Ken is an inspiration – but we need reconciliation

By Ben Cobley

Ken Livingstone visited Wimbledon on Monday – the first stage of his “Tell Ken” tour around the London boroughs building up to the Mayoral election for London in May 2012.

You may think that Ken and Wimbledon do not necessarily chime easily in the same sentence, visiting the same prejudices about inner and outer London that helped propel Boris Johnson to victory in the London mayoral election of 2008.

Thankfully Ken has other ideas. In a Wimbledon hall on Monday night he told an engaged audience of more than a hundred locals how Londoners do not care about divisions between inner and outer. Good local services are as relevant in one as the other.

He talked about those local services, and how the minority local Labour administration in Merton is looking to preserve essential services against central government cuts – especially by preserving funding to the voluntary sector (the real “Big Society”). He talked about housing and made the case for caps on rents so London does not descend into American-style ghettoes of rich and poor.

He and his nominated deputy Val Shawcross especially emphasised policing, and how cuts to Neighbourhood Policing teams risk a whole new generation falling into crime without the restraining force that knowledgeable local police can exert.

All the while Ken spoke with the knowledge and wisdom of experience, of previous confrontations with vested interests like the RMT, and the police hierarchy – the latter of whom used to argue about the pointlessness of coppers on the beat.

Ken got a sustained and heartfelt ovation from the audience at the end of his Q&A (the first in his tour of all London’s 32 boroughs). Perhaps the audience was generally friendly (except for a few notably rude Tory imposters), but the applause was deserved from any objective point of view. He is an impressive politician, and Ed Miliband would surely die for his common touch. However the doubts about Ken need to be addressed. With his engaging manner he easily rebuts the accusations that he is past it, despite what many in London have been suggesting. More presciently though, he has gained enemies in the Labour Party, by leaving the party to win the mayoralty in 2000, and then, more recently (and I would suggest more importantly), supporting a candidate in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election who had been disowned by the central party, for seemingly good reasons.

He also does divide opinion quite sharply amongst the wider public. Some say his avowedly socialist inclinations are too much and threaten their way of life. The gardener on my estate, a good man who I get on well with, joked that I should take a shotgun with me when I went to have lunch with Ken and his team at the local party headquarters.

A joke is a joke, and believe me that was a joke, in no way hateful – and he was not aware that I would tell the world about it. But it does show up once more how the general public have been led to distrust and hate politicians, especially when comfortably distanced from any real contact with them.

What Ken did in Wimbledon was make that contact, unashamedly. He talked for twelve hours straight with people – at a victim support group, a local cafe, the entrance to the station, those who felt engaged enough to come and confront him later on in the Q&A and lastly our local Labour Party members.

The reaction from the public was actually not that different from that of local Labour members. Many people are doubtful, but people like Ken when they meet him. He is genuine, he knows Londoners, is not fazed by criticism and has surely more knowledge of the city than any other Londoner.

And this is surely what gives Ken a big chance in the Mayoral election in May 2012: Ken knows London inside out. He is aware of the general feeling that buses are not as clean as they used to be, because he travels on those buses. He knows the London budget numbers down to the nearest thousand pounds. He knows the arcania of planning regulations to a degree that I would find worrying in someone who had not had any responsibility for them previously.

However what is most impressive about Ken, to my mind, is the fact that he really wants it. Ken is 65, but full of fight and full of arguments about how he wants to help Londoners. And beyond it, he speaks passionately of how a Conservative win in the next Mayoral election will give a green light to real Tory instincts not just in London but also in Britain as a whole. If there is a message to mobilise the Labour Party in London, that is surely it.

From a personal point of view, I have been a sceptic about the man. However I worked for Ken during his day in Wimbledon and the wider area of Merton and am proud to have done it. The man is a force of nature, and he knows it.

However his awareness of that specialness, and the anger of some in the wider party about him, should not hamper the campaign in London or those in the wider country – which could be very strong if the early indications are anything to be discerned.

We need reconciliation. Some people need to get around a table and have it out with each other – and reconcile. Then afterwards we can hopefully move on together, strong. We will be a force in any case, but let us not withdraw from these debates and arguments.

Over to you, Ed…