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Doreen Massey interviews Ken Livingstone
© Soundings 2007
DM. When you talk about London being a world city or a global city what do you mean by that?
KL. Well, it's quite clear that London has caught up as an equal with New York.
DM. In terms of?
KL. 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. London might very well still be the capital of Britain, but it is actually genuinely a global city.
DM. In the sense of being the whole world in one city …
KL. 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. 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.
DM. So you're really explicitly against US hegemony in that sense, the neo-con version, the Washington consensus version …
KL. I'm probably anti any hegemony …
DM. Nonetheless, in the middle of all this London is still the place of production of a neoliberalism which has supported the Washington consensus . 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.
KL. 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.
DM. So there's contradictions, or there's kind of cracks in the system, that you can work with …
KL. 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 2007. 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'. This is a real dilemma for them.
DM. 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 …
KL. 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.
DM. 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.
KL. 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…
DM. So why don't you argue for that?
KL. 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.
DM. 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'?
KL. We do do that. But it just doesn't get reported. We know that the inequalities of wealth are going to produce huge problems.
DM. So you do say to the Labour government that we should be taxing the super-rich?
KL. 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.
DM. Mind you, if you had a strategy that wasn't so focused on finance wouldn't that in itself be somewhat redistributive?
KL. 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.
DM. And it increases inequality.
KL. 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. 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.
DM. That's the point, exactly, and it's such an irony …
KL. 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.
DM. Is there anything else you'd like to put into this interview?
KL. No, no, no I never volunteer anything. It gets me into trouble!!
DM. But you love getting into trouble! Anyway, thanks very much.
Doreen Massey is a founding editor of Soundings. A full version of the interview can be read in Soundings 36, out in July
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