Accompanying this story: Labour Herald caricature of Begin. Click here for the text of the Newsline editorial of 9 April 1983 and Ken Livingstone's accompanying comment.. Click here for image of that Newsline editorial.
A drunken Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, leaving a party, accused an Evening Standard journalist of being the equivalent of a Nazi concentration camp guard.
On being told that the man was Jewish and therefore took especially strong exception to what he said, he refused to withdraw the remark or to apologise for it. He stuck to that attitude even after he’d sobered up.
The (local government) Standards Board for England suspended Livingstone as London Mayor for four weeks. The power of a non-elected watch-dog body to suspend Livingstone from the position he was elected to raises important questions of democracy.
Tony Blair weighted in on the side of Livingstone and so did many others including Solidarity. Livingstone is appealing against the suspension.
It seems to us at Workers' Liberty to be very unlikely that Livingstone is an anti-semite on the level of prejudices against individuals who are Jewish or of Jewish background. That Livingstone has wallowed in the political anti-semitism that poisons the kitsch “revolutionary left” is a plain matter of fact. In the mid-80s he publicly rectified some of his earlier statements on Israel and Palestine to substitute the term “Israeli nationalist” for “Zionist racists”.
He has signed a call from the Israel-Palestine Socialist Solidarity Group for “Two states, Palestine and Israel… with national and personal security”. But he continues to link himself with Islamist reactionaries such as Qaradawi. He is surrounded with highly-paid “advisors” who are members of a strange semi-underground, semi-organisation which calls itself “Socialist Action”. These are long ago “Trotskyists” turned Livingstone-sycophants such as John Ross, Redmond O’Neil and others. They share the defining dogma of the kitsch left on Israel-Palestine, rejecting a two states solution and advocating the destruction of Israel.
In the past Livingstone has associated with such out and out anti-semitic “left” organisations as Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, which for four years up to its collapse in 1985 helped Livingstone publish a newspaper, Labour Herald. (Its regular contributors included David Blunkett).
Livingstone was explicitly associated with some of the craziest excesses of the WRP’s “World Zionist [read Jewish] conspiracy” mongering. In 1983 Livingstone explicitly endorsed the WRP’s then very shrill “anti-Zionist” campaign against a low-audience early Sunday evening BBC programme which told some of the truth of WRP financial links with certain Arab governments, and against Solidarity’s predecessor Socialist Organiser.
He will not have known that his interview would appear side by side with some of the craziest anti-semitic rantings of the WRP. He was publicly invited by Socialist Organiser to comment on the “World Zionist conspiracy” editorial. He remained eloquently silent.
He continued to associate with the WRP until it — and the paper it ran for Livingstone, Labour Herald — collapsed in late 85. A decade later he wrote a sympathetic introduction to a biography of the late Healy by two of his most fervent followers, Paul Feldman and Corinna Lotz. He has never repudiated the WRP or his association with it.
The cartoon published here from Labour Herald of 25 June 1982 is a measure of the strength of Livingstone’s identification with the WRP’s “anti-Zionism”. It shows the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin dressed in Nazi Adolf Eichmann-style uniform.
We republished these pieces from Newsline as a small contribution to sanitising the left, and to help a clean reborn honest working-class left rise out of the cesspool in which Livingstone, as well as the WRP, the SWP and its “Islamic” front Respect, have mired it.
Sean Matgamna
