ABK: Anyone But Ken

In under 3 weeks, on May 3rd, us Londoners go to the polls for the 4th time to directly elect the Mayor of London. The Mayor has vast influence over the lives of Londoners, with significant control over public transport, policing, housing, local taxation and infrastructure as well as promoting the interests of the capital at home and abroad. With around 7 million residents, I make the argument that the Mayor of London is the most powerful directly elected politician in the UK.

This year, we see a partial rerun of the 2008 election, with 7 candidates standing for the job:

• The incumbent, Boris Johnson (@BackBoris2012) from the Conservative party
• The former mayor from 2000-2008, Ken Livingstone (@ken4london) from the Labour party
• 2008 candidate & former Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick (@brianpaddick) from the Liberal Democrat party
• Long term London Assembly member and former deputy mayor, Jenny Jones (@greenjennyjones) from the Green Party
• Lawrence Webb (@UKIPWebb4London) from the UKIP party
• Uruguayan/Italian former FCO staffer Carlos Cortiglia from the BNP. I will not be linking through to any of their propaganda, and have only included him for completeness sake. In fact, the title of the blog should be ABCOK.
• The only independent candidate, Siobhan Benita (@Siobhan4mayor) a long term senior civil servant with the Department of Health.

This will not be a post comparing the various policies of those individuals - I'm not going to shill for one candidate or another. For what it's worth, I'm tossing up between Paddick and Benita, but please take a look and make your own mind up. I apologise in advance for the length of this post.

What I do want to say, and the only campaigning I will be doing is sadly a negative point. The single biggest catastrophe, to my mind that could befall the city that I have grown up in and love, is the re-election of Ken as mayor. Other, significantly more famous and eloquent people than I have argued differently - that in a shoot-off between Ken & Boris (which this looks like being), Ken would be better as he is closer to their position on the political compass. With respect, I totally disagree.

Ken Livingstone is bad for London. He is a divisive, controversial figure who revels in the publicity that his attempts to "stick it to the man" have gained him. Labour have already expelled him once from the party and in a forerunner of the recent Bradford-West by-election, their former ally embarrassed them at the polls.

Now I liked Boris on Have I Got News For You, and have enjoyed the 2 occasions where I have bumped into him in London. I don't believe he is the best man for the job, and therefore will not be voting for him. In fact, my previous voting history (Labour, LibDem & Green) places me pretty far from traditional Tory values. However, I agree with him when he says this election is about trust. In fact, I'd say all elections are about trust, and I have none for Ken.

Policy:

Elections theoretically are policy based, so it seems a good place to start. Disagreements on policy don't really constitute the reason for my intense dislike of Ken, but it is important to note that I feel his policies reflect his personality.

Ken has centred his campaign around Transport - a vaunted cut in fares saving £1000-£1600 over 4 years. Unfortunately, I don't believe him. Ken repeatedly lied when he was mayor about rising fare costs and I have not seen a single opinion outside Ken's core supporters supporting his maths this time round. That includes the board of TfL (who may be biased) and several independent academic and economists. Perhaps the strongest argument came from Brian Paddick at the Evening Standard Mayoral Debate this week, when he said

"Boris may play the fool but he isn't one. If he thought the money was there to cut fares in electoral year, why wouldn't he have done it?"

A 'fare' point, I thought. So aside from the crux of his manifesto being built on quicksand, why else will Ken not do this time?

Some of his other ideas have been ridiculous to the extent that they beg the question if he even understands the role - claiming he would devolve more powers to make London similar to New York...I'm pretty sure that would have to come from Westminster who are unlikely to go down that route. An idea to set up an energy cooperative buying cheap power through TfL and selling it to ordinary Londoners sounds great - but also dubious in terms of legality. Why would an organisation with no experience in delivering energy to private residences suddenly become experts in this industry? He's also claimed he will relaunch the EMA in London to persuade teens from disadvantaged backgrounds to remain in education. Very noble - I strongly believe it should never have been scrapped - but where does the money come from? He has repeatedly stated that he will not raise his share of Council Tax, and the coalition government are unlikely to give more money to Ken than they would to Boris.


UPDATE: Ken's EMA promise is centred on getting local authorities to use their own budgets for this project. An area he has no control over, and something they don't appear particularly enthusiastic to do. It sounds a perfect Ken policy - attractive to voters but unlikely to be achieved under the mandate of the Mayor.

All this is policy based, and that's fair game for all politicians. My deep seated antipathy to Ken comes from his personality - and this seems to be a perfect example of an election in an era of personality politics.

As I mentioned above, Ken is divisive and disingenuous.

Divisive:

I'll start with my own community. A few weeks ago, a letter was written to Ed Miliband from various Jewish community leaders about a meeting they had had with Ken Livingstone. The issues that particularly struck with me were Ken's inability to differentiate between Jews, Zionists and Israelis. Maybe it's because I'm comfortable with all 3 terms, but I can't understand how a professional politician in London should struggle to the extent that he uses the term Zionist as a pejorative in an incorrect context. I also have a visceral reaction to a man who cannot understand why people might be upset with his refusal to even acknowledge that inviting and then hugging Al-Qaradawi could be considered offensive, and his income from the now banned Press TV troubles me.

The press ran with an angle that Ken said 'Jews vote Tory 'cos they're rich' - a friend of mine was at this meeting and swears blind that he didn't say that, and that the conversation was taken out of context. I believe her - Ken gave a sort of apology a few days later, but why even get yourself close to that situation. I believe the reason is that being the pragmatic politician that he is, he has decided that the Muslim vote in East London is more valuable than the middle-class centre left vote that he might lose with this controversy and therefore has decided to go down a vaguely sectarian route - not to the same extent as Galloway in Bradford, but enough to make me feel that he is unsuitable to represent the fantastically multicultural city. Two high profile Jewish journalists, both of whom were Labour supporters wrote of their inability to overlook Ken 'being Ken' this time - previous indiscretions include calling a Jewish journalist a "concentration camp guard" for which he was suspended from office.

I can't think of any other reason - Al-Qaradawi is well known for his homophobic comments and someone as progressive on Gay rights as Ken was in the 1980s can't have failed to know that. He decided to make that call and now lives with the consequences. Another, more recent example of offence to the LGBT community came when he claimed to use the phrase "riddled with [gays]" in a positive manner. Again, Paddick (openly gay himself) called him on this - "riddled with" being commonly associated with an infection, especially HIV, which is of higher prevalence in the LGBT community than the general population. It seems that his tactic is to make a headline-grabbing inflammatory remark before offering a partial apology to appease his critics.

Disingenuous:

I'm going to only use examples from the last 2 weeks to prove my point here. It's really that easy. Working back, in chronological order, I'll start with "Bus-advertgate". Boris does something good, Ken has a pop for not being good enough. That's fine - that's politics. However, what's wrong is that Ken did exactly the same thing, except it took him 3 years to get to grips with, rather than a few weeks, whilst Gay Times magazine were asked to change their advert for a more "acceptable" image, despite there being several examples of more explicit heterosexual imagery used in advertising on the tube. Exhibit A of Ken not being generous with the truth.

Then let's take Ken's tears at his own campaign video. Aside from this being rather egotistical, and probably a cynical attempt to appear more 'human', the whole premise of his tears was that the responsibility of helping ordinary Londoners live through tough times was so great. Probably is, however the video was composed of paid actors reading lines, in some cases rather blatantly (see from 0.07, 0.48 & 1.46).

Finally, and most pertinently, let's talk tax. If Ken loses the election, this will be THE defining reason why. Again, it's a morality issue with Ken - there is no question of criminal evasion of taxes. Instead, it's a guy who campaigns for ordinary Londoners, who has spent as long as I can remember having a pop at Boris for his "chickenfeed" comments about his columnist fee from the Telegraph, as well as continuously referencing his support for the cut in top-rate income tax from 50% to 45% now doing exactly the same as these immoral banker types he rails against. To my mind, there is nothing wrong with using the complexities of the tax code to keep as much of your income in your own pockets rather than given to the tax man. I'm for a simpler, more thorough tax system that doesn't allow for this, but I don't deny the rights of individuals to try and beat a terrible system. Ken does, and that's why this tax issue doesn't go away. It is hypocrisy of the highest level, and he knows it. That's why 1 week after agreeing with the other 3 major party candidate to transparently publish their tax returns whilst on Newsnight, he is the only 1 of the 4 not to do so. That's why, he has blustered his way through a week, claiming to have paid enough tax "to buy a new aircraft carrier" whilst changing the percentage paid, as well as falsely accusing Boris of having a similar arrangament.

Again, Paddick embarrasses Ken by refuting his claim that he was right to channel funds through his company as he employed a staff of 3 - one of whom was his wife. As Paddick pointed out, that income would have been tax deductible, and therefore there was no need to pay them through a company. He could have been a sole trader like Paddick, paying the usual rate of income tax, rather than the lower rate of corporation tax. At the Evening Standard debate, this issue led to more noise than any other on the night, and led to calls of "champagne socialist". To me, this issue sums Ken up. He says the right thing (according to my political stance for society), but does whatever is in his own best interests. He is a hypocrite and a liar, and fails to live by the first motto I ever learnt - that of my primary school: Deeds not Words.

All this, added to a man who allegedly pushed a friend down stairs, leading to a concussion, or who's core team consists of the seemingly corrupt means that Ken is possibly the least suitable candidate to represent London. I am in no way intentionally promoting Boris, nor any of the other candidates, except by comparison. All I'm saying is, come May 3rd, please....Anyone But Ken.

Please feel free to leave comments below. Agree, disagree - say what you like but please stay respectful and polite. Follow me on Twitter @ccdaniels65 if you want to hear more of what I have to say about anything....there is a lot of football talk though!