RED KEN VISITS THE EAST END

James Frankcom: London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone spent a day in Tower Hamlets on 23rd January meeting local people and hearing their concerns ahead of the mayoral elections later this year when he is hoping to beat Tory incumbent Boris Johnson and get his old job back.

Ken’s first port of call was the now notorious Bow roundabout in E3, which he visited with John Biggs, the Labour London Assembly Member for City & East, and Cllr Josh Peck – the Leader of the Labour Group of councillors at Tower Hamlets. 

Bow roundabout is the place where two cyclists were tragically killed in separate accidents during a three week period late last year. Brian Dorling, aged 58, was killed on the morning of 24th October as he headed to work at the Olympic Park. The second fatality was 34-year-old Bow resident Svitlana Tereschenko, who lost her life on another part of the roundabout on 11th November. Lorries were involved in both fatalities.

Speaking later at a public meeting, Ken slammed the present London administration for making a priority of smooth traffic flow – which leads to vehicles driving at higher speed. He contrasted that with his own record in office where the safety of pedestrians and cyclists was always his paramount concern, saying, “The top priority for me was always cyclist and pedestrian safety. Boris scrapped that and then two cyclists died within a month of each other at Bow roundabout – and this was despite Transport for London formally advising him that his plan for smooth traffic flow at Bow could result in deaths.”

Continuing on the transport theme, Ken told a packed public meeting in E1 that he would not restore the western extension of the Congestion Charge Zone despite the over-crowded streets of west London needing a congestion solution and being a valuable source of revenue for City Hall that helped keep transport fares down. He explained that it would cost £150m to put back the scheme Boris Johnson had ripped out and he would rather invest that money in a new DLR Extension to Barking & Dagenham instead. 

Moving on to housing, Ken lamented the decline in social housing over the years saying there were now 700,000 people on council waiting lists in need of affordable social housing. He blamed the demise in affordable housing on Margaret Thatcher but also criticised former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair whose decision not to begin building new council homes was, he said, “a mistake”. Ken added that the last four years of financial crisis had been “catastrophic” for millions of Londoners who had now all but lost hope of ever owning their own home because they were unable to afford the requisite deposits of around 30% – sums of money which are well beyond the reach of most people.

To resolve this problem Ken proposed state pension funds be used to build new social housing rather than “gambled” on the global markets as they are now. The returns from the rent received and from the occasional sale of these houses would provide the return the pension funds require.

Moving on to the issue of the high cost of rented accommodation in the capital, Ken cited a problem affecting millions of Londoners. The average rent for a two-bedroom home in outer London is now 66% percent of the total take-home pay of the average worker. This factor, coupled with rising prices on everything from food to transport and the added burden of Council Tax, was rendering London living unaffordable for many. He pledged, if returned to office, to cut out the “middle men” who are making profits through the “introduction fees” they claim for directing potential tenants to landlords. He also pledged to take out compulsory purchase orders on residential properties which were deliberately being left vacant and then to make these properties available for people to live in.

Talking about jobs, the former Labour Mayor described his successor’s implementation of the policy to recruit “local people” to work at the Olympic Games as “a disaster”. Ken blasted Boris Johnson for failing to give the matter the “constant attention it needed” and letting down the people of East London. He criticised the fact that many of the people being employed to work at the Olympics were not “really local” and, in many instances, had intentionally moved to the Olympic boroughs to make themselves eligible, often having arrived only recently in London from other parts of the UK or EU countries.

Taking questions from the audience, Ken was asked what the London Mayor could do about the bankers and whether he could direct the police to punish them for the crimes many audience members believed they had committed. He replied that if the police were ever in a position to investigate the bankers he was certain they would find all sorts of dodgy records but, broadly speaking, the way laws had been changed, piece by piece, had allowed the bankers to do what they had done. Describing the regime before deregulation as “a cartel hooked on boozy lunches”, Ken said the reforms Thatcher implemented in 1986 (known as “the big bang”) were “not all bad” because the new system enabled fresh European companies to come in and change the way some things were done.  However, he continued, the down side was the end of a rule we had had since the Great Depression whereby high street banks were separated from “casino banks” – adding, “I said it would be a disaster at the time but was amazed it went on so long.”

Several people raised the tragic death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson at the hands of PC Simon Harwood during the protests in the City of London in 2009. The issue of police officers at demonstrations deliberately concealing their identifying numbers was also raised. Ken responded by saying, “there has been a definite hardening of police tactics since I was Mayor” and that if he was re-elected in May there would be a return to policing which enabled lawful protests rather than sought to prevent them, as now seemed to be the case. He cited the student demonstrations in December 2010 where the police forced student protesters – the vast majority of whom were peaceful – out of Parliament Square and on to Westminster Bridge where they proceeded to kettle them for hours in freezing temperatures. This was particularly bad because some of the protesters were in their early teens.  

Other questions on crime from the audience included one from a woman school teacher who raised serious concerns about domestic violence against women, which she described as “rife” in the borough, and instances of girls disappearing from school and then being forced into arranged marriages. She added the alarming comment “at one point there were 250 girls missing from Tower Hamlets schools.” A young woman told how the meeting how she and her two female flatmates had each been “groped or molested” in shops by men “three or four times since moving here, and this has never happened to us anywhere else in London.”

Ken responded by saying that in the 1980s men could not be charged with raping their wives but now that had changed, and the police took domestic violence increasingly seriously. He also raised the example of female genital mutilation which “was regarded as a cultural thing and something we couldn’t change” – but it has and is now very rare. Forced marriages were, he said, “not acceptable” and there should be a reporting system for teachers to alert the authorities about their suspicions. On the issue of the repeated incidents of groping he advised the young lady to contact her local police neighbourhood patrols, who may recognise the culprits.

On the subject of drug use in the borough which was raised by another questioner, he said;

“I’m against legalising drugs but recognise our current drugs policy has failed. Until [the Misuse of Drugs Act] 1969 if you registered as a drug-addict then your GP could prescribe those drugs to you and – if he was responsible – help you get gradually weaned off them. But now, as we know, that is not the case and the current policy clearly isn’t working. I’d like to see a change which would take out the criminal middlemen.”

*Ken’s Tell Ken tour will see him visit all of the thirty-two London boroughs. To find out about future dates, visit his website: www.kenlivingstone.com/tell. The elections for the next Mayor of London are set to take place on 3rd May.