Ken Livingstone
talks to Doreen Massey about London as a global city, and how times
- and politics - have changed since the GLC of the 1980s.On the one hand,
London is now a place unrivalled in its particular form of multiculturalism.
On the other, it is thoroughly entangled in the production of the contradictions
of the current world order. How can a city respond to such a positioning?
© Soundings 2007
We meet in Ken's office, on the eighth floor of City Hall, and are still just chatting, before we get to the interview proper, when Ken rushes from the room and comes back waving a document. The old energy and enthusiasm have clearly not dimmed. 'Look', he says, 'look at this …'
We are planning to launch this on 27 February.1 It's a carbon reduction strategy for the city up to 2025/30. And it can all be done. You could actually get a 60 per cent reduction in emissions. And it's all based on behaviour changes and existing technologies. All it requires is will. [We pore over a succession of graphs and figures, his finger jabbing home with conviction the point that this can be done.] By 2030 we could get carbon emissions down to a level at which there isn't a problem at all. The only problem is political will.
So how do you generate political will?
Ah … Well, it's plugging away endlessly on these things. Winning the argument, pushing it all forward. I meet at least a government minister a week, and I have done for the last six and half years. You make painfully slow progress - and then every now and then you get set back by them saying something like we need a new runway at Heathrow.
London is a fantastically important political voice in the country - I mean the GLC used itself like that.Do you see yourself in these big issues still as 'London', as a political voice in wider debates?
London has had this huge surge of growth and confidence, the whole world is fascinated by what London is doing, and has been for a long time. The Clinton Foundation is getting involved in all the climate change stuff with us, and helping to push that agenda forward. They have said there's only Chicago, Los Angeles and London close to doing anything like this, really, with New York coming up behind.
Is climate change the biggest priority now?
There is a whole host of other stuff you've done. Yeah … but if you can't achieve the carbon emissions reduction I'm not certain human civilisation can be sustained. It's going to be catastrophic. I think the Stern report is the most optimistic he could have produced, because he is trying to lead business in that direction. The most sensible big capitalists recognise this issue. They have a long-term strategy for the firm, not just for the next five/ten years till the meltdown. At the time of the GLC, the international political divide mirrored the class divide in virtually every society, and business was totally signed up behind Thatcher - including her attacks on the GLC. But big business is now a strong ally on a whole range of fronts - climate change, improving skills in the workforce, investment in public transport and so on. Small business is still pretty poujadist, but a substantial percentage of the London workforce work for a relatively small number of large firms. This is not to say that the small/medium-sized enterprises are not important in their own way, but if you're doing deals with big business - in terms, say, of the affordable housing agenda, which we managed to get the developer community to sign up for, or the idea that every development must have 10 per cent renewable energy (now they're moving up to 20) - your problem is not big businesses. They're not the enemy anymore; it's all councils (and Labour ones are every bit as parochial as Tory and Liberal ones). And it's government, which is so terrified of what the Daily Mail will say.
Absolutely, whereas your forte has always been not being terrified.
Just ignore them.
Beyond climate change, have you got an overall view? … You speak a lot about making London a sustainable world-class global city. When we were in the GLC we were definitely there to stop London turning Thatcherite and to be a voice against Thatcherism … Is there an equivalent positioning now?
We were pushing the alternative economic strategy then. And we were still effectively presiding over the old Abercrombie plan for managing London down from 8.5 to 6 million. And that has all completely gone into reverse. Now it's about containing as much as possible of England's growth in London and on brown-field sites. The density of housing has increased by 300 per cent per hectare in four years. Basically we're driving Richard Rogers's urban taskforce approach - that what you need is real levels of density in order to make the city work. And given that the majority of the world's population now live in cities - it'll be three-quarters by mid century - you've got to find ways in which the cities can work sustainably. That means challenging a lot of those old perceptions we had on the left about the little home with a garden. Coming out of all the great slum clearance, that used to be the Labour councillor's goal.
Then there's the question of structure. In the GLC we did everything possible to prevent the decline of manufacturing, and nothing whatsoever to encourage finance and business services. Coming back to the job after a fourteen-year gap, that battle had been well and truly lost. Finance and business services had doubled in size and accounted for over a third of London jobs, and manufacturing was down to 300,000 and still declining - and most of that manufacturing was printing. And so you are now presented with a situation - certainly not one you would have chosen - in which finance and business services just drives the whole London economy, and now produces more wealth than the whole of British manufacturing. The clear thing that unleashed this was Thatcher's Big Bang. Before that London's financial centre was this small inward-looking club of old white men who'd all been to the same schools; she destroyed them, they were swept aside by international capital, which is much more dynamic, much more progressive, less racist and sexist (I mean, it's not wonderful in there, but compared with the old lot …); and the new people were quite prepared to engage with me, whereas that lot would refuse to meet. Now they recognise that mayors can deliver things, and they rely on me to try and get the flow of office development and new housing.
And there's also now this question of skills - all the old white and black working-class men who got left behind by the collapse of manufacturing at the docks and the arsenal have never really been fully re-engaged in employment. Particularly around the East End, where there's only about 55 per cent of the adult workforce in employment as opposed to 75 per cent nationally. As well as lifting London's skills base to keep in competition with New York, Shanghai, Tokyo and so on, you've also got to have a second-chance programme - it won't get all of them back, but it can give some of them the skills to get them back into employment. Some of these people haven't really had a secure job since the collapse in the 1970s. And 80 per cent of all the jobs coming to London in the next decade will be in finance and business services, and therefore if you aren't literate and numerate, and can't work in the office environment, you're in real trouble. There is also a creative layer of industry, which we are really looking to encourage … and which leavens the whole pattern. Then there are all the poorly paid jobs in the service sector and tourism and so on, where the London Living Wage is important, because you can lift them from being intolerable jobs and just not worth doing, to being just about worth doing. Telco led this demand and then we put one of the team on it.
In complete contrast to New Labour, who spin everything, distort everything, the core of people around me work on the assumption that we must tell the truth, because, given where our policies are coming from, if our facts don't stand up we have no impact at all. You've actually got to win the argument. The GLC became incredibly popular because we won the argument about abolition, that it wouldn't work. And so you never make a short cut. What is amazing is that when I was elected Mayor there was no London economic data.
So there had been nothing done since the LIS?2
No - people would take what the national figures were and try and abstract out what it might have been for London. We've now assembled a real body of knowledge about the London economy.
So far the two things you have really concentrated on are the City - and we'll come back to that - and climate change. When you talk about London being a world city or a global city what do you mean by that?
Well, it's quite clear that London has caught up as an equal with New York.
In terms of?
In terms of finance and business services, but also in terms of how it is perceived by the rest of the world - lots happening here, more young people choosing to come here than will go to New York and so on. And the other big dramatic change is that the black and Asian population has doubled since the GLC days. Thirty-five per cent of the workforce were born abroad, and 80 per cent of all the extra people coming into employment in the next ten years will be black or Asian or other ethnic minority, and so you have created a city which might very well still be the capital of Britain, but is actually genuinely a global city.
In the sense of being the whole world in one city …
Yes. You've got 300 languages spoken in London and 200 in New York - which probably has the second highest total. The big advantage we have over the other cities that are quite mixed is that the races and places mix much better here. One person in twenty is mixed-race, and that really isn't the case in New York. And therefore those ideas about the clash of civilisations and global terrorism just don't make sense. And the attempt by America, following the collapse of communism, totally to reassert itself and dominate the whole world and get the world to accept its agenda, its culture - that is doomed too. Just look at the way China and India are emerging. There is never going to be that dominant super-power again - and it will be a very difficult transition as America comes to terms with that.
Can I pick you up on something before we talk about that? The way you do multiculturalism is that it isn't a happy-clappy kind of thing …
Oh god no, you don't have to like everyone …
You've taken stands that have offended particular groups, for instance. Could you reflect on that? I think it's a different form of multiculturalism from what is usually talked about in the States for instance …
Yes. In the States it's about a shared set of American values, and therefore people are defined as Italian-American or Mexican-American or whatever. And that's not what we have in London. Here we say this is a city in which all these people preserve their identity whilst participating in the city. Most folk do. Some decide they don't want to. I think it prefigures in some ways what the world could be - think of the concept in the Cold War of co-existence.
We now have in the world several major cultures - Islam, China/Confucianism, America's version of capitalism and the slightly softer European version. None of these can ever be predominant in the long term. They've got to learn to co-exist. And if you look at the growth rates now for China (everyone keeps saying Chinese growth has got to slow down at some point but it clearly hasn't), at some time between ten and twenty years from now China will overtake America, which will be an absolutely seismic shock for the American psyche - and also for white people everywhere. For the last 500 years white folks have basically run the whole world to their own convenience, and that world will be passing within a decade. Think: in fifteen years time the Presidents of America and China and the Prime Minister of India will meet in a room to decide the course of the world - which is why I am in favour of a United States of Europe - it would be nice to be in there you know. And it's to prevent the formation of this kind of alternative power base that, over the last fifty years, around the oil companies and the White House, every move towards some sort of Arab Republic or any sort of unification in the Arab world has always been ruthlessly undermined. All sorts of little statelets have been propped up to prevent that. Moving into this sort of world is going to be difficult for the neo-cons - for example having to try and absorb China, which they are never going to be able to do because of its strong culture.
So you're really explicitly against US hegemony in that sense, the neo-con version, the Washington consensus version …
I'm probably anti any hegemony … what we have a chance for here is for the world to decide what it likes in cultures, for people to choose which bits of somebody else's culture they can ignore and which bits they want to adopt, and so on.
Nonetheless, in the middle of all this, and accepting that the financial City now supports a lot of your strategies, London is still the place of production of a neoliberalism which has supported the Washington consensus and has produced all kinds of disasters of various sorts, and inequalities around the world.3 You are quite explicitly against neoliberalism I take it, and you have said things to that effect, and yet it's the centrepiece of the London Plan. I don't want you to reconcile those things; I just want you talk about how you play those things together …
Within that, within what you call neoliberalism (I wouldn't say neoliberalism, I think I'd say globalisation, i.e. the globalised economy), you have good and bad. I mean you have got Esso in there denying climate change, but you've got BP and now even Shell coming along saying something's got to be done. Shell came to see me saying they'd given up on the British government doing anything on hydrogen fuel cells, they'd like to do work with me in London. Then they told me they'd established a Muslim workers group. If only you could get that out of a borough council. So there's all sorts of contradictions. It is not a Bush, Cheney, Halliburton military-industrial-complex that dominates all of this. There are factions that push backwards and forwards within it, like there were in the American establishment in the run up to the Cold War - when there were those wanting to avoid isolating Russia (basically the Roosevelt position) and the hard-liners saying it must be isolated and defeated.
So there's contradictions, or there's kind of cracks in the system, that you can work with …
Yes. You really need to talk to the people in big business to ask why they deal with me. Take The Economist article about me in January. They go through all the left-wing things - Chávez, Cuba - and of course they don't like any of this, but then they acknowledge that I got elected twice as Mayor because I actually do deliver all these other things. And their conclusion is I'm 'repulsive and brilliant in equal measure' [Economist, 11.1.07]. This is a real dilemma for them. I have the dilemma of having to deal with institutions such as the big banks, which are responsible for problems like the huge debt burden. But they also have to deal with me. I keep popping up with Cuba and Venezuela, and doing everything possible to promote China so that it emerges as rapidly as possible to challenge the hegemony of the USA.
And the Oyster card is a classic example of the small ways you can change things. The Oyster card contract was a PFI deal. We got elected and there was this Oyster card scheme, which on paper looked a good idea, but it was only aimed at people who had monthly and annual season tickets. Poor people weren't going to get them … it wasn't going to be used on the buses for instance. And so we had a really brutal struggle with the PFI consortia. It ended up with us saying, look, either this is going to be a smart-card system for everybody or we're just going to cancel the PFI. What they wanted was a smart-card for people who had monthly and annual passes/season tickets, so guaranteeing that the card users would have a level of income that would allow them to be used as a target for sales and marketing of other things. It came down to a point where, to show we were serious, I sent off to Moscow to get an alternative quote, for what the Moscow underground system would charge in giving us their smart-card. Then we got negotiations, the scheme has changed, and now it's for everybody. That's the margin in which we operate - as somebody once said, 'we disagree with 95% of what this Labour government's doing but 5% is the margin in which we live'.
OK, but it is still the case that you are backing the City and its penumbra of all kinds of business-service industries - whether or not you call them neoliberal …
Well, I'm also arguing that you've got to have your Tobin tax, and that I should have the power to redistribute wealth from the super-rich in London.
That's what I want to know about. Because another problem with the finance-led strategy is that London becomes also the high capital of inequality, and that has huge effects in housing policies, in …
Yes. But that's not the fault of big business, that's the fault of the Labour government. Basically it's quite clear that in London the gross earnings of that small elite, the 1 per cent, is so out of line that you can actually take quite a big extra chunk of tax out of that…
So why don't you argue for that?
I can't see an alternative. There's no way this government, or Gordon Brown, is going to give me the power to redistribute wealth in London, from the super-rich or big business. So I'm tied to a much less progressive tax structure than I had at the GLC - which was wonderful.
But why aren't you using London's voice to say 'look, the vast inequality, your refusal to deal with the super-rich, is causing huge problems for the "growth engine" of this country'?
We do that. But it just doesn't get reported. We know that the inequalities of wealth are going to produce huge problems. And if you look at the best period of growth the global economy has ever had, it isn't what we're going through now. It was probably when we went through the post-war consensus, when there was a much stronger emphasis on redistributive taxation - which started to break down in the 1970s.
So you do say to the Labour government that we should be taxing the super-rich?
Oh yeah. But I don't waste my breath trying to persuade Gordon Brown. In all our debates we so often are saying how much more money we need … and this is only a problem because he won't allow me to redistribute wealth within the city.
Mind you, if you had a strategy that wasn't so focused on finance wouldn't that in itself be somewhat redistributive?
What else would it be focused on? Am I going to rebuild manufacturing? This is not the world you create, it's the world you're in. What, effectively, has happened with the growth of financial services in London is that it's driven land costs and house prices and the cost-base up to a level where nothing else can get off the ground.
And it increases inequality.
Yes. But given that it is now the biggest and most important source of jobs in London - and not just the people it employs directly but also in all the services - then you can't say you are going to stop that, because it would lead to a pretty catastrophic recession in London for some period of time. So it's a real problem. You do everything possible to build the industries in the creative sector, and try also to sit down and look at issues such as the London Living Wage and so on. But ultimately we're locked into that set-up. So there's this real contradiction - at the heart of an administration that's making a real case for international redistribution of wealth and power, I'm reliant on one what is probably the world's biggest concentration of global corporate power outside New York.
That's the point, exactly, and it's such an irony …
I know, but New York is the same sort of city. What's been really interesting is that - and this is a big difference between the time of the GLC and now - New York and London have grown to be virtually mirror images of each other in terms of employment structure. Both are cities where the population is growing, both are very diverse cities, and both are cities that in cultural terms have almost nothing in common with the hinterland of their nations. And both of them are at the nexus of administration of the globalised economy …
Exactly - so it's just a deep irony from your point of view?
Well, give me dictatorial powers and we would be in a position to do something about it. But the other problem in all this is that even if you did something in London, finance would simply shift to Paris or Shanghai. You've got to build global structures of progressives and Labour and Greens to tackle it. If suddenly the Labour government gave me independence so I could manage the whole thing, and I whacked up taxes, finance would just up and go elsewhere. But, fortunately for us, there would be problems for them in moving to other locations in Europe. Paris won't allow the Hausmann grand design to be swept aside for big modern buildings, and finance people don't like being stuck far out from the centre. And Frankfurt just doesn't have enough else going on. The real threat to London as a financial centre would have been if Germany had moved the financial district from Frankfurt to Berlin as well as moving the capital - then Berlin would have been our big threat. So, broadly, nothing's going to rival New York in their hemisphere, and we'll most probably stay ahead in ours. But it's quite clear that if the Chinese government should wish it to happen at some point in the future, Shanghai could displace Tokyo as the financial centre in the East. The world will probably sustain three big financial centres, and there will also be a growth of smaller ones around the world.
The other thing is that it's not just a question of what the left does. You've now got Bill Gates, who says 'I've made 35 million pounds, I can't spend it, I shall have to do something progressive with it'. And Warren Buffet, who came along and did the same thing. And now you've got Clinton running round persuading firms to donate cheap medical supplies to the third world … So you're suddenly getting a layer of mega mega capital also recognising that the world can't go on like this - and god knows what will come out of all this.
They do something different from you though. They do things to stop the problems looking so bad, whereas what I understand you to be about is actually trying to change how things work; it's not just elastoplast.
Nor, actually, is what Gates and Buffet and Clinton are arguing about climate change. The Clinton Foundation is now really driving this agenda forward. Clinton is negotiating with major companies to switch over to manufacturing energy-efficient traffic lights. The idea is to guarantee that Chicago and New York and London and Los Angeles will buy them, and hopefully Paris and Berlin, and therefore the price will spiral down so that you get a long-term effect. That sort of stuff is quite interesting.
In the Cold War, broadly speaking, in every conflict you would either be on the Soviet Union's side or America's; and, broadly, almost every domestic political issue also reflected that same divide. There were all these absolute certainties. And even when you didn't like the Soviet Union, you still knew that in the war in Vietnam they were on the right side, or in Angola or Mozambique … But now it's really not that simple. There are corporations out there that are led by people who are so short-sighted and blinkered that they endanger the future of the world. But there are others that recognise that there's a catastrophe coming. And equally the left was generally quite disparaging about restraining growth; the renewal of the left has to be very democratic, unlike its past, and it has to be very green. The picture is more complex than in the past. But in fact, because global warming is such a catastrophic threat, it can't be resolved by the simplistic agenda of the neo-cons; it's got to involve sharing, planning, restrictions … and thus inevitably this agenda has to be addressed through what have traditionally been left approaches.
Yes, yes. We have been talking about global alliances - that one city can't do anything on its own, and that if you decided to go against finance it would just go somewhere else (even though in fact it's difficult to think where in Europe it might go). You have actually been doing quite a bit on global relationships - you've already mentioned you've got loads of stuff going on with Cuba, China, Russia, Venezuela. Can you tell us something about this?
Well, the core in all of this is the emergence of China. In the Cold War, the very fact that there were two sides meant there was an awful lot of space in between in which small nations and various struggles could manoeuvre. And once the Soviet Union collapsed there was this huge advance by one side, coinciding with globalisation, the rolling back of the welfare state, and devastating reductions in people's pay and conditions all over the bloody world. And it's not until a superpower emerges with a different agenda that you can really dramatically roll that back. And what's interesting about China is that, although they've adopted their own form of capitalism, it really isn't a simple capitalism. Our initial view was that we would have a city to city link with Shanghai, but we rapidly realised that all the major corporate decisions are still cleared by the Party machine in Beijing. You have to be in both cities. And in all our dealings with the Chinese Communist Party leadership we could see that they are genuinely proud that they have lifted 200 or 400 million people out of poverty. And they are much cleverer than the old Soviet Union was because, instead of putting half their GDP into matching America's military might, they just buy billions of dollars every year, and the moment they are threatened by America they stop buying dollars. Without the Chinese buying dollars, interest rates in America would have to soar and you'd have a great recession. They are quite brilliant about that strategy - they have bought all these bloody dollars and they have got the American economy by the short and curlies.
So, what's London's role in this then?
Well, London's role is to do everything possible to encourage links - between what's emerging in China and India, the progressive forces in the West, progressive forces in Latin America and so on. We just play a role in encouraging, helping develop all that.
Sounds a bit like multi-polarity …
Yes, in a world of uni-polarity, multi-polarity seems like very heaven. This is a half-a-loaf strategy, it's not the world you would have created.
OK tell me about Chávez or Cuba, what's going on? The Chávez deal is a very clear one.4
Chávez is aware that I can't redistribute wealth. So he's charging us £20 million a year less for our oil for running our buses, and we use the money saved to, say, have half fares on the buses for everybody on benefits.
And that's because he knows you can't redistribute within the city? That's quite explicit?
Well, I explained that to him. And what we would then do is share with them our historical experience of managing a huge city. Caracas is in some ways like London in 1830 - half the people live in shanty towns. Basically, London was the first of the great world cities to run into the kind of problems that are generated by poverty and growth, back in 1800, 1810, as everyone was driven off the land and came here. We've had two hundred years of experience of how to unlock these problems: sewage, water, housing, education and all that. For example, in Caracas, because petrol is a penny a litre there is just permanent gridlock. I mean the radio says if you're driving today take sandwiches, take a book, take an ipod, because you might be stuck for four or five hours in this jam. Increasingly, ministers do helicopters from one side of the city to the other. We can offer things like our traffic-light system which is managed by super-computers because no one can think fast enough to do it any more … And so we will open an office there and staff will be seconded there to work with Chávez's ministries.
So on the one hand you're teaming up with Chávez, and on the other hand you're going to Davos.
I'm going there to talk about what we're doing on climate change.
It's not an incompatibility or inconsistency.
No, though it might very well be that I'll catch a whiff of the tear gas and then … but don't forget that one of the first things we did here was to crush the mad anti-globalisation protesters. We told people not to go on the demo, we penned them in.
Why did you do that?
Because these people are mad, they will destroy you - in exactly the same way as the ultra-lefts around in the shadows present you with nothing but risk, because they open you to attack from your opponents. I mean you can't have, in a city like London, two hundred people running up and down Oxford Street smashing windows, because it just creates the ground on which the right advance. Don't forget all those decades in which the Communist Party taught its cadres self-discipline. You don't go off and do mad gestures because you open the way for reaction. You move when you can advance.
But what about the wider counter-globalisation movement? You supported the World Social Forum.
Yes, all of that, but you've got to isolate and marginalise the violent fringe because they are most probably being funded by neo-cons anyhow. I mean, how many of the demos that went violent in the past in Britain had been infiltrated by agent-provocateurs, sent in there to make sure there wasn't a disciplined, organised march? I don't think it's all agent-provocateurs, but I think, since the collapse of Communism, there has been a whole generation of young people who are angry, but have grown up without the experience of going into Communist or Trotskyist organisations or trade-union movements. And because they haven't been trained and disciplined in Marxism and haven't learned from people who have told them that it is a lifelong struggle, they get really angry and go out and smash in a shop window. I'm sorry, but these people are a luxury we can't afford. I'm not going to be guilt-tripped by some angry 25 year old who in twenty years time will be a merchant banker and have forgotten it all. I've invested my entire adult life in trying to advance a socialist cause and I have stopped worrying about being guilt-tripped by people half my age who are just having a spasm.
Is there anything else you'd like to put into this interview?
No, no, no I never volunteer anything. It gets me into trouble!!
But you love getting into trouble! Anyway, thanks very much.
Notes
1.
The Mayor's Climate Action Plan.
2. The London Industrial Strategy, published by the GLC in 1985.
3. See Doreen Massey, 'London inside-out', Soundings
32. For a wider exploration of this issue see Doreen Massey, World city,
to be published by Polity Press later this year.
4. The cities of London and Caracas have signed an equal-exchange deal.
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