History
Ken Livingstone and the history of the Greater London Council
April 2000
Ken Livingstone will most probably emerge from the 4 May poll as the mayor of London, nearly 15 years after Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) that he led on 1 April 1986.
Livingstone joined the GLC Labour group in 1973 and found himself, by the summer of 1975, in a bloc of nine Labour councillors that formed an opposition to the right-wing leadership under Sir Reg Goodwin.
In the two years between Thatcher’s first general election win and the next GLC poll, Livingstone spent his time and energy plotting a "Labour left" take-over of County Hall.
In May 1981 Labour did recapture the GLC and Livingstone swiftly replaced Andrew Macintosh as Labour leader. But the Labour group itself remained divided.
The man who would serve for two years as Livingstone’s GLC deputy, Illtyd Harrington, was definitely not from the party’s hard left, but he welcomed the dynamism of the now dominant Livingstone-led faction. In Harrington’s words, they "appeared to be fresh, open-minded.
These were attractive things to see. We had gone through a long period of appalling local government [in contrast] they appeared to be alive, marvellously alive."
Even prior to Livingstone’s leadership "coup", the Tory tabloids had begun a "red scare" offensive, taking their cue from the Conservative Party manifesto which warned voters of the "Marxist threat to London".
The media spotlight on "Red Ken" intensified during his first summer in charge of County Hall. His meeting at the seat of London government with the mother of an IRA hunger striker sent the editors into new fits of rage.
The old Labour right joined in the attack. The then Southwark Council leader, John O’Grady claimed that "the GLC is in a Walt Disney situation". This remark came as word leaked out of a potential 120 per cent rise in borough rates to fund the implementation of Labour’s GLC manifesto pledges.
In September 1981 Livingstone renewed an old political alliance with Ted Knight, the Lambeth council leader. They launched a new paper, Labour Herald. In its inaugural issue it signalled a left turn in expectation of a new Tory attack on local authority spending powers.
An editorial, co-signed by Livingstone, declared that "Labour councils must refuse to vote for cuts in services or rent and fare increases. But they must also refuse to vote for rate increases under the Tories’ new system."
By late 1981 the stage was set for the first major confrontation between the Livingstone-led GLC and the Thatcher government. The battle was over public transport fares. The Labour manifesto had pledged at least a 25 per cent cut in tube and bus fares.
The Inner London Education Authority, made up in large measure of GLC councillors, had reneged on a manifesto pledge to slice 10 pence a day off school meals after legal advice, though the GLC actually delivered on its promise to slash transport fares by nearly a third. But a legal challenge by Tory councillors in suburban Bromley left the GLC’s "Fares Fair" policy in tatters.
An excerpt from the judgement gives insight into the ruling class’ priorities when it comes to local government. The judge, Lord Scarman, concluded that the GLC had pursued the fares cut as "an object of social and transport policy" rather than from "economic necessity". Scarman went on to state that "the GLC had abandoned business principles . . . a breach of the duty owed to the ratepayers and wrong in law."
Livingstone made political hay out of the Law Lords’ ruling against "Fares Fair". But as his biographer Carvel noted: "it did not mobilise the people who were probably worst affected by the Law Lords’ judgement: the poor, the unemployed and the housebound women for whom cheap fares had been a passport to greater freedom."
Livingstone refused to call for the considerable industrial muscle of tube and bus workers to be used to defend the fares policy. Larry Smith, a member of the TGWU’s national executive council, threatened a combined bus and tube strike across the whole of London Transport in defence of the policy - and his members’ jobs - that would have "sealed the city like a drum".
There was a widespread mood in favour of a strike in the aftermath of the Law Lords’ ruling.
But Livingstone ignored it in favour of a media oriented campaign of getting councillors to dress up as judges, ride on buses and refuse to pay the increased fares.
Needless to say the mood for strike action dissipated as the GLC campaign itself petered out. Livingstone blamed the legalistic cowardice of the right wing of the GLC Labour group for the eventual fare hikes, but his "defiance" of the "vandals in ermine" had cost him nothing and enhanced his left credentials into the bargain.
Meanwhile, London Transport would pass completely from GLC control in the summer of 1984 as the prelude to the complete privatisation and partial deregulation of London’s buses.
Following the "Fares Fair" defeat, media interest switched to and GLC’s supposed obsession with backing "zany left-wing causes that alienated ‘ordinary’ people". Tory strategists were worried that the GLC’s help for ethnic minority, women’s, and lesbian and gay organisations with grants to make them Labour-loyal would provide Livingstone with a rock solid electoral base. So they cast their opposition to the voluntary sector grant policies in racist, sexist and homophobic terms, branding the GLC as an example of the "loony left".
The GLC’s policies actually incorporated quite a few militant activists into the local state, turning them into more or less willing agents of an alternative establishment that dared not bite the hand that fed them.
Even so, and whatever Livingstone’s motives, the GLC did bring about substantial progressive changes in the make-up of its own workforce and gave an important symbolic recognition to the genuine diversity of London’s working class, which had been largely ignored by traditional Labourism and even sections of the far left.
By late 1983, as Thatcher ruled with a 144-seat parliamentary majority, big city Labour-controlled authorities had moved to the top of her hit list. Foremost among her targets was the GLC.
Her Environment Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, developed a two-pronged strategy: restrict the revenue of the large metropolitan authorities through rate-capping legislation; abolish the authorities by an Act of Parliament. He stabbed at local authorities with these prongs just as the biggest class battle in Britain for nearly 60 years began, the great miners’ strike of 1984/85.
While some of the Labour leaders in these local authorities addressed dozens of meetings in support of the miners, placed local facilities at their disposal and even endorsed the call for a general strike in defiance of the anti-union laws, none of them actually opened a second front for the NUM.
Even Liverpool City Council, ideologically dominated by the "Marxists" of the Militant Tendency, precursors of today’s Socialist Party, struck a deal with Patrick Jenkin in the summer of 1984 that bought the council some time and concessions, but did nothing to relieve the miners’ isolation. Other councils followed suit in what amounted to a betrayal of the miners.
The GLC itself opted for a witty campaign of advertising and publicity stunts to stave off its demise at a time when class struggle was required.
In the same month as unarmed miners battled against the riot police at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, "Red Ken" bowed to shake hands with Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony to mark the opening of the Thames Barrier. This was the same Livingstone who less than three years before had turned down an invite to the royal wedding and called for the abolition of the monarchy.
In defence of "local democracy", Ken became a chameleon switching from tabloid bogeyman to shameless populist. Not all of his allies on the left of the GLC Labour group were pleased with the thrust of the campaign, but they all, more or less, agreed with the cornerstone of his strategy for resisting abolition: lobbying the House of Lords during various phases of the Tories’ legislation uneasy passage through Parliament. The chambers of County Hall witnessed a good deal of winning and dining of Tory peers in 1984.
At the same time Livingstone caved in to the logic of ratecapping and abandoned his leading role in a national campaign among Labour authorities. A group of local Labour leaders had refused to set a rate, with the explicit aim of provoking a financial crisis so severe that the Tories would have to enter into serious negotiations about the estimated £9 billion they had ripped off local authorities in the preceding four years.
The GLC wound up adopting a budget that was nearly three per cent below what the Tory capping limit would have allowed. While Livingstone’s deputy, John McDonnell, led a revolt of Labour lefts against Livingstone. He was one of the very few GLC councillors and Labour left leaders not to gallop rightwards in the ensuing years.
Livingstone severed his ties with Labour Herald in May, with McDonnell replacing him as co-editor. There would be fewer firebrand speeches at party conferences from Ken and more well paid after dinner speeches to the great and the good.
Throughout this saga the local authority workers were used as stage armies playing bit parts. In the immediate aftermath of the miners’ defeat, tens of thousands marched to the County Hall car park, but there was no significant campaign of industrial action. Community groups were also kept on the sidelines.
Over the space of two months after March 1985, virtually every Labour-controlled authority pledged to the "no rate" position fell in line, leaving only Lambeth and Liverpool to fight alone. Their resistance crumbled thanks to the explicit collaboration of Labour’s national leadership under Neil Kinnock with the Tories’ demands.
A little more than a year after the Livingstone-led GLC played its crucial role in the ratecapping debacle, the authority itself was no more, drawing the curtain on nearly a century of some form of elected government for the capital as a whole.
The reality behind the myth of "Red Ken" was largely apparent even before March 1985.
Here was a politician capable of taking bold and controversial stands on such issues as Ireland, racism and homophobia. But when his administration faced crunch times - the Law Lords’ ruling against "Fares Fair", the challenge of abolition and the Tories’ ratecapping assault - Livingstone made his excuses for not fighting.
His wit and his ability to box clever with his enemies on television was no substitute for a strategy to save working class Londoners from the ravages of Thatcherism. It was they, not Ken, who really lost out.
Livingstone’s failure to mobilise his supporters among the working class and oppressed stemmed from a political philosophy that can be summed as reformist to the core. The path to political change for him has always run through the council chamber and the parliamentary talking shop, to the virtual exclusion of working class action on the streets and at the workplaces.
Yet his political career - from the abolition of the GLC to being blocked as the Labour candidate for London mayor - shows that the reformist path invariably leads to defeat, rotten compromise and new attacks on the working class.
We need a revolutionary alternative - a new revolutionary party - to Livingstone’s brand of reformism. Of course supporting him for mayor, as a real reflection of the anger of working class Londoners at New Labour’s betrayals, is vital. It is a means of uniting with t
he workers who look to him, so that he can be put to the test of office.
But it also means using the election campaign to argue with the tens of thousands of trade unionists in the FBU, RMT and elsewhere, who see Ken as their champion, about his real record, and trying to mobilise those same workers into an effective opposition - not only to Blair’s New Labour but to any attacks that Livingstone himself launches once he is in office.