On two of the defining issues of our time for young people, Ken was on our side

By Veronica King / @Vron_King

London needs a mayor who calls the big issues right and will stand up for Londoners. Consistently, and on issues of importance to young party members, that candidate is Ken Livingstone.

The budget this week will give a clearer indication of where this government is taking the country. It is already a Thatcherite horror-show.

David Cameron and Professor Alan Budd, the head of the new Office of Budget Responsibility, were advisers to Norman Lamont when Britain was forced out of the ERM. The policies emerging will make the majority pay whilst helping a rich few. We are going to see attacks on pensions, pay and public services, VAT rises for the many, but cuts to corporation tax. National insurance payments will be up for employees, but not for employers.

Students and young people are already on the receiving end: scrapping Labour’s Future Jobs Fund for unemployed young people, scrapping 10,000 extra university places from this September, and restricting access to free school meals. David Willetts has revealed a lot about the Tories’ approach to young people by labelling students a “burden on the taxpayer.” Willetts’ remarks have widely been seen as softening up public opinion for an increase in student fees, just as the government overall is softening up opinion for massive cuts.

All of this is presented in a way that suggests there is no alternative. But progressive politics is about finding alternatives to policies that make the majority pay whilst a few at the top benefit.

Yesterday, the publication of new government figures on the cost of the wars Britain has waged in the last decade gave the clearest possible example of how choices really do exist. £20billion has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Ken Livingstone pointed out at the weekend, that is ten times the cost of scrapping fees for students for one year – or the equivalent of ten years of student fees.

It is exactly on those grounds that Ken is the best choice for students and young people. On both issues he called it right for the majority of us. There is an absolutely clear choice in the Labour selection on this issue for former and present students who are Labour members.

As a student myself in 2004 when the Higher Education Bill was going through parliament, and then again when top-up fees came in, Ken was the highest profile and most senior Labour politician who backed students and supported our cause.

And when earlier legislation was first introduced in 1998 to charge students for their university education, and also to completely remove grants in 1998, the main amendment in parliament against this, which would have kept the grant, was backed by 34 Labour MPs. Ken Livingstone was one of them. Ken also helped lead the campaign outside parliament against removing grants during that time. Again, that presents a clear choice in the selection for Labour’s candidate.

And when hundreds of thousands of young people including students marched against the war in Iraq, Ken was with them too.

Those two issues are linked not only because of their mobilisation of many young people but because they show that Ken is a politician who calls the biggest issues right and understands that big choices in politics do exist. We don’t have to back the right wing of American politics; we don’t have to distort our economy through our support for wars and military adventures; and we don’t have to accept the orthodoxy that young people and students should get a worse deal.

These are issues that saw Labour alienate key groups of voters – Ken maintained his links with those voters and we must learn the lesson of that.

Now, with a vicious right wing cuts agenda emanating from Whitehall, we need a Labour candidate for City Hall who calls things right, as Ken did not only on the biggest issue of the last decade – Iraq – or on the central issue for student finance, but on the big issues for London, such as congestion charging, neighbourhood policing, transport investment, better buses and free travel for under-18s. And he is doing it now in this selection by setting out the challenging circumstances London will face in 2012 and what our priorities should be to protect Londoners.

Labour needs a mayoral candidate with a proven ability to govern, who will always fight for the best deal for Londoners and who has the strength of character not to bow what the media or the whips are saying – and who gets the big choices facing us right.

Veronica King is a Young Labour member in Tooting and vice chair of Ken Livingstone’s campaign for the London mayoralty.