‘Fighting the Cuts’: Ken Livingstone’s Third Term
The eyes of the world were on London. That evening three billion people were expected to tune into the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. In the mean time, an estimated 20,000 journalists had time to kill and an angle to find. Ken Livingstone knew it better than anybody.
Since becoming mayor for the second time, just two months before, he had played the press like a fiddle. He was the most senior and the most powerful Labour politician in the land, and the media were listening.
The top floor of City Hall has a view of London that is hard to beat, with a 360-degree panorama of the capital that takes in almost every landmark. Except today. Normally only dedicated political hacks attended the mayor’s press conferences, but now they were joined by journalists from around the world, crammed in, confused and obscuring every part of the view, except for a small sliver on the easterly side where a podium stood.
Ten minutes late, Livingstone arrived, beaming like a Cheshire cat.
‘Good morning everyone.
‘Today is a genuinely great day for London. So, welcome, all of you who don’t have the privilege of living here, because what you will see in this city is something I don’t believe you can find anywhere else on the planet.
‘But as the Mayor of London, it is my duty to represent the men and women of this city, and that means speaking the truth, no matter how unpalatable or uncomfortable it may be for the people who hear it.
‘The truth is that London is on the brink of catastrophe. The cuts agenda being forced through by this government is bringing pain and suffering to the ordinary families who live here – ordinary families who have seen their standard of living fall at a faster rate than at any time since the great depression, or quite possibly, even earlier.
‘Now, I stand before you as one of the people who helped bring the Olympics to London. But I was always clear that I had no interest in sport or in the spectacle that millions of people will be tuning in to watch. Rather, my interest was in seeing billions of pounds invested in London, and the regeneration of one of the most deprived areas in the developed world. And it is with that in mind that I am speaking to you today. Because while the games have brought in money and investment, the current government with its agenda of cuts have launched an assault on the very people who I supported the Games in order to help.
‘Just a few hundred metres from the Olympic stadium tonight, children will be going to bed hungry because this government has cut their parents’ tax credits. Families of six, seven, eight or even more will settle down for the night in two-bedroom flats in the knowledge that there is no hope of them finding a suitable-size home, thanks to this government’s slashing of the money for new affordable housing. And even more will turn off the television, having seen this government of millionaires spend the money that could have supported ordinary families spent on a spectacle that gives politicians the chance to flaunt themselves on the world stage, but leaves the people with nothing.
‘So I urge you, when you report back to wherever it is that you come from, leave the artificial paradise of the Olympic Park and visit the surrounding parts of the city. Go to Bow, and to Canning Town, and to Barking. Report on the real London and the cost of this extravaganza being paid for in the misery of the desperate. Thank you.’
With that, Livingstone turned and left the room. His job was done.
Short of ideas of their own, the world’s media did exactly what Ken had asked of them. There were eight hours before the start of the opening ceremony and that was more than enough. The Thai news anchors, Detroit sports hacks, Parisian supplement-writers and everyone in between all had their angle. Every part of East London that could still be called working class was swamped by journalists trying to stand up Livingstone’s story. The traffic slowed. Chicken shops had to close as desperate journalists tried to find the under-class Livingstone had described. The bemused stewards on the Olympic site’s media village, told to prepare for the busiest day of their lives, were left twiddling their thumbs.
The reaction from Number 10 was initially to do nothing. By mid-afternoon CNN were asking whether the silence from Downing Street signified the contempt that the coalition government held ordinary people in. By 5pm, Olympic President Jacques Rogge was quoted as saying that he: ‘didn’t know 100 per cent’ whether the Games would still start that evening. Something had to be done.
Deliberately caught by the press pack on his way to the opening ceremony, Prime Minister David Cameron told journalists that it was a ‘silly outburst, the sort of thing we have all come to expect from Ken’. The foreign networks, he said, probably didn’t realise that people in the UK wouldn’t take Livingstone’s attempt to upstage the Olympics seriously.
It was too late. Around the world that night, in every language, presenters lowered their voices to mark a more serious tone and took a moment to tell their viewers the plight of London’s suffering and the impact of coalition spending plans.
Not for the first time in the history of the Olympics, politics had taken centre stage.
~
The election campaign had been hard fought and bloody.
London found the entire thing rather tiresome, and wholly uninspiring. Voters stayed away in their droves. Luckily for Mr Livingstone, the ones who could be bothered to turn out tended to be the ones who were slightly more fed up with his opponent. Ken returned to City Hall with more votes than Boris, but with fewer than he had managed himself in 2008. That, however, was enough.
The first few weeks of his mayoralty had been a whirlwind of activity as he unstitched much of what Boris had done, replacing it with a cross between a carbon copy of the mayoralty circa 2007 and the wildest days of the GLC.
The congestion charge system would be modified so that people driving the biggest cars would have to pay £25 to enter the zone. Anyone in a 4x4 would pay £100. Ken’s advice was simple: ‘Get a new car’.
Most importantly to Livingstone, City Hall was to be turned into the front line in the battle against the government and against the cuts. Plans were made for a giant, free-to-attend, open-air music festival in Hyde Park in defence of public services. Named ‘Defiance’ and paid for by the taxpayer, the budget for this event was coincidentally the same as the increased revenues from the congestion charge in the first year.
Indeed, each of the Royal Parks, all of which had recently come under City Hall’s control, was to become the host to a memorial garden for those who lost their lives as a result of government inaction. Each was to be named after a famous free-market thinker or economist. Ken’s reasoning was that: ‘We’re forever remembering people who died because the government sent them to war, but what about the elderly who freeze to death because the government or council have sacked the only person who used to check they were all right? Weren’t they sacrificed too?’
All this, however, would take time and Livingstone knew he needed to make an early impact. At the end of his first week, Ken unveiled the first plank of his plan to battle the government. The grass outside City Hall became home to the ‘cuts counter’. Standing 20 metres tall, it was nearly half the height of the Great Glass Gonad itself. The new glass and steel scissor-shaped structure was Richard Rogers-designed and nothing if not striking. Four enormous screens rotated around the middle of it, 24 hours a day, counting not just London’s jobless, but every police officer, tube driver, youth programme, environmental measure and everything else that had actually been cut by Livingstone since entering office. The message was clear: it was the government that was to blame. They had cut off his money.
Building such a machine at such short notice had been costly. The cheapest price GLA officers were quoted was £8 million, but Ken opted for a more expensive ‘green’ version, replete with solar panels and a wind turbine. Even then it burned nearly £1,000 of electricity every day.
That was the tip of the iceberg. Every tube station was kitted up to carry the same message on signs that greeted every passenger. On the platforms, digital displays designed originally to tell ‘customers’ information about the next train were re-programmed to update them on the size of the shrinking state as well.
It was a measure designed to piss off the government, and it worked. An expensive legal case was prepared, destined for the High Court, accusing Livingstone of misuse of public money. This merely gave him more publicity and while the case dragged on, the counters kept creeping up.
~
Away from the drama in City Hall, Boris Johnson wasted no time. Through love and persuasion his younger brother Jo showed his older sibling more courtesy than has sometimes been the case in modern politics and resigned as the MP for Orpington. In a short, high-profile, but largely uneventful by-election the former mayor was elected to Parliament to represent the outer London seat.
Despite constant invitations from the media to blame Downing Street, the coalition or the cuts for his defeat, Mr Johnson stayed fully on-message. The defeat was his own; magnanimity and grace was the aim. The reward was a fast track into government.
But he had made enemies at the highest level while mayor, and their punishment for his indiscretions was simple. The brash, publicity-hungry Boris Johnson was given a role of mind-crushing tedium of interest to few. Boris was to be the new Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government, with special responsibility for decentralisation and localism. The job, it was supposed, was one where the only chance of success was meticulous attention to detail, technocratic finesse and the mastery of a brief which, his enemies assumed, would be far beyond him. Most of all, it gave no opportunity to rock the boat.
At least that’s what they thought.
~
Livingstone, in the meantime, was having the time of his life. The food parcels for London’s destitute from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez were carefully orchestrated to make the most of the post-Olympic climate. When North Korea sent them too it was the icing on the cake.
But he had a serious problem – the public didn’t like any of it. ‘THE MAN WHO RUINED THE OLYMPICS’ was what The Sun had screeched on its front cover the day after Ken’s now-famous intervention, and the public seemed to agree. No less than 75 per cent of the population agreed that Ken had ‘damaged’ Britain with his outburst (at least according to the opinion polls) and there were calls in the right-wing press not just for Ken’s removal but also for the abolition of the GLA itself. No body that gave that type of platform to that type of man, they said, could really be justified.
This delighted Livingstone. A veteran of the GLC’s battle for survival in the 1980s, the mayor knew that nothing had ever helped his reputation as much. Ken and his advisers reasoned that little could be better than a Conservative campaign to get rid of City Hall. Ken would cast himself as the saviour of London, fighting for a voice for ordinary men and women against a government opposed to democracy and frightened of the elected representative of the people.
It was decided. The government would be goaded into trying to abolish City Hall.
Livingstone didn’t believe that Cameron, Clegg or Osborne had the bottle to go through with it. A victorious campaign, won in the name of London, the people and democracy itself would not only make him a shoo-in for 2016, but deal the body blow to the government that his Parliamentary comrades seemed incapable of delivering.
His strategy was clear. Antagonising Tories was something which he had always had a gift for.
Along with the millions being spent on anti-government propaganda, Ken decided that a few more court cases would be helpful. The publicity would be enormous. The trick was finding issues where the mayor would be seen as being on the side of the people, while the government was cast on the side of a mendacious economic philosophy.
The simplest idea would be to call for a judicial review of the government’s finance settlement for London. But while this might allow for a head-on collision and an argument on his terms, legally there wouldn’t be a leg to stand on. Few people would understand it and even fewer care. Plus, when he lost the case, he might appear to the only half-interested as having lost the argument over the cuts. Instead, he decided to lay a trap.
Powers given to City Hall in the last days of Boris Johnson allowed the GLA to build houses, old-fashioned council houses. Although there wasn’t any money to do it, Ken decided to utilise this new authority beyond to its full potential – and beyond.
In early September, with some of the country’s grandest political correspondents squeezed into a two-bedroom flat on the top floor of a Tower Hamlets tower block, the mayor announced the largest programme of house-building in London since the end of the Second World War. The capital was to become home to half a million GLA council houses, for over a million residents in East London. The money, he said, was to be borrowed from the bond markets against the future rents that these new homes would bring in. He called it ‘the solution to London’s housing crisis and the blueprint for London’s future’. His enemies called them ‘Ken’s Folly’, or ‘Livingstone’s Lithuania’, and predicted a Soviet-style slum where only the most desperate would be housed in identikit concrete apartment blocks. The word that most warmed the mayor’s heart was ‘treason’.
The house-building drive may or may not have been morally or aesthetically right, but it was most definitely illegal. Ken had no right to borrow the money and, despite the high-profile launch, had made no real attempt get it. Indeed, he never expected a single house ever to be constructed. The aim was provocation.
The government reacted furiously. Who did this man think he was? What was he up to? He would have to be put in his place. As the minister most familiar with the workings of City Hall, it was Boris Johnson who was despatched to attack. Just past 8am in the morning, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme:
‘I find it absolutely inconceivable that having spent money with an extravagance not witnessed in a leader since Caligula made his horse a Senator, Mr Livingstone cannot accept that there is no money left. It beggars belief that in the name of nothing more than his own vanity he is trying to borrow money we can’t afford, despite the eye-popping debt he and his chums in the Labour Party left us with. And finally, let me just remark, if I may, that some say that a sign of madness is to not learn from one’s mistakes and to repeat them again and again. I think I will leave it up to your listeners to make what they will of that.’
By lunchtime, Livingstone had announced his intention to borrow yet more money from the bond markets, this time in order to build holiday homes for working-class Londoners to enjoy subsidised weekends by the sea.
Before dinnertime, legal proceedings against him had begun.
~
Livingstone had become not just the biggest story in London, but in national politics as well. The actions of the mayor dominated Prime Minister’s questions. Ed Miliband had tried to say as little as possible, but it didn’t work.
Did he or did he not back Livingstone? David Cameron taunted him. ‘He can’t even control his own party. But then again, maybe he doesn’t want to? Maybe he approves of a mayor who spends millions of pounds the country can’t afford on vanity schemes? I don’t know what the Right Honourable gentleman thinks, but personally I don’t believe I can think of anything that better sums up the Labour Party or how we got into this mess than the current Mayor of London.’
He sat down to rapturous applause. The Labour leader was lost for words. Humiliated, he needed to be seen to do something. He rang Livingstone.
‘Err, look Ken, this is just ridiculous. You have to stop it. As leader of the Labour Party I have to insist you stop this council house thing.’
‘Let me tell you now that I have absolutely no intention of doing so and there’s nothing you can do to change my mind. I mean, do you seriously think that they’re going to win this? Because, they won’t. I am proposing to build London out of a crisis. There are half a million people on council-house waiting lists in London, nearly a million in overcrowded conditions. I’m offering a solution where we can stop that at no cost to the taxpayer, because it will be paid for by the rent these new homes will bring in. These idiots think they’re going to win an argument by saying that people shouldn’t have a decent place to live and they would rather the misery continued than watch a left-wing policy go through. If you can’t see that, no wonder Cameron makes you look like a bloody plonker every week.’
‘Look, the party needs a credible alternative and it doesn’t help when you’re throwing money away on pop concerts and unwinnable court cases, but at the same time complaining about the cuts. These stunts have got to stop, Ken.’
‘Or what exactly?’
‘Or else … I’ll be bloody cross.’
~
London had no legal basis on which to declare independence from the UK – but then again, Livingstone reasoned, neither did Scotland.
He timed his referendum on the question of whether the capital should abandon the country it governed to happen on the same day, in early 2014, as the vote north of the border. The new independent city state would keep the Queen, but become a member of the Commonwealth like Canada or Australia, outside the United Kingdom. Freed from supporting the less affluent parts of the country, it could afford lower taxes and higher spending. The great buildings of Whitehall would be turned into hotels and galleries. Parliament would become a refuge for battered women. While the constitution of the new state was agreed Livingstone would take over as president temporarily, with a promise to concede power when the appropriate moment came.
Without doubt it was the most audacious move he had ever attempted. Even if he lost, Livingstone reasoned that those on both sides of the debate would have spent months drilling home the message that the rest of the country depended on London, its money and its influence. The case for not cutting investment in the engine of the British economy would surely be won.
Much to Livingstone’s surprise, in the rest of the country the idea was popular. A slim majority of people thought they would do better without London’s magnetic pull sucking in investment, jobs and the educated – not to mention the smug swagger of the self-satisfied metropolitans. Losing the capital’s one million Muslims and large black population was also a consideration to some.
But in the 33 boroughs that would actually get to vote on the issue, the cause was considerably less popular. The £20 million spent on holding the plebiscite was money, Londoners seethed, that would otherwise have been used to pay for police on their streets and to maintain their roads. Their cash was being thrown at another ‘vanity scheme’.
More to the point, while the government said that it would abide by the result of the vote on Scottish independence, in London they made no such promise. Livingstone’s referendum would be ignored, meaning that the enterprise was guaranteed to be a waste of money.
As far as the government was concerned, this was now a life-or-death struggle. It was war – and if it was the only means of getting rid of Livingstone, the GLA would have to be collateral damage.
The first member of the government to finally say it was none other than Boris Johnson. In an article for the Telegraph, the former mayor wrote:
No right-thinking person can seriously now believe that allowing King Newt to turn the seat of our great capital’s government into nothing more than a monstrous megaphone of malice should be allowed to continue. His own desire is no less than a one-man state. A dictatorship, trampling on the wishes of this ancient and free city. Nobody, I doubt even Mrs Livingstone, wants to live in a Ken-ocracy. He must desist or we will stop him. Mr Livingstone may well be Mr Leaving-soon.
~
And so it came to pass.
Ken did not believe a word of his old adversary’s rhetoric, but not for the first time he underestimated him. It would be Johnson’s job at the Department of Communities and Local Government to preside over the GLA’s abolition and design the new constitution for London.
It would be too ridiculous, Livingstone assumed, for a man who had been mayor a little less than two years before to abolish the post completely in an act of political revenge; and Johnson would have neither the attention to detail nor the heart to reduce his old friends and colleagues to long and lonely afternoons at the nearest Jobcentre Plus. But the mayor was wrong. It was exactly what Boris decided to do.
The battle was lost. For the second time, Ken Livingstone presided over the abolition of London’s regional government, and once again it was to be the only capital in Western Europe not to govern its own affairs. The GLA had nine months to wind itself up, before the London Localism Authority – a newly created quango –took control of its remaining assets. London Underground – already technically a limited company – would be privatised, as would any remaining state-owned transport infrastructure. The police would be run by a directly elected commissioner, as would the fire service. In the name of localism, any remaining planning and housing jobs would be devolved to local authorities.
As far as Ken was concerned, he had nine months to give away as much of City Hall’s money as was possible before the government could get their hands on it.
He started with the big stuff. Nearly half a billion pounds of assets held by the Mayoral Development Corporation was given away to councils. As it happened, and entirely by coincidence, all the recipients were Labour boroughs with a strong bias towards those whose leaders had supported Ken in his campaign to become the Labour candidate for mayor.
Derelict land owned by Transport for London was given away to housing associations, despite protests that it would make future expansion of the transport system impossible.
Computers used in City Hall and other agencies were given away, with strict instructions that hard drives should not be deleted. Information, after all, is power. Power in these cases went straight into the hands of those who would continue the fight. TfL’s machines went to transport unions, hell-bent on fighting plans for privatisation. Machines blessed with information on policing went to the Justice for Smiley Culture Campaign and Victims of Police Brutality.
In the GLA’s last weeks, the sight of lorries being loaded up with desks, chairs, telephones, water coolers, carpets and even the ovens from the City Hall kitchen became standard fare. The recipients were the usual suspects, now joined by anyone who said they had room for equipment and a worthy cause – Class War, Free Quebec and the Movement Against the Monarchy.
The last night of the GLA’s existence was 13 March 2014. In Jubilee Gardens on London’s South Bank thousands gathered to watch the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Speech Debelle sing out the last hours of London government.
In front of the assembled activists and music lovers, Ken took to the stage just minutes before midnight.
‘If you want to know why Cameron and Johnson are doing this, you need look no further. You are the reason. It is because you care enough to come. It is because you, the ordinary people of London, are showing that there is an alternative to their dogma and division. You are the alternative. The future of our city, of our country relies on you.’
The crowd whooped and cheered before breaking into a rendition of ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
On the stroke of midnight, heavy-set staff from the new London Localism Authority descended en masse. The exciting, flattering stage lighting was turned off and replaced by an overwhelming floodlight. It transformed the stage into nothing more than a large plank of wood with some people on it – and expensive equipment, now being taken away by the stocky men and women in high-visibility coats. The crowd booed. Plastic glasses were thrown. Chants of ‘Tories out’ rang out through the night.
Still standing in the middle of the stage amid the chaos, Ken Livingstone tried to take it all in. It was too much. A single defiant tear rolled down his face. He knew this was the end, not just of the GLA, but also his political life. No local party would have him as their MP. A life of occasional political punditry and restaurant reviews for gloating right-wing editors (who delighted at the one-time symbol of the left indulging in possibly the most decadent and useless of jobs) was all that would be left for him. For Livingstone that was no life at all.
Watching the whole thing on television, Boris Johnson was delighted. His career in government had just begun.