Afternoon:
10°c
Day five in Boristown, and London is a city transformed. Already, the new Mayor has put an extra policeman on the streets (Brian Paddick). Children have stopped killing each other and taken up traditional English pursuits, such as Morris dancing. Young people are queuing at hair salons for the newly fashionable Boris Johnson Look.
Well, all right. Not very much has changed, nor will it, straight away. Bendy buses are still blocking traffic. Lee Jasper is still giving us hours of family entertainment (he announced on Tuesday that he wants to become a Labour MP). And Ken Livingstone and Labour still show no understanding whatever of why they lost.
In a message to supporters last night, rather different from his gracious concession speech, Ken blamed his defeat on the suburbs, on the BNP tactically voting for Boris and on the "conservative nature" of the Lib-Dem campaign - on everything, in other words, except himself. "There is no doubt," he added, "that the new Mayoralty will inaugurate decline and division."
On a thousand blogs and in their house journal, the Guardian newspaper, his supporters have taken up the theme that London is now "doughnut city", a Ken-friendly inner core surrounded by Tory-voting reactionaries. The capital's multicultural "progressive consensus" has been betrayed by white, suburban net-curtain twitchers who "aren't really Londoners at all", roused into action by Evening Standard "smears" and Lynton Crosby's "dog-whistle" politics.
You may think that post-election inquests are academic. But a healthy opposition party is good for everyone - and unless Labour faces the following truths about why it lost, London will be a Tory one-party state for a generation.
First, and most importantly, Londoners who live in the suburbs are every bit as much "real Londoners" as anyone in N1. Ever since the first train steamed out of the first station, London has been a suburban city. The people of Ilford and Hayes and Finchley and Croydon pay for the GLA just the same as the people of Lambeth and Camden, indeed rather more so. They have exactly the same rights to vote, and there are more of them.
Neither does the doughnut theory hold water. Every one of the suburbs I just named is represented by a Labour MP, and voted for Ken in 2004. And nor, any more, are the suburbs the comfortable, complacent places of cliché. They are economically harder-pressed than some Ken-supporting parts of inner London, ethnically and socially quite fast-changing, deeply worried about public services and crime.
Amazingly, Livingstone ignored all this. He had nothing to say to those potentially Labour C2s. He put more effort into wooing the Polish community - which is unlikely to have cast more than 20,000 actual votes - than into Redbridge and Merton.
That happened because the Livingstone machine fell into a series of self-delusions about its candidate, its opponent and, indeed, about London itself. It genuinely seemed to believe that the capital is a mixture of Guardian readers, who were targeted by majoring the campaign on climate change, and ethnic minorities, who could be scared by talk of Boris's supposed "racism" or bought by LDA grants.
But it isn't like that. There is no "progressive consensus". London is not a progressive city - it's a swing city. It goes with, or slightly ahead of, the tide in the country. And the swing voters are precisely those people in places such as Ilford that Livingstone ignored.
I happen to care very much about climate change but then I'm a Guardian reader. It was nowhere near the top of the voters' priority list, and there was nothing to be heard from Ken on the issue that was - crime.
London is electorally like Britain because, electorally, it is British. Ken's fantasy idea of London, a patchwork of immigrants, an independent city-state, ignored the fact that the average migrant worker, here for a few years, is neither registered to vote nor interested in voting.
And I sense his attempt to woo, or frighten, voters on the basis of race offended many, black and white, who want to be addressed as Londoners first, just as interested in the Tube or the police as anyone else. London is not New York. People here mix - and we disliked Livingstone's attempt to separate us into categories. Ken, not Boris, "inaugurated division".
So Ken fought in the London he dreamed of having, rather than the one he did have - and he also fought the opponent he wanted to have, not the one he had. He regarded Boris's election as inconceivable - entirely forgetting that in 2000, he himself took the Mayoralty by insurgent charm. He genuinely saw Johnson as a vicious Right-winger, failing to understand the breadth of his appeal. He came to believe his own propaganda, seeing himself as the irreplaceable father of the city.
Yet though Ken may have been popular with opinion-formers, he was never all that popular with Londoners. Even in 2004, he got only 35 per cent of the first-preference vote. What saved him was that his principal opponent, Steve Norris, was even less loved than he was. But then along came a candidate - Boris - who could unite the anti-Ken majority that has always existed.
The Standard played a part in Ken's downfall (and as for the charge that our articles were "smears", I am still waiting for the sour-grapes fraternity to produce a single example of anything I wrote that was untrue.) But the greater damage was done by the ex-Mayor himself.
The Livingstone campaign existed in a state of permanent denial, where all negative news stories were by definition false, where a senior campaign adviser, John Ross, told the London government expert Tony Travers that a Boris win was "scientifically impossible", and where, at the absolute apogee of delusion, the campaign made an official complaint about an opinion pollster because its polls showed them behind.
Even so, Ken would probably have survived without the crossover appeal of Johnson, who brought together not just the Tory family but enough UKIP and Lib-Dem voters to take him over the line. This truly was Boris's victory.
Reader views (11)
Perth, Scotland? Gilligan may have a point about the suburbs but that's pushing it a bit.
- Lemongrass, Hackney, 09/05/2008 09:38
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Some aspect of this line of argument have been more than a bit tweaked. Most obviously, the claim that London is "a swing city". London is the most right wing big city in Great Britain by some way.
There are about 20 Conservative MPs in London, the majority of all suburban Tory MPs. There are between 4 & 5 in other places entitled to more than 2 MPs: Shipley, Altrincham and Sale West, Cheadle, Sutton Coldfield, Devon South West (which is partly in Plymouth).
I have heard Ken Livingston speak of "an anti-Tory majority" in London. His pitch to win second votes from LibDem and Green voters was not successful enough; certainly not as successful as the wholesale return of UKIP voters to Conservative.
- Alan Griffiths, Forest Gate, London, 09/05/2008 08:47
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Livingstone lost because he likes playing the race card and ignored or forgot the White Working Heterosexual have a voice and opinion.
- Mike, London, 09/05/2008 08:28
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Ken used to live in Camden (not sure if he still does), part of the GLA's Barnet and Camden constituency - one of the "donut" suburbs. Sometimes one wonders whether the Guardianistas actually bother to think before they write or then again it may be that they don't know much of London outside of Farringdon Road!
- Mike Isaacs, London NW4, 09/05/2008 00:06
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After the joke at the beginning, is this Andrew Gilligan’s way of masking the fact that he has aided the election of a mayor with no policies? Well certainly no policies that could actually make a difference and bares no resemblance to any of the deeply ingrained urban and global issues of our time.
Then there were some interesting points about fluid migration and local democracy but it is twisted into nonsense about London being homogeneously 'British' and flows with the country. I’m not sure where Andrew read his history books, but I think he maybe confusing the fact that culturally London has always pushed the British parliament and not the other way around.
I would also like to pick up on the suburb ideal that Andrew seems to have romanticised. Suburbs are not Urban, they are also not a sustainable approach to land use. The suburbs are London’s mistake not her image. The fact that many suburbs can be defined by a conservative, protectionist, selfish, non-progressive nature is more a tarnish on the swing of the electoral vote than something we should be celebrating the influence of.
- B Marsden, London, 08/05/2008 19:04
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Well the left feel that the
"white, suburban net-curtain twitchers" were behind it all. Well I believe that there's some truth in this as Bromley showed with its massive Boris vote. If anyone one practices discrimination it is ken and the left. They have for years put hard working decent people at the back of any queue in fact they despise them especially the white ones. Ken didn't care about Londoners per see, only the ones that punched above their weight in terms of influencing votes for Ken. I'm sorry to say that tended to be minority pressure groups and the left who love nothing more than to stir up grievances amongst these minority groups by persistently telling them how hard done by they'd been by a intrinsically racist white population over the centuries.
Ken and his left nutters have the temerity to target a white population as the cause of their downfall and yet he showed no shame or care just like Mr. Brown in constantly financially bleeding this section of the population with nothing given in return but higher council taxes and living costs in order to tickle and please via grants cultural do’s and so on those that would be then guaranteed vote for him.
A proper government or mayor takes *all* Londoners along for the ride regardless of race or status
Tough Ken and the rump left, the people that you so despise and felt morally justified in your distorted self hate Marxist view to rob; have now turned
- Lawrence Beatty, London UK, 08/05/2008 18:22
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Ken & Co. are just continuing in defeat as they did in power, ignoring public opinion, berating anybody who dares to disagree with them and being generally "sidagreeable." I'm just glad that I no longer have to pay for the pleasure of listening to it.
- Mark, London, UK, 08/05/2008 16:54
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I dearly hope, now, that the Guardianistas amongst us can put behind them such petty squabbling as we saw in the run up to the elections and take the egalitarian approach of getting behind the Boris (London first, politics second) and helping him to make London better, just as the conservative supporters generally did with Ken.
- St, London, 08/05/2008 15:45
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Sounds like you've been reading my blog, Andrew. Boris appealed to Londoners; Ken tried to appeal to minorities.
- Nobby Clark, Perth, Scotland, 08/05/2008 15:41
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Kenneth Livingstone, the silly old fart, is deliberately deluding himself in a vain attempt to prop up his fallen ego. He lost because we hate his corrupt politically correct crony ridden regime.
- Annabelle, london, 08/05/2008 15:05
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Andrew, time to move on.
- Darren Lewis, United Kingdom, 08/05/2008 13:47
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