ENGLAND: Blair stumbles in mayoral grab
By Greg Harris
LONDON — Following a monumental effort to pre-select the least winnable candidate for London's new mayoral office, the British Labour Party continues to stumble towards defeat in the May 4 poll. The election marks the return of a London-wide council destroyed during the reign of former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Tony Blair's "New Labour" has offended the majority of Londoners with plans to partially privatise the Tube (the underground railways). Repeated derailments and crashes by privatised national railway systems have contributed to Londoners' concern.
Using a crooked system of preselection, Blair was able to impose his candidate, Frank Dobson, on the Labour Party, although no single constituency voting in the preselection, with the exception of parliamentarians, supported him. Following this, Ken Livingstone, who had won overwhelming support from party members and unionists, announced on March 6 his decision to stand as an independent.
Over the past month, the Labour Party has dragged out a series of dirty tricks to discredit Livingstone, while Livingstone himself has run an exclusively "photo opportunity" campaign, relying on his overwhelming popularity. While this popularity is based on memories of his militant activism during his previous term in the Greater London Council, in recent weeks his most enthusiastic advocates have included some of the London dailies, happy to stir a few problems for Blair.
The Labour Party's first campaign was to publicly, loudly and repeatedly brand Livingstone a "liar" for accepting the preselection rules and then not accepting the outcome. The fact that the party used technicalities to stop two pro-Livingstone unions from participating in the ballot weakened the effect of this argument. After a couple of weeks, with support for Dobson still around 15%, Blair publicly admitted that it hadn't worked, and ordered supporters to drop the "liar" label.
The second dirty trick was a ruling by a parliamentary committee that Livingstone, who is a Labour member of parliament, had misled parliament by not itemising his earnings from public speaking engagements and a newspaper column. The committee demanded an apology to the House of Commons. This is a sore issue in Britain at present, with one Conservative member of parliament in dire straits after failing to admit rental income.
Livingstone's reply was that the last time he checked with the appropriate body about this specific income he had been told it was okay. In passing he said he was happy to apologise. The subsequent revelation that the "member of the public" who laid the complaint was a mate of Dobson was a further embarrassment to the Labour leadership.
After this the Labour Party tried to dig up a tax issue. With four weeks to run, the evening press are eagerly awaiting the next scandal.
Livingstone is coming out of the whole affair looking like a victim of mad-dog Blairism. The strangest dirty trick was a headline about the discovery of "Livingstone's love-child", published just days after Livingstone decided to stand. The small print explained that the article was about the 19th century adventurer Dr Livingstone.
Labour's approach has set a tone of triviality in the election. As a result, Dobson could hardly be surprised when a second Frank Dobson, a published authority on lichens, announced his decision to stand in opposition to the idea of a London mayor.
Amid this triviality, a number of key issues have been submerged. In addition to the need to improve London's transport and environment, the cost of living in the country's capital is forcing the city's service workers to suffer overcrowding or travel from outside London to work.
While there is no doubt that Livingstone could win mayor, he is most likely to end up with a Blair-loyal council majority. He has yet to express an opinion on which councillors to vote for but has not launched his own team of candidates.
There is a range of non-Labour candidates who could provide an alternative, including a ticket of unionists working on the Tube, and the London Socialist Alliance, an electoral coalition which includes most of London's radical left activists.
At this stage, Livingstone as mayor held captive by a Labour Party council is highly likely.