Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone announced he would be running for mayor last week. This interview is from when Ken Livingstone was last Mayor of London. And it’s why we need him back.

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MK: I just wanted to ask you first about George Bush. When he visited London you said that he was the “most dangerous man on the planet”. Do you still stand by that?

KL: Yes. Not just because he’s forever having wars but just his environmental policies threaten all life on the planet. If you think back, if, say, Al Gore has won in 2000 – Al Gore was aware about the problems of climate change – by now America would have been set on some good climate change reduction policies. Instead, he’s just let everything rip and America just continues to expand its production of carbon gases and of course the close we get to the tipping point where all this become irreversible – which might be no more than 10 years away. I think his environmental policies threaten all life on this planet and it may be that even by the time a new President is elected, it might only be two years before the tipping point, or so.

MK: But you were a vociferous opponent of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as well…

KL: Yes. Not so much Afghanistan because I think there is a real problem with the Taliban, but with Iraq it was a complete charade – there was no threat to anyone else after ten years of sanctions. It wasn’t in the position to be a military threat to anyone else. And I suspect more people have actually died since the invasion than Saddam was regularly killing himself. But you’ve also got the fact that there is the possibility of a fundamentalist regime which is in many ways even worse than Saddam Hussein because of it does to women.

MK: Do you think the bombings in London were directly related to the invasion of Iraq?

KL: They would have been a factor. But they were just one in many. You’ve had 80 years of Britain and America and France intervening in Arab and Muslim countries – always around the issue of control of oil. You have these long running sores of Palestine and Chechnya and Kashmir and it has fuelled a genuine view, I think amongst many Muslims, that there is a double standard being applied by the West. You know, Sharon can organize the invasion of neighbouring countries and nothing is done, but when Saddam Hussein did it there was immediate international force raised behind America in 1990 and he was told he wouldn’t be allowed to keep what he’d gained. That isn’t what the world said to Israel after it invaded the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

MK: In the context of that kind of feeling, do you think there is a “clash of civilizations” now?

KL: There’s clearly a desire around the neo-conservatives around George Bush to have that because if they can have the whole world living in fear of Islam it justifies their military budget; it justifies military intervention all over the place. Just like the Cold War was largely a fiction because at the time in the 1950’s and 60’s America had a ten or twenty to one dominance of nuclear weapons over the Soviet Union. Everyone in the West was scared with all these stories about how the gap was closing and the West was vulnerable – it was never true at all. We’re not vulnerable now – Islam does not want to take over the West. You have a lot of people who would like to see a lot of the present regime replaced in the Middle East and you’ve got some people who would live to see a united Muslim world community but, you know, in exactly the same way that a lot of other countries want to expand themselves. There is no particular threat to us.

MK: You speak out quite a lot about the Bush administration and some people have accused you of being anti-America. Is that something that angers you?

KL: Some of my best friends of American and I pay them lots of money to work for me! I mean, what is so annoying about Bush is there’s so much that’s absolutely wonderful in the American people and America and yet they keep getting this… I mean, the worst elements in their society flow up to the top to run it – the biggest crocks, the biggest cowards, the worse racists. There was a wonderful slogan that Jimmy Carter had when he ran for President in 1976 saying, “Why can’t we have a government as good as the people?”

MK: So do you think it is a clever way of controlling dissent? That you can just slap that epithet on people…

KL: It’s exactly the same way in which America manufactured the Cold War in the late 1940’s – they needed an enemy to sustain their military budgets. You are now in a position where America spends more on its military than the next ten largest spending nations combined. You have got to ask why does America need to spend so much? It’s because it seeks global domination and ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has made really aggressive advances – in economic and military terms – across the planet. Until China emerges as the equivalent superpower they will continue to get away with a lot of it. That’s why a lot of us are so keen to open up channels of dialogue to try to… as well as the fact that the Chinese government seem to thinking a lot more original thinking about the global environment and what needs to be done than George Bush is.

MK: But I mean what you say is essentially true. But because of our special relationship with America is Blair not, by default, the second most dangerous men on the planet?

KL: No, I think the mistake that the government made was to assume that they could influence the US in a less dangerous direction. I mean, when you read about this transcript of Tony Blair trying to dissuade George Bush from bombing Al-Jazeera and I don’t have the slightest doubt – and also my own contacts with people in Downing Street – that they have done what they can to moderate them but the trouble is the impact of the military-industrial complex is so overwhelming – the UN is having to make all sorts of concessions to keep its foot in the door – at the end of the day it’s not worth being there.

MK: What do you think the best way of combating radical Islam is? We’ve got Hamas in Palestine now…

KL: Well Hamas is most probably the one body that can deliver a just and lasting peace settlement in the Middle East. I mean, Fatah has clearly alienated a lot of its voters with corruption, inability to deliver and clearly a deal can be done between Israel and the Palestinians which is satisfactory for Hamas. I mean that will bring the fighting to the end. It’s a bit like 25 years ago I shouldn’t talk to Gerry Adams, I should only talk to the SDLP but the SDLP weren’t killing anybody so there wasn’t much point really. You had to talk to the people that were running the military campaign and you’re not going to get a just settlement if it’s not acceptable to Hamas because Hamas will carry on fighting.

Also, Hamas is no different from the Likud. I mean the Likud Party was formed out of the far-right, nationalist terrorist organization that practiced a brutal regime of bombing, murder and rape in the 1930’s and 1940’s. They went into parliament and became legitimate and now Hamas is doing the same thing. I see very clear parallels between Sharon and Hamas.

MK: But in terms of extremist Islam in England, we had the demonstration a few days ago which was pretty extreme…

KL: I mean a couple of hundred on a demonstration – you can get a couple of hundred people marching around on a demonstration claiming the Earth is flat. In London we’ve got 750,000 Muslims. The number that support fundamentalist interpretation of Islam is in percentage wise single figures and, you know maybe 2 or 3%. If you actually look at any large group in Britain you’ll find… actually there was a speech by a Baptist minister complaining that no enough people were killed by the July 7th bombings because we tolerate homosexuals in our midst. You had a Rabbi make a speech back in the 1990’s saying a thousand Arab lives weren’t worth a Jewish fingernail. You really can’t judge every Christian, or every Jew, or every Muslim by the ranting of the small ultra-nutter, fundamentalist wing. And every religion has got its fundamentalist wing.

MK: But you’re saying that the actions of the US and UK have made it worse…

KL: Oh undoubtedly. It’s fuelled the sense of grievance in the Muslim and I mean made the world a much more dangerous place.

MK: But a lot of the left in Iraq supported the invasion…

KL: I think clearly if your perspective is one from which you’ve been trying to survive under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship you’ll grasp at any straw and hope that that might get better. And a lot of people did initially take that view. A lot of them have now come to the view it was a mistake. That’s not at all surprising: If your family was murdered or tortured by Saddam Hussein you would most probably think that nothing can be worse than that and then along comes George Bush and you realize it can.

MK: What chances of an invasion of Iran now? The drumbeat is starting to sound…

KL: I mean it is quite easy for America to do bombing from a great height or missile strikes but there’s no question of a ground war with American troops going into Iran because they would be defeated. Iraq’s a basket case; it’s three separate ethnic groups – all who hate each other. It was never a genuine society in any sense. Whereas of course Persian/Iranian society has been there for 5,000 years, is a great historic culture, it was once the leading power in the world. And if America was to invade the whole Iranian would rally their government to resist and the American death toll would be most probably the sort of level you had in Vietnam. MK: Are you optimistic about the anti-war or the global justice movement? You were mayor when one million people marched through London…

I’m optimistic. I’m assuming that there’s a good chance that a much more open-minded President will be elected in 2010 – it won’t be perfect but it will be an improvement. But here in Britain there seems to be a real resurgence of support for traditional values around the Welfare State and progressive taxation. I mean the great conflict still comes about whether the world goes down America’s road or between Europe and China and to see if we are able to construct something more progressive. You look at the way all the elections are going in Latin America where the pro-Bush candidates are all humiliated – people supported by Chavez and Fidel are getting elected.

MK: In terms of your politics what kind of intellectuals and thinkers do you read?

KL: What I read is documents relating to the London government. I suppose what formed my thinking was the events of 1968. It was people like Tariq Ali and those ultra-leftists and radicals and street fighters. And Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. It was all the people who were defenders of ’68. If you look at more orthodox politicians I thought that Robert Kennedy actually might have been a very good President. And John XXIIV who was Pope from 1958-1963 was an incredibly progressive force – he was about to reexamine the position on contraception and women when he died. It’s taken the last Pope John Paul to roll back most of the progressive reforms he enforced.

MK: Do you feel like you have been on an evolution politically?

KL: You can’t go through 35 years of political activity and not change – you really would be a vegetable. You have a core set of values, which are public services, progressive taxation, the redistribution of wealth between the rich and the poor nations. The way in which these are fought out just changes, particularly at the present time. Since the defeat of the Soviet Union, progressive forces have been dramatically rolled back in countries and globally. I tend to think that is inevitable and I think it is quite possible it could roll back the other way. Everything will depend really on what comes out of China and Africa and Asia. For the last 500 years global politics has been determined by Europe and America. Now it is about to shift so that power will have to be shared with China and the coalition of forces in the developing world.

MK: Do you think a Chinese superpower will be any more humane? It could be even worse…

KL: The thing is for progressive forces and for countries there’s a space between superpowers in which you can maneuver. When you don’t have two superpowers there isn’t space. And almost all the progressive things that we take for granted like the Welfare State and decolonialisation would never had happened if Russia and China hadn’t been there building a real challenge to capitalism and until there is an alternative pole – I suspect it will be around China – we’re are going to find that room for maneuver.

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