Tomorrow is Yesterday

My fellow Blogger has posted his thoughts on yesterday's Local Elections in the UK, and has unsurprisingly focused on the London Mayoral Elections, which seem to be the single bright spot in an otherwise fairly dismal picture for the Coalition. More on the wider ramifications, which are a direct result of the questionable Budget on which I posted what seems like an eon ago, later in the week, but it's perhaps worth considering the scale of the Johnson achievement, which comes in the shadow of A:/ A pretty dire performance by the Conservatives within London even in the 2010 Elections where they were the largest party and B:/ In the face of National polling data which has seen even the much-maligned Ed Miliband presiding over a 13 point (at maximum) poll Lead, which has led even Erstwhile and somewhat tiresome Former Statesman blogger Dan Hodges to damn him with faint praise. ( 9.30pm London time: Warning - Lest I speak too soon - It appears the result is considerably tighter than predicted - it looks like it will go right to the wire. However, the basic critique remains valid although were Livingstone to win the ramifications for those unfortunate enough to live in London would require a separate post)

As my colleague has pointed out, anyone wanting to see the scale of Ken's achievement in managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of what would have seemed certain victory need only follow Andrew Gilligan's blog in the Telegraph which gives an almost daily dose of bile for those able to stomach it. This has been derided on the Left as a 'smear campaign' which given the outrageous calumnies against Boris seen almost Daily on Twitter suggests either a distinct lack of Irony or failure to take account of the phrase beloved of the late Peter Cook, 'Mote and Beam , sir, Mote and Beam' (Based on the Biblical quotation from Matthew 7:3)

'Why beholdest thou the mote that is in your brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye'

A quote the increasingly desperate bloggers such as Owen Jones  and Sunny Hundal  (who appear willing to forgive almost any outrage if it gets a Labour victory) would do well to bear in mind.  One can only imagine the reaction had Johnson made some of the verbal gaffes that Ken had. Who can forget this classic piece from the Ultra Left Compass think tank which would have touched the heart of the Late Joseph Goebbels with its use of selective quotations, dissimulation, out of context quotations and innuendoes back when Johnson first became a mayoral candidate in 2007? Given the state of the election, I'm surprised this wasn't used as a Bible for journalists to attack him!

As Hal points out, Livingstone's failure will have almost zero ramifications for Ed Miliband - he's considered as much a maverick by many across the political spectrum as was George Galloway, and if anything, I think Miliband will benefit from having, as far as possible kept a discreet distance from his candidate's antics.

So, what is the secret to Johnson's success?:

1/ He has kept a relatively Low profile throughout the campaign - A Savvy campaigner who since an unsuccessful bid for Parliament back in 1997 has an excellent track record, I think he quickly evaluated that Ken would do himself enough damage that his best bet was to keep quiet and leave discussion until the debate, where the visceral mutual loathing would do as much damage to Ken's campaign as to his. This lack of gaffes (and he has a track record here in terms of putting his foot in his mouth as anyone from the Liverpool area will testify) served only to magnify Ken's errors.

2/ The Labour Party managed to hang itself with a singularly unsuccessful and arguably the weakest candidate they could possibly have put in the field. Anyone who has lived under Ken and who worked in the Private Sector would have had no difficulty remembering Ken's record, which was to introduce huge tax rises with almost nothing in return except for a regular diet of Political propaganda, and procure contracts for his political cronies at, again , great expense to the taxpayer. His much-vaunted congestion charge merely had the effect of shifting commuter traffic outside the zone and made private motor transport the preserve of the rich. It is very hard to conceive of a single positive aspect to his period as mayor and suffice it to say, although I had fled London to the West of England by that point, the celebrations which followed Johnson's victory led to a less than productive Friday. Had Oona King been selected as candidate, given here popularity with Ethnic minorities and women, it would have been a tall order for Boris, even with a considerable cult 'Personal' following to overcome her.

3/ Although Boris has arguably been less effective than many hoped, he does possess a certain charm that sets him apart from the Coalition - various appearances on Have I Got News for You  combined with a carefully cultivated image as a shambling , quasi-cartoonish character has done much to negate the 'Tory contamination' that has affected almost the entire rest of the coalition and gives him a certain cachet amongst the apolitical voters especially. This, combined with his relatively calm persona in the face of quite vicious hatchet jobs from the Left has done a great deal to provide a personal bounce factor which has negated the otherwise dire Poll ratings for the Tories. By contrast, as I have pointed out to Hal, Ken's ruthless 'coalition-building' and effective use of Private Sector workers as cash cows for his political projects has led to an 'Anti-Ken' coalition (No prizes for guessing I was a member) of people who vote for anyone but Ken. Although many have left London for pastures new, I'd say only the BNP has a more polarising impact than that man.

(Update 10pm London Time - the last few thousand ballots are having to be counted by hand due to a failure of the counting machines, Don't you just love modern technology?)

Ken Livingstone, dinosaur machine politics, and the case for change in London

I have spent rather too much time towards the back end of this week following an entertaining, but at the same time philosophically deep, Twitterspat between the erst-while uber-Blairite Telegraph (and ex-New Statesman) blogger Dan Hodges and various other Labour bloggers and Twitterati from the left, right and centre of the party (including Owen Jones, Eoin Clarke, Mehdi Hasan, Luke Akehurst and Hopi Sen) concerning the merits of Ken Livingstone's campaign to win back the London mayorality from Boris Johnson. And specifically, whether Ken should be supported just because he's the Labour party candidate even if you have serious misgivings about him as a candidate.

Unusually, I find myself in a certain measure of agreement with Dan Hodges on this issue... in that I don't think Ken deserves the automatic support of Labour members, let alone the wider left or centre of London politics, just because he's currently the main challenger to Johnson.

We need to get something straight about what Ken isn't, first of all (and I'm speaking as someone who voted for, and donated money to, Ken in his independent mayor bid of 2000 - the last time I was eligible to vote in a London election - and who was also an enthusiastic supporter of his re-election bids in 2004 and 2008). He is not a "hard-left" Labour candidate; if anything he is a maverick centrist, who enthusiastically endorsed most of the New Labour agenda while he was mayor. That's not to say his two terms as mayor were particularly bad; on the contrary, he made many good innovations, including congestion charging, low public transport fares (at least on Oyster cards), the Oyster card itself, and the rather nice red "ON" in the "MAYOR OF LONDON" posters. But this was back in the day when he was mainly focused on policy, rather than making an increasingly bizarre sequence of unforced errors, for example:

• making ludicrous, borderline anti-semitic allegations about London's Jewish voters (as Jonathan Freedland has pointed out in an excellent article in the Guardian).
• emulating George Galloway by hanging out with a selection of reactionary and homophobic religious leaders (as pointed out by Nick Cohen, for example).
• making unwise remarks about denying the vote to tax avoiders - unwise because on some definitions Ken is a tax avoider himself (I will be devoting a specific post to this as it is important to clear up confusion about what "tax avoidance" consists in, but suffice to say for now that the right-wing arguments that Ken is a tax avoider DO have some validity, and the issue is a time bomb which has exploded in his face at just the wrong time).

The sad thing is that Ken's policy platform is basically sound - on transport policy, reinstating EMA, and many other areas. But he's become an electoral liability to the Labour campaign. I've been arguing for several months now that Ken was going to win this election - albeit narrowly - because he only lost by 6 percentage points in 2008, and Labour was at least 10 points down in the national polls then. Logically, with Labour now 5 to 10 points ahead in the national polls, Ken should be in front of Johnson by at least 10. But instead he's around 5 points behind. I think if Labour had chosen Oona King to be selected as mayoral candidate in 2010 rather than Ken, she'd be kicking Boris Johnson's ass (and god knows, that bastard needs to have his ass kicked).

Some people - notably the brilliant left-wing Labour commentator Owen Jones - have argued that there is a right-wing media conspiracy against Ken. And yes there is, but the Tory press EXISTS to put the boot in to Labour candidates by means fair or foul. Labour's failure to reform the media to make it more balanced despite several opportunities to do so from 1945 onwards ensures that - at least until the next Labour Govt - Labour candidates are going to have to struggle against a tidal wave of lies, bullshit and smear operations. So, given that we know that, isn't it a hostage to fortune to put Ken Livingstone -a very articulate politician, but also a guy who is often the rhetorical equivalent of a cluster bomb - in the hot seat? Why not go for someone less gaffe-prone?

There's then the final line of defence, which is to say that Ken should be backed just *because* he's the Labour candidate. One of the reasons I'm not in the Labour party is this kind of dinosaur machine politics, which has in recent years been mainly been the preserve of the Blairite right, but which elements of the Labour left are now showing they can do just as well. My view on this is quite simple: supporting Labour candidates who aren't worthy of the role is a bad idea. It degrades, and in the end is likely to destroy, the Labour party. Tony Blair wasn't worthy of being PM by 2005 and no way would I have advised people in Sedgefield to vote for him then. I'd have backed Reg Keys. Likewise, I don't believe Ken Livingstone is worthy of being mayor in 2012. I don't have a vote so this matters not a jot to the election itself, but if I did, I would be voting Jenny Jones of the Green Party as 1st choice on the ballot.

And who knows? If Ken continues to disappoint in the next couple of weeks it's quite possible that Jones, the Lib Dem Brian Paddick or the indepedendent candidate Siobhan Benita could start to move up in the polls. And then things might start to get really interesting.

The demise (?) of Dan Hodges

Once I had stopped throwing my Blackberry around the train for not working properly today and remembered that I had a perfectly functioning Samsung Galaxy S as backup, Tweetdeck dealt me the sad news that Dan Hodges had left the New Statesman.

For those who have never read his stuff (and there can't be many of you on the left, nor apparently among the Tories), Dan is a maverick blogger with strong Blairite tendencies. He is no great fan of Ed Miliband most of the time, and according to the (usually less than reliable) Guido Fawkes, Ed's office was instrumental in securing Dan's dismissal from the Statesman after such classic anti-Ed fodder as "Ed Miliband has a strategy - it's called Ralph Nader", "No one likes Ed Miliband - but he doesn't care" and "Ed's hit himself with a hammer. Why is he surprised it hurts?"

The Statesman itself issued a tweet saying that Dan had resigned rather than being fired, and there has been no word - yet - from the man himself, so it's not at all clear what happened yet. The Guido Fawkes view is that Dan was forced out because of his anti-Ed Miliband views. However, there are a lot of anti-Ed views expressed on the site and only some of them have come from Dan. Until recently the Statesman had Lib Dem Olly Grender on the books, and they also have the dreadful Tory Graeme Archer, the small 'l' liberal legal specialist David Allen Green, the hard left (ish) activist Laurie Penny, and economist David Blanchflower (the British Paul Krugman); none of these are sycophantic Milibandites. The only real hardcore pro-Ed voice on the Statesman's main writing team is Mehdi Hasan.

It also seems unlikely that Dan's persistent attacks on Ed are well crafted enough to prompt a nasty phone call from the Ed team saying "get rid of this geezer". Basically, Dan writes two kinds of articles; the Ed is Crap Article and the Article About Something Else. Sometimes the Article About Something Else is worth reading (e.g. his recent post on the Tories' problems over whether to abolish the 50p rate or not was excellent.) The Ed Is Crap Article is, and always has been, desperate Blairite trolling replete with all the tricks of the trade - asides from unnamed "cabinet ministers", the "concerned insider" saying "we really don't know what Ed's doing anymore", Tony Blair lurking in the background tutting disapproval, and some guy Dan meets up for a pint with every fortnight who doesn't know the names of any contemporary politicians at all but thinks Enoch Powell had the right idea in sending 'em all back home. Or something like that. I do computer programming sometimes and I'm thinking of producing a piece of software that will automatically write a generic Dan Hodges "Ed Is Crap" Article at the press of a button, using randomisation to generate slightly different copy each time (along the lines of the early web classic the Post Modernist Essay Generator). Maybe I could sell it to the Statesman and they could carry on as if all was well.

Actually I'm being slightly unfair on Dan here - recently he did discover a third type of article - it was the Ed Balls Is Crap article. File under "slight variation of the formula."

Despite the fact that I rarely agree with Dan (although occasionally I have enthusiastically endorsed his writing), and that I think his anti-Ed stance is tired and one-dimensional, I'm nonetheless sad to see him leaving the Statesman, partly because I enjoyed commenting on his articles (usually either to accuse him of being a Tory plant or a plant from Ed Miliband's office designed to offer only token and thin criticism to make Ed look good), partly because - as evidenced by his Twitter feed - he does have a great wit at times, and partly because even though he's mostly wrong, he's often interestingly wrong - unlike someone like John Rentoul for example, who is just annoying. And also because it probably means he'll be doing more on Labour Uncut - the right-wing Labour blog started by Mr Webcameron himself, Sion Simon - which is full of people with views similar to Dan, but who express them much less articulately. To the extent that I can't be bothered to visit the site: Labour List is as far right as I go, and even then rarely.