Workers' Liberty

Ken for Mayor or Boris for Mayor? Voters in London’s mayoral elections face a grim choice on May 1st.

Despite the cuddly image he cultivates, the very real prospect of Tory Boris Johnson’s victory is terrifying. This man has no experience of working class London life. Educated at Eton, then Oxford, he is the product of a public school system that boosts the elite and produces educational failure for the majority. When he says he’s ‘spent his whole working life in London’ he actually means he’s ‘spent all his days in the corridors of power at Westminster, as MP for rowing and boating constituency Henley on Thames, one of the poshest places on the planet’. ‘Boris Johnson belongs to a social class that despises ordinary Londoners’. ‘If Johnson wins in May the brays of victory will be heard throughout west London and Home Counties where his chums make their sport. It will be a triumph for an archaic social system. How about Camberwell? Lots of grinning piccaninnies, but the shooting’s good’.

In this city with huge divisions between rich and poor, his policies will favour only the rich. And as someone who once described black people as ‘picanninies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, he is hardly the best champion of the oppressed for an ethnically diverse city. He has a vision of returning to an age of crimelessness and community values, based on nostalgia for his privileged upbringing. But how will he achieve crimelessness in modern-day working class areas of London? By cracking down hard on working class behaviour, and youth in particular, punishing them and policing them, while offering no solutions to social problems he cannot possibly understand. He has pledged to remove under 18s’ right to free travel as a punishment for bad behaviour; he wants to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority and fund more BTP officers. His only answer to complex issues behind gun and knife crime is to increase searching at stations.

His pledge to try to introduce a no-strike policy on London Underground marks him out as an enemy of working class people. He wants to kill the principle that working class people have the right to stand up for what is ours, whether that’s pay or safe conditions. It is a political mission to make sure that big business and people of his social class can rule without any other force to contend with.

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Ken too has run London in the interests of the rich. He has courted international investment, making £370,000 worth of trips abroad to turn London into the most prosperous capital on earth. Ken should know from his days as a socialist that having a few wealthy investors around doesn’t mean that everyone in the city becomes wealthy! Not if the wealth is concentrated in a few hands. And not when the City’s super-rich push the average house price up to over £400,000, well above the means of working-class people. And people wonder why there are record levels of homelessness on the streets of London! The 2012 Olympics will cost £20,000,000,000. But only 4,000 new houses will be built out of this money (that works out at £5,000,000 per house!). It is a paradise for the investors, not working-class people. The promised new jobs have not gone to workers in East London, but to imported super-exploited agency workers.

Ken gives his courtship of capital a left gloss by offering some token concessions, such as or 90p bus fares on Oyster. He looks like he’s trying to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, but this does not go nearly far enough, when every other policy he pursues creates the gap between rich and poor in the first place. For those who say he was forced by the government into the Public Private Partnership on the Tube, why has he pursued the same agenda of allowing private companies to make money out of running public transport by privatising the East London Line?

Ken is not a humble public servant putting a check on the abuses of the profit-making system. Ken’s salary is £137,579 per year. The GLA Group has ‘embassies’ in Brussels, Beijing, Shanghai, at an annual cost of £765,000. Ken seems to have styled himself as some kind of head of state, with London as his prosperous Kingdom. His state-like bureaucracy oversees and promotes capitalism in London. Ken recently visited India, on a mission to find cheap, easily-exploitable staff and found they ‘can be secured at substantially lower rates than in the UK or ...US and Europe’.

While union members on the Tube remember him urging us to cross picket lines, and the planned ticket office closures, and Metronet’s battle for public ownership, we should bear in mind what kind of anti-working class political figure Ken is when deciding who we want for Mayor.

But we are not faced with great options. None of the major candidates stand up for working class Londoners. Democracy for working-class people should be about more than choosing between people who harm our interests! Moves within the RMT to stand a list of working-class candidates for the GLA elections, were initiated by people involved in Tubeworker and other socialists, but stalled by RMT’s leaders. This would have given working class people a chance to vote positively for someone who represented them.

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ASLEF and TSSA are affiliated to the Labour Party, but we have not seen much evidence of them enthusiastically campaigning for the Labour candidate. At the minute, the RMT is not affiliated to the Labour Party and seems to have little political direction. It is campaigning against the possibility of the BNP getting seats in the GLA elections. But the best way of defeating the anti-working class, racist BNP is to provide a working-class alternative that addresses the real concerns of working-class BNP voters.

Tubeworker thinks that the best thing to do on May 1st is to vote for Lindsay German for Mayor, a candidate on Left List, and vote for Ken as a second preference - not because of his record, but because the Labour party still has links with the trade unions that give some form of representation for working class people – and because if Ken is a bad dream, then Boris is a nightmare.