AADHIKARonline The 3rd Edition 2210 Hrs GMT London Tuesday 10 April 2007
Editor©Muhammad Haque
AADHIKARONLINE quoting the Rupert Murdoch owned and controlled ‘ ‘onetime quality newspaper’ the London Times piece [published online during Tuesday 10 April 2007] confirming the crucial role for big business that the Crossrail hole-plotter against the Brick Lane and Whitechapel London E1 Area ‘undone mayor’ [‘London mayor’] Ken Livingstone has been allowed to play by Tony Blair, a Rupert Murdoch-backed agent of big business corporate destruction of a socially inclusive and fair political system himself.
Rupert Murdoch ahs come to the Big Business agent Ken Livingstone’s rescue after the London Evening Standard was unable to conceal the truth of how badly let down Londoners had been by this political and anti-social monstrosity that Blair has created.
The Murdoch rescue bid is part of the project to make Livingstone look still plausible after the seriously unflattering facts of how he has been funding Bob Kiley came out in the EVENING STANDRD interview recently.
Murdoch is of course too happy to let the fantasist and self-server Livingstone put his long standing hatred of Gordon Brown in with a flourish the like of which would be unthinkable in the Times had there been no concerted agenda to stop Brown taking over at No 10 Downing Street.
For the second time in such a short time, Gordon Brown is being compared with Joseph Stalin! No, in this Murdoch Times attack piece, Livingstone is being compared as being worse than Joseph Stalin!
Now, who has been writing the lying Livingstone's script against Gordon Brown then?
[To be continued]
“From The Times
April 10, 2007
Bursting with London pride, the corporate boss we knew as Red Ken
The city’s growing prestige on the world stage is linked to the way its once doctrinaire mayor is embracing pragmatic capitalism
James Harding, Business Editor
Ken Livingstone has some sympathy for the idea of London seceding from the Union. “If everyone in the rest of the country dislikes us so much that we have to go, we would be happy to go,” he says, in that dry, droning voice that barely betrays that he is just being mischievous.
But, when pressed, it is clear that he thinks the idea of secession is about as sensible as Scottish independence: “There is no rational economic argument for disaggregating any existing economy.” Russia’s problems, he argues, were not just the consequence of the Yeltsin era’s botched privatisations, but the break-up of the Soviet Union; the sub-continent would have been a more powerful economy if it were not for the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These snippets of donnish wisdom may give the impression that the Mayor of London is an intellectual in office. And, sure enough, Mr Livingstone’s suit is beige, his shoes are comfortable, one wall of his office is lined with hardback histories and biographies. He gambols around world history as he speaks: London’s success is due to its openness to immigration, much like the US after Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency; London’s congestion problems stem from the explosion of service industry jobs after the 1973 oil crisis.
Yet, these days, Mr Livingstone comes across much more like a chief executive than a senior lecturer. Conversation is conspicuously light on left-wing ideology, but littered with capitalist preoccupations such as productivity levels, global competitiveness and light-touch regulation. “London has gone from being in the second tier of financial centres to being up there with New York,” he says. “We are the only place in Europe that matches American levels of productivity and competitiveness.”
Having taken off his jacket, Mr Livingstone sits at the long boardroom table in his eighth-floor office. He is wearing a white shirt, a magenta tie and bright blue braces. As he discusses the recent recognition that London now rivals New York as the world’s business capital and the most cosmopolitan city on earth, he sounds more like a corporate boss than a municipal bureaucrat. Asked what his concerns are about the failings of capitalism, he complains about the overweening powers of Gordon Brown’s Treasury. “It is not the failings of capitalism, they are much more failings of government,” he says. “When I told the mayor of Moscow that 97 per cent of all tax is collected by the Chancellor and then disbursed, he said: ‘That’s worse than us under Stalin’.”
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• The Capital’s Capitalist
Mr Livingstone is a talker, who does not obviously draw breath nor happily brook interruption, so there is no chance to ask whether he agrees with Lord Turnbull’s view of the Chancellor’s “Stalinist ruthlessness”. But, it seems, his argument is not with Mr Brown, but with the centralisation of power in Whitehall.
He would like greater powers to raise taxes and distribute wealth. “I’d like to abolish the council tax and replace it with a local income tax,” he says, suggesting that with a 2p increase in the basic rate of income tax, the Government could afford to get rid of the council tax. London could then reap the benefits of the huge wealth being created in the City. “I do think that someone who has got a million-pound bonus could afford to give us a few quid more for London, because that bonus has been built on London’s success.”
He would like everyone living in London to be able to vote and, therefore, be required to pay tax. “The Russians who have moved here are unlikely to move back. This is effectively their home. I would like to see them able to vote, able to participate,” he says. “I would like to see them not just buying the odd football club, but sponsoring major cultural events.”
Mr Livingstone knows that Westminster is not in any rush to give up its stranglehold on taxation. But he says that while Londoners pay on average £1,000 per person in fares and £1,200 per household in council tax, New York City can levy at least 50 per cent more from its citizens. He would like more flexibility in raising money and thinks London deserves it, because it is so much better at spending it than the centre. “I recognise that Whitehall does not work. You can’t run a vast state machine from a tiny little centre. The Soviets tried it.”
He cites the inefficiencies and the budget overruns in the National Health Service and contrasts it with the cost-cutting and accountability at Transport for London. This seems like an odd boast, given that Bob Kiley, Mr Livingstone’s recruit from New York to overhaul London’s creaking transport system, recently told the Evening Standard newspaper that he was an alcoholic who had done “not much” for his £737,500 consultancy package.
“Bob Kiley was the best investment we ever made,” Mr Livingstone shoots back. “We paid him half a million pounds a year and. . . he identified over a billion pounds of waste.”
Londoners who chafe at the squash of bodies on the Central Line, the bendy buses that clog the centre of the city and the shortage of scooter bays for the Vespa set may scoff at Mr Livingstone’s claims to have transformed public transport in the city. He says Whitehall would have done far worse. If Crossrail, the multibillion-pound project to build an underground rail line which cuts across the city from east to west, finally happens, the mayor and his advisers say it will be thanks to Bob Kiley: he earned London’s transport operators a reputation for financial discipline. Mr Livingstone believes that there will be an announcement from the Government within the next year to commit to the construction of Crossrail. “London will not work without it,” he says, and he adds: “I would rather rely on Bob Kiley’s advice when he is drunk than [ Evening Standard Editor] Veronica Wadley’s advice when she is sober.” London will continue to hire the best executive talent in the world and pay them executive salaries, Mr Livingstone insists. He is quite open about the fact that if Ian Blair had not been available to run the Metropolitan Police, the city would happily have looked to recruit the police chief of Los Angeles or Miami. “You need to be able to bring the best in.”
London’s ability to bring people in is, according to Mr Livingstone, its unique selling point: “The thing that defines London is that you can be yourself. It is not like Paris. Across much of Europe there is a demand for conformity, emphasising national integration. We celebrate diversity.” He has recently had to defend his “foreign policy”. He clearly sees it as his role to travel the world advertising London’s qualities. “When I go travelling around, all I can say is that the regulatory mechanism will always be less severe and the taxation regime will always be slightly lighter. In those circumstances, London will stay well ahead of the likes of Frankfurt.”
Over the past year, London has spooked the political classes in New York. The head of the New York Stock Exchange has sneered at the quality of companies on London’s junior market, Aim. A leading US regulator has dismissed the market as a “casino”. And three of New York’s most powerful politicians have launched an investigation into the Big Apple’s competitiveness. Mr Livingstone clearly revels in the relative triumph of the City. “London’s best selling point is that the rest of the world sees London as the best place to do business in Europe, if not the rest of the world. If the American economies and Russia and China and Brazil and India see that, then London’s economic future is secured and so is most of the rest of the country.”
It is strange to hear a man who once seemed such a doctrinaire socialist, sounding such a pragmatic capitalist. Not that he has cast off all his old socialist affections: he is probably the only “chief executive” in the City who has on his desk a Hugo Chavez doll; one that, at a button push, delivers a speech in Spanish on the theme of the international Bolivarian revolution.
Ken on . . .
" . . . Bob Kiley
I would rather rely on Bob Kiley’s advice when he is drunk than Veronica Wadley’s advice when she is sober [Kiley is the former Transport for London commissioner, Wadley is Editor of the Evening Standard]
. . . rich Russians
The Russians now living here, you would look to them to becoming much more like Victorian philanthropists
. . . the constitution
I am a federalist. I have been in favour of a federal state for the past 30 years because I recognise that Whitehall does not work. I would take the US or German constitution wholesale, because they are so much better than ours
. . . suffrage and the city
I think that everybody who lives in the city should be free to vote here
. . . City bonuses
I do think that someone who has got a million-pound bonus could afford to give us a few quid more for London, because that bonus has been built on London’s success
. . . dealing with Cameron
I couldn’t have started out with a worse relationship with Government than I did with Tony Blair. It took them a couple of years to recognise that we were driving the right agenda forward. Whatever the politics of the mayor or the politics of the Government, no Government can ignore that London is now the most dynamic part of the British economy . . . We would have to make sure we have got all the information to Cameron’s people before the election so they don’t have a difficult learning experience
. . . Gordon Brown’s Treasury
When I told the mayor of Moscow that 97 per cent of all tax is collected by the Chancellor and then disbursed, he said: That’s worse than us under Stalin. And that’s true. I doubt that there is any other country in the world where there is such centralised control of finance
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