:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/...ndon_mayor/729...

His first attempt to rejoin the party was rejected in the summer of
2002 - his application...http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2075257.stm

...and the NEC's rejection...http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2145796.stm

He was eventually successful in rejoining the party in January 2004,
before going on to be selected as their candidate ion the 2004
election a month later:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3452363.stm

So he wanted to rejoin Labour long before the second election
campaign. And most London Labour activists and members wanted him to
be the Labour candidate in '04 - indeed, a great number of them wanted
him as the candidate the first time round in 2000, but the stitch-up
excluded him.


I didn't know he'd tried to rejoin so many times, but I remember the
stitchup well. I was a member of the union whose block vote, that
would have got Ken selected as Labour candidate, was discounted on
dubious grounds.



Also, from that point onwards, he ceased expressing political opinions
on most things, restricting his pronouncements to things like
reliability of buses, encouraged strike-breaking, ceased appearing at
anti-war rallies etc.

Not true.

March '05, calling Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a "war
criminal":http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4319879.stm

February '05, ignoring the PM, Tony Blar, and many other senior Labour
people who were strongly urging him to apologise for the "German war
criminal" jibe:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4269979.stm

September '05 - ok, so it was a statement read out by Kate Hudson of
the CND, but Livingstone voiced (or had voiced) his views on Iraq at
an anti-war protest in London:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4275542.stm
(was he perhaps away on business, I dunno, I've googled but failed to
discover more)

The 'encouragement' of strike breaking, as you put it, showed that he
wasn't in the pockets of the unions.

OK I'm exaggerating a bit, but his political pronouncements and
attendance at ralllies were dramatically curtailed.

Voting with his feet, basically.

Livingstone always made clear that he was a Labour man, and justified
going it alone as an independent in 2000 by referring to the strenuous
efforts made by the Labour leadership to exclude him (and he was
expelled, rather than resigned his member ship, of the Labour party in
2000). The idea he could carry on standing as an independent candidate
in future elections is hopeful, to say the least - most commentators
appear to agree that Mayoral candidates need a party machine behind
them to be a success, and continually running as an independent is not
really feasible. His election in 2000 as an independent candidate was
the result of special circumstances, specifically those of his dodgy
exclusion from being the party's Mayoral candidate.

I agree that he might not have won without the backing of Labour in
2004, but then again, his association with Labour in 2008 was probably
a sufficient handicap for him to lose to Boris, although by a far
smaller margin that Labour was losing to Conservatives elsewhere.



The other thing that people continually fail to take proper account of
is the fact that Livingstone was 'back in the fold' he was able to get
a far better deal out of central government than were he to have
remained an independent - for example, TfL gained the ability to
borrow on the money markets in summer 2004 which enabled them to fund
the ELLX project, as detailed in this Mayoral press release - note
that Ken is hardly being complementary about rail privatisation and by
implication the government's policy on the railways (note that by this
time, saying such things was no longer simply just a criticism of the
Tories and their pre-97 actions):http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_...releaseid=3903

Livingstone came to an accommodation with the 'way of the world' -
markets, private finance, the City etc - he certainly always said
"this is not the world as I would have made it", but instead stated
that he was being a pragmatist and doing the best that he could given
the way the world worked. From a transport point of view, I think he
was very effective, though my broad support for Livingstone was
certainly not without reservations. But he wasn't ever "born-again New
Labour".

My view in 2008 was "if you can't have the Mayor whose politics you
agree with, you might as well have one who knows how to run things",
so I would hugely prefer Ken to Boris from a transport point of view,
while still finding his actions unforgivable.

What galls most is that he rejoined at a time when Blair was in real
trouble over Iraq. The timing gave Blair a huge boost at a time when
he might have been on the verge of withdrawing troops from Iraq. I
think it was total cynicism from Blair to have him back as a winner,
and opportunism from Ken, but he must have known what a boost he was
giving to everything he supposedly opposed, like the continued
occupation etc.

And I think that Ken's original position was to oppose the creation of
directly-elected Mayors as undermining local democracy. That's a
position I agreed with at the time and still do. Any Mayor other than
Ken simply gives their party overall control while local
representatives have little power. Labour, never expecting to be able
to lose, wanted anyone other than Ken for that reason.