A difficult decision

The polls have closed. It may be relatively close, or not, but Ken Livingstone will probably lose (and, at this point, whether he wins or loses, the argument is the same). And I feel like I can finally send this rather personal piece that I wrote some time ago. I know it’s a little long, but I feel the need to explain some things that you may not all know.

This is the first election in my entire life that I remember feeling unable to support the Labour candidate (and that includes 1983, under Michael Foot, although I was too young to vote then). For the record, I was supportive of, and would have voted for given the chance, all the London Assembly candidates who stood yesterday. I have broken no party rules; I have not campaigned for a non-Labour candidate. That said, I cannot find it in my heart either to criticise those members who have done so (although, personally, I’d be embarrassed to vote for Boris Johnson, a candidate with an woolly policy agenda and who clearly sees any kind of political conviction as a terrible hindrance). I criticise neither them, nor the thousands of decent activists who have decided to “hold their noses”, as Tom Watson put it, and “vote for Ken”, not to mention their loyal campaigning for someone who so clearly does not deserve it.

No, if there was ever a special case, this is it. Before I tell you why, a few words to the people who feel it is wrong for me, as an activist of twenty years and former staffer, not to support Labour’s candidate.

First, to those friends who gently suggested that I was not being very helpful to the party by pointing out the defects in Livingstone’s case: I’m sorry. But I am not going to write things I do not believe. If I believe there is a case to answer and where the truth is being distorted, I will not gloss over it just to be nice to the party. Some of Livingstone’s public statements during the campaign had holes all over them. At best they lacked credibility and, often, sailed close to complete untruth.

This sweeping under the carpet, in all honesty, is not good for the party. The reaction to an untruth should not be to tell people off for pointing it out. The reaction should be to point up, and rectify, the untruth. Should we not instead just get the liar not to lie, or am I just a bit old-fashioned?

Further, there is absolutely no point writing a blog if it is to write Party propaganda. People can go to the party website for that (or Liberal Conspiracy, some mean-minded people might say). And nothing against Party propaganda, by the way – it’s a completely necessary part of the political process. I used to do that when I wrote for the little newspaper we started at Islington Labour Party, and it was fun. But I don’t do it here at the Centre Left – for a start, no-one would read it. I need to write what I think, period. And I hope that people appreciate a little honesty, otherwise there’s not really much point.

Second, to those who simply suggested I was being “factional”, that is, because my politics is different from his: you don’t get it. This is not about left and right factions. I have supported candidates equally to the left as Ken, and would again. It is about integrity, and it is about the future of the London Labour Party.

Third, to those more extreme people who accused me and others of some terrible disloyalty for not automatically supporting the Labour candidate in any election, no matter how unpalatable they are: that’s just silly and counterproductive. There may come a time when you actually believe that you cannot, in all conscience, do so, for whatever reason. The same people criticise me every time I write an article, and the fact is that the party needs critical friends, not cheerleaders.

[Note: there is a madder, fourth category: those people who have ended up criticising the electorate for not voting Livingstone (I kid you not). For them I refer readers to Hopi Sen’s excellent post here, likening it to Bertolt Brecht’s wonderful, parodic suggestion that the government should “dissolve the people and elect another”.]

I appreciate that loyalty is important in a political party, up to a point – it is the glue which makes us forget our differences and go out and spend our free time fundraising or door-knocking. I too have felt frustration at those flaky members who capriciously decide whether they like the party’s policies this week before they turn up to a meeting or deliver their leaflets. They’re no use to a political party. On the other hand, I have dedicated a fairly significant portion of both my free time and my working life to the party over the last twenty years. So please, don’t accuse me of flakiness. There are limits to the loyalty of anyone, and you do not have to leave your critical faculties at the door when you join. We might also add that Ken Livingstone is hardly someone to lecture on the subject of loyalty (see below).

To all three of these groups, the only reason you could possibly have for thinking this is simply all okay is to be terribly badly-informed. In some extreme cases this is wilful, but in most it is because you probably do not have the time or interest to go crawling through blogs and newspaper coverage to find nuggets of truth, or even videos where Ken manages to hang himself with his own words.

I do. In researching my articles, I have done precisely this, and it is this that has changed my mind from gritted-teeth tolerance to make an awful realisation about the man and how he operates. But not based on hearsay, based on easily-available hard evidence.

I am, in my own little way, making a statement, and it’s this: that the London Labour Party’s way of doing politics in London is not sustainable. And now I want to explain why, dear readers. Why this is a very special case. If you really think that everything is acceptable about the Labour candidate, please, read on and understand why it is not.

One. Lack of loyalty to the party. Livingstone has not only stood against his party once, but openly supported the independent Lutfur Rahman in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election against a Labour candidate, in direct contravention of party rules. It is certainly by no means beyond the realms of imagination, either, to conclude that he may end his days outside the Labour Party, on a ticket of Respect or as an independent, or something similar. That is the extent of his loyalty.

Two. Consorting with dictators and demagogues using the public purse. Livingstone, while holder of an office with zero responsibility for foreign relations, organised trips to Venezuela and to Cuba at the taxpayer’s expense. This cannot be allowable for any candidate, much less a Labour one. It is an embarrassment. Not to mention the oil-deal-that-wasn’t he made with Chávez which, as some Assembly members pointed out, had nothing to do with oil.

Three. The employment of a group of thoroughly unpleasant people. In office, Livingstone was surrounded by a clique from Socialist Action, a tiny, entryist, hard-left organisation. These were not Labour people, or anything like them. On leaving office in 2008, these people were paid off, according to the Daily Mail, an average of £200,000 per person, after a change Livingstone made to GLA rules which then allowed people on short-term contracts to claim severance. This is not to mention the case of his “race advisor” Lee Jasper, who funded the project of someone that he wanted to seduce with public money and was then forced to resign. I have corresponded with Jasper on Twitter after his ridiculous, and highly ethically questionable, claim that “black people can never be racist”. Jasper is awful: of the Diane Abbott school of seeing the whole world through race-coloured glasses. Most of us, thankfully, do not.

Four. The trade-off between winning the London elections and winning the next general election. On the one hand, it is stupid to say that, in pure electoral terms, a mayoral defeat will help us win the next election. On the other, a good win in the local elections and the London Assembly, which looks likely, coupled with a Labour defeat in the mayoral election may make Miliband look stronger and make Livingstone his lightning conductor for the mayoral loss. We shall see.

More importantly, this result may be less bad than the damage done by putting off for another four years the rebuilding of London Labour. Since the mid-1990s, Labour in London has been left to its own devices, like the rest of the country. London has always been to the left of the national party, ok. But, on the back of that, it has failed to reject Livingstone as a candidate (although the non-OMOV selection process was flawed to begin with). As a result, it is still living in the 1980s. More than anything it needs to ensure that other parts of London do not descend into the corrupt, vote-rigging chaos that has become the politics of the left wing in Tower Hamlets, inside and outside Labour. Most of London is comprised of decent, hard-working activists like everywhere else. But there is a small, rancid part which is not helping the party reform itself.

In short, losing this mayoral election, assuming a good performance in the locals and the Assembly, may well be a better long-term result for Labour than winning London and perpetuating a method of operation which is stagnating.

Five. Tax hypocrisy and its defence. I don’t give a damn about Livingstone paying the minimum tax, and good luck to him. In fact, it’s pretty stupid to complain about minimising tax. If there are loopholes, that is the government’s fault, not the fault of people who exploit them. What should we all do, say “yes, I’d like to pay twice as much tax, please”? No, I care about someone saying everyone should do something (don’t exploit tax loopholes) and then doing the exact opposite (exploit tax loopholes). It makes him look unscrupulous and hypocritical. This may, indeed, have been the issue that finally made the wheels fall off his campaign.

But that is really a minor point, compared with the inanity of his later defence. He just could not produce a set of accounts stamped by his accountant, unlike the other candidates. They were incomplete, because they did not include the company in which he had left a large amount of capital, to be drawn off later. It would have been a simple thing to just release everything, but he didn’t. You have to ask yourself why, and there is no reasonable explanation apart from the fact that they would have looked pretty bad if released. He promised full disclosure but, during the final days of the campaign, he was reduced to continually saying they were going to be delivered in a few days. They never arrived.

Six. Questionable statements on race. Alienating an entire community, as Livingstone has managed with the Jewish community, is a difficult trick to pull off. The fact that a few members of said community panicked at the last minute and (we assume) thought they might be left out in the cold in the case he got elected, matters nothing.

We can also add to this his friendliness with the awful racist, homophobic preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, his comments about concentration camps to Jewish journalist Oliver Finegold which, lest we forget, got him suspended as Mayor, his comment that the Reuben brothers could “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”.

It is not brain surgery to conclude that, the more we tolerate this kind of behaviour within our great party, the shabbier it looks.