I got an email last week from London 2012, advertising a Cultural Olympiad gig in a park in Hackney. In the footer I noticed something bizarre: The email listed the Olympic and Paralympic corporate partners, and number one on the Paralympic list was Atos. Atos, who administer the deeply flawed disability benefits assessment. Atos, who play a leading role in the Tories’ production of class antagonisms, in this case between the able-bodied and the disabled.

The brazenness of it shocked me. It’s not as if the issue has faded away, though the stories have largely moved off the front pages. The Hardest Hit campaign (among others) is still going on, and there was an investigation into the computerised test in Monday’s G2. But deep cuts to legal aid are approaching. 46 percent of disability support allowance tests that fail are overturned upon appeal, and the majority of those who appeal are only able to do so because of legal aid. The appeals system is chaotic enough as it is, and it’s only going to get worse.

So I was angered by the presence of Atos’ logo, prominently displayed as supporters of the Paralympics. But I think this is a reflection of how the Olympics works as a corporate nostalgia machine par exellence. The Olympics operates in the public consciousness on the level of a festival of internationalism and sport, with implicit reference to times when things were supposedly better. In the case of London 2012, the particular referents are the 1948 games (the Austerity Olympics) and London in 2005 (when the games were awarded, pre-crisis and pre-7/7). This is the logic of that nostalgia: We should all pull together, and make do and mend, like after the War – while at the same time, we should think of the Olympics as something that’s still basically appropriate and affordable, like it was supposed to be in 2005 (it’s not).

While this nostalgia is how London 2012 works on an ideological level, the games are at heart a tool for the protection and creation of capital. The main beneficiaries of these Olympics have been private interests who have benefitted from land deals, advertising exclusivity and a massive public profile boost – for more on this I recommend Anna Minton‘s book Ground Control, which was recently reprinted with a new chapter on the Stratford site. It’s also worth noting that lots of people are concerned about the games’ material effects on East London as well as the economy as a whole – nostalgia is the ideological framework by which the games are approached, not a mass delusion. Plus, there have always been critical voices from the communities most directly in contact with the event.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the company sponsoring the Paralympics is also making disabled people’s lives a misery. We shouldn’t be surprised that Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and BP use the Olympics to sanitise their brands and receive a massive boost to their corporate profiles. We shouldn’t be surprised that London 2012 sponsors will control advertising across the city during the games, and we shouldn’t be surprised at the percentage of tickets that are going to corporate guests. This is what the Olympics are for. We can’t separate the corporate roadshow from the sport.

I’m not against the idea of the Olympics in principle – I’m a sucker for sport on telly, to be honest, especially athletics (I ran for Camden once upon a time). But I wouldn’t wish these particular effects of the Olympic circus on anyone, least of all my own city. It’s too easy to fall into defending a nostalgic Olympic ideal against the realities of the event.

Two prospective building sites in London are, I think, totemic of our current economic climate. The Heygate Estate and the Broadgate Estate, though very different, show two sides of the same coin.

The Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South East London, was completed just over 30 years ago. Now, however, it has been completely boarded up, the doors and windows locked with metal from the inside out. Of 1800 units which used to house over 3000 people, there are now only 8 residents left. The rest have been dispersed throughout London, having been offered generally unfair compensation, and shunted to Zone 4, away from their communities, family and friends.

The Heygate Estate

The reason for the prospective demolition is that as the city expands, Elephant and Castle has been deemed a prime area for business development and regeneration. It’s an old story, and one to which we have perhaps become far too familiar. The Elephant Amenity Network, the local community group, has been fighting the ‘regeneration’ plans with counter planning, campaigning to save the trees and green spaces in the area, and trying to put pressure on both the council and the architects.

Part of the way Southwark has got away with this is by abandoning the Heygate residents for longer than it seems. About 10-15 years ago, maintenance work on the site slowed to a halt, as the council let the buildings run into so much disrepair that the estate became a favourite for film crews wanting to capture ‘gritty urban life’ in the metropolis. But this was a purposeful dilapidation, which allowed the council to label a large working class community as criminal and innately impoverished.

Southwark Council then adopted a masterplan for transforming the area in 2004. Since then the main task has been finding investors and emptying the buildings. However, it has now been revealed that it could be another 5 years before any work is done on the site. Due to the recession and the slow pace of planning permissions these 1800 homes near to central London are simply going to remain standing and empty.

There are of course possibilities for temporary use. Guardian resident agencies like Camelot might be brought in, essentially outsourcing security work to an increasingly precarious workforce in London, desperate for cheap rents and shorter commutes. Alternatively, there’s the artsy option of Meanwhile, a fairly new organisation which sets up artists with temporary work and exhibition spaces.

But these schemes have two big downsides. While they do provide some temporary spaces for those who want them, they are also used to ‘protect’ buildings against squatters, a residential group who are being increasingly targeted by the Conservatives and the right wing press. Secondly, neither scheme deals with the general problem of housing in the capital. The simple fact is that the Heygate estate should not be used to meet a temporary space problem. The energy, time and materials invested into it in the 1970s was to meet a need then for residential space in the city, and that space is still needed.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city centre, bankers and right-wing commentators are up in arms about the potential listing of the Broadgate Estate as a heritage site. The Broadgate Estate has no housing; it doesn’t meet any immediate need of the majority of the city’s residents, but instead is a complex of banks, businesses and office space with a central ice rink and shopping area. Why would it possibly be listed as a heritage site? Well, its innovative design, heralded at the time as an architectural jewel in the city’s complex of squares and high-rises, was only finished in 1985. Now, however, the owner British Land has a better idea for the site: headquarters for the banking giant, UBS.

the Broadgate 'Estate'

UBS apparently wants to move its headquarters from Switzerland to London because the Swiss tax regulations are getting just a bit too strict. Let’s play that again: the tax regulations in London are actually seen as lenient in comparison to those of Switzerland, the economy of which is almost entirely based on creating a political environment suitable to banking. Faced with being refused the space for its new shiny home, the kleptocrats of the Corporation of London are now crying ‘red tape! red tape!’ to anyone who will hear them, hoping to gain some points from sympathetic reactionaries and free marketeers.

What strikes me as so monumentally absurd about both the Heygate and Broadgate proposed demolitions is the extraordinary waste involved. While the Broadgate boasts of its advanced recycling schemes, and Southwark Council is piloting a food-waste program, the demolition of the buildings would signify that all the energy and resources expended on their initial construction comes to naught.

And of course, the two schemes are connected by the still-going-strong debt economy in the UK. The reasons for developing Elephant and Castle is simply to raise property prices, and with his leverage yet more credit for further expansion in the financial sector. The reflation of the debt economy is underway.

This construction project has nothing to do with meeting a need: the new ‘knuckle duster’ building right next to the Heygate, Strata, boasts of its sustainability. But its combined heat and power system, and its fancy iconic wind turbines, are mere decoration when compared with the massive loss of energy and sustainability that happens in a building that’s not even half full. The Gherkin remained similarly empty for years (I don’t know how it is now), and I have little hope for the Shard, the building which has already eclipsed the Strata Tower for the odd title of ‘tallest building in Southwark’.

the Strata Tower (aka the knuckle duster)

The turbines of the Strata Tower, which cause too much noise and vibration to actually be used in the building, hover over the Heygate Estate as a homage to green capitalism, and an icon of current attempts at debt reflation. But how long would a business development in Southwark last, if even the the 1980s business campus at Broadgate is deemed outdated and expendable to the irrational ravings of the city’s high capitalists?

So there we have it, an ecology of debt. Attacks on unions and a debt-economy built on cheap oil have caused mass unemployment, and a sizeable migration of workers towards London in search of jobs. I imagine that many of the fought over jobs will be low paid, ununionised construction work, commuting in from distant suburbs and demolishing and rebuilding sky scrapers for big business while thousands of homes next door remain empty.

A doctor who gave medical assistance to protesters on 9^th Dec has spoken of the police risking a ‘Hillsborough-type’ disaster on Westminster Bridge:

The anaesthetist from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, who gave medical assistance to the protesters, said that officers forced demonstrators into such a tight “kettle” on Westminster Bridge that they were in danger of being seriously crushed or pushed into the freezing River Thames.

The 34-year-old doctor, who set up a field hospital in Parliament Square, said that people on the bridge suffered respiratory problems, chest pains and the symptoms of severe crushing.

“Police had us so closely packed, I couldn’t move my feet or hands an inch. We were in that situation like that for hours. People in the middle were having real difficulty breathing.

[…]

The Aberdeen doctor added: “The sides of the bridge were only waist high and all it would have taken is one stumble and someone could have gone over the side. I’m surprised that no one died there. And if anyone had been injured, I would have struggled to respond even if I was stood next to them.” She said that when several police became caught inside the kettle they were screaming to get out. “They were experiencing what we were experiencing.”

[My emphasis.]

(She also stated that the ‘vast majority’ of injuries she saw that day were head wounds: “I was surprised how much force the police had used.” Read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/i4O6V0.)

Hillsborough didn’t occur to me when we stopped moving across the bridge. As we all struggled to find the space to breath and the people got restless, I couldn’t help thinking of the stampede that happened on a bridge in Cambodia several weeks before. (456 dead). It only takes a few to panic and start pushing for people to get trampled.

The police know this. They remember Hillsborough, and know full well the dangers of a crush in such circumstances. Either the police knowingly risked the lives of protesters that day, or they were making it up as they went along. (As they were marching us onto the bridge, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for all their scary frowning, the police were just as clueless as to the outcome of this as we were.)

Responding to the allegations that police took unnecessary risks that day, a spokesman for Scotland Yard insisted that kettling was used to control only violent sections of the crowd, while minimising the use of force. I can only assume that in the world of law enforcement, ‘sections of the crowd’ means ‘the whole fucking crowd’, while the word ‘force’ doesn’t cover imprisoning a group of people in a wall of batons and riot shields for three hours with no possibility of escape.

But this makes sense in a world in which government ministers can claim with straight faces that their decision to raise tuition fees in no way compromises their pledge not to increase tuition fees; in which the woman shagging the heir to the throne being poked with a stick becomes the very definition of inexcusable violence, while a 20 year old being hit so hard with a baton he needs emergency brain surgery is just good policing in difficult circumstances.

Very often the abuse of language and common sense in this manner by those in power is committed knowingly. But this is much worse: I have a strong suspicion that the police haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. Be afraid.

Whenever a modest tax rise is proposed, the rich show their patriotism by immediately threatening to leave the country. It has been an odd sight seeing bankers warning that they will jump ship to Switzerland if forced to pay rates of tax similar to the people who clean their offices: odd that they think this will strike the electorate as a bad thing, and odd that the people most to blame for the current crisis actually have the balls to assert their value to the economy in this way. (Though nothing is more confusing than the idea that someone living in London would voluntarily move to Switzerland.)

Early this year, Boris Johnson warned that, if subjected to a ‘super-tax’, London would lose 9,000 of its valiant financiers, doing irreparable damage to London (some how).  Almost a year on from that extraordinary levy, we now know that the number of bankers leaving the City has been negligible. To quote this weekend’s FT: “From practical concerns over infrastructure and regulation to quality of life issues, executives are proving “stickier” than many feared.”

A banker enjoying his new life in Switzerland.

Quite simply the difference in potential high level earnings in the UK and Switzerland is not big enough. A recent report showed that a City worker making £141,000 after tax would make £156,000 if living in Geneva. This seems to be not enough to justify moving. (And the differences in income when moving to other countries are even lower; that same worker would make just £4000 more if relocated to New York, for instance). It is also hard for entire financial institutions to simply relocate, as lower level employees will see little or no benefit in their post-tax bank balance. (It seems companies require the labour of many employees, and that financial success is not assured by the presence of just one highly paid financial overlord, a surprise to some.)

The most significant loss so far has been in the hedge fund ‘industry’, where almost a thousand employees have left for the land of Heidi, surely a reason to celebrate.

One aspect of this issue not explored by the FT’s coverage – though implicit in the oddly-chosen phrase ‘quality of life issues’, quoted above - is the fact that once you are richer than most of humanity, increases in income will have far less importance than other factors when making decisions. What’s more important to somebody in the top 10% of earners?: living in a groovy international city like London, or an extra 10k a year? In economic jargon, the marginal utility of money decreases the richer you get, proving the hedge fund people who did move to Switzerland to be degenerate, irrational sociopaths, unworthy of our fair city.

To Toblerone, the cuckoo clock, Nazi gold and racism, Switzerland can now add 1,000 hedge fund managers from London, a noble achievement.

Here’s the final paragraph from an online Telegraph article on the tube strike:

Having trouble getting to work? Please share your tales of travel woe below. For readers who live outside London, this is your chance to gloat about your trouble-free commute.

Who said conservatives don’t have a sense of humour? Yes, vent your anti-union anger if you have a job to go to (as 800 Tube employees won’t, if the cuts go through), or, if you live outside the city, you can ‘gloat’ about your ability to get from one inferior location to another.

The reaction to the strike has been typical and quite boring. I think these headlines point out something quite disappointing in our political culture:

Tube strike: millions hit by travel chaos with 9 lines affected – The Telegraph

Tube strike forces Londoners on to buses and bikes – The Guardian

Autumn of discontent begins as Tube walkout brings misery for millions of commuters and tourists – Daily Mail

I don’t think it would be too degenerate to point out that public transport strikes can be annoying, but there’s very little outrage to be found over the planned 800 layoffs, which is surely the story here. The Guardian even has a blog post entitled ‘London tube strike – tell us your stories’. Here’s my story from this traumatic incident: Yesterday I decided to postpone a drink with a friend, and my mother had to get up earlier than usual; when she got home she was quite tired, and she shouted at me for not informing her that my wardrobe is a bit broken at the moment. Guess what – she still has a job. No surprises in guessing that most people have stories about as boring; they either took the bus, hopped on a bike, or worked from home (which some regard as a luxury, btw).

I find the sympathy for the poor tourists in the Mail headline quite amusing. How patriotic of them to suggest Londoners forgo their industrial disputes for the sake of Johnny Foreigner’s holiday. This has the added benefit of applying practically every day of the year in London.

Striking public sector workers are always deemed ‘selfish’ by popular grumbling; I think it’s clear who’s being selfish here.

For the last two years or so, I have been engaging in a dastardly plot to destroy the Tory party. Yes, by writing silly outraged-liberal letters to my Conservative MP – to which she must respond – on matters she ultimately doesn’t care about, I’ll hopefully waste enough Tory time and resources to destroy the party from within. I’ve had mixed success so far.

A resident of Chipping Barnet, I live in a Tory safe seat – someone once said you could put a blue ribbon on a cabbage and it would get elected here – but at least my representative isn’t a total dinosaur. Theresa Villiers has been criticised by some cunts in the party for her liberal views on social issues – she voted to keep the abortion limit at 24 weeks, for which I thanked her – and her environmental record; she’s opposed airport expansion in the South of England and puts much emphasis on high-speed rail. She also gave Michael Gove a very public bollocking after his department refused academy status to a local school. A good egg, then, as far as Tories go.

One week I read this:

Cameron has put the man most to blame for the worst environmental disaster in living memory in charge of his cuts agenda, and appointed a man who has faced accusations of wriggling out of cleaning up a environmental atrocity to run his party’s finances. He has slashed programmes to prevent global warming first and hardest. He has decreed that the Department of Transport will take the hardest cuts, which will shutter much of our public transport network and force far more people onto smoggier roads. And he has appointed an oilman to ensure we begin deep-water drilling, Gulf of Mexico-style, off the coast of Britain – just as every newscast in the world is showing how well that turns out. Johann Hari, The Independent. Read the full thing here: http://bit.ly/c47OeU

The Department of Transport, you say? Why my liberally-prone constituency MP heads that department. Surely I should bring this to her attention, and get some sort of comment.

What did my MP have to say?

I appreciate your taking the time to let me know your views. I have noted your comments with regard to the appointment of John Browne [the former BP exec who oversaw a radical cuts agenda in the corporation that led to the deaths of several employees in oil rig explosions. He was also found to have lied in court about the whole thing. This man is now the government's 'Cuts Tsar'].

I am afraid that my responsibilities as Minister for Transport mean that I have to take care in relation to areas where my work in Government overlaps with cases I take up for constituents.

As recommended by the Ministerial Code, I am therefore passing your correspondence to officials at the Department for Transport to consider. They will be in touch in due course; and will keep me informed.

Thank you again for writing.

Kind regards

Theresa

What the fucking fuck????

It seems my MP has a hard time reconciling her constituents’ dual lives as both residents of  Barnet and transport users. And as for this ‘Ministerial Code’, I do appreciate having my ‘correspondence’ passed along to some unaccountable bureaucrat in the Ministry; I hope he gave it a thorough ponder before binning it.

I know what some of you will be thinking. What was I expecting? Did I think she was going to bravely resign in protest, spurred on by my letter? Well maybe not. But this woman is perfectly comfortable publicly admonishing a fellow member of the government for not granting academy status to a place with a rock-solid reputation as a shit-street sink school. Yet not a titter on this.

In particular that second paragraph is bugging me. Can someone please help me decipher this?

Anyway, my stern weekly letters have yet to end the government, but at least I’ve got one more Tory to loathe inflexibly.

Yesterday I went down again to the Heathrow picket lines, to see how the strike is developing, and also to check out the new community garden squatted by Sipson residents and activists.

Last time I didn’t write about my journey down there. (Quick tangent: a crack-of-dawn piccadilly line farce complete with hundreds of tourists, Japanese cameras, garbled German, a replacement bus and a fortuitous chat with a CWU rep on his way to Belfast.)

This time, I arrived at the far more civilised time of midday. As I got out at Hatton Cross station, there was the same picket line with its mandatory 14 picketers. Even though this had been designated by Unite as ‘family day’ (yesterday was ‘International Solidarity Day’) there was still a limited number of supporters, this time the lone child on the side of the motorway with her Unite flag, cheering at honking cars, seemed a dismal response to such an awesomely effective strike.

The planes may have roared over head (even for me, non-flyer as I am, I can’t stop the kid inside go ‘ooh’ at the size of them), but when I joined the plane spotters up on the bridge over the road, they informed me that they were the same planes going round and round. ‘We can see the registration numbers’ one said ‘they’re just empty planes made to look like BA is busy. Oh that one’s the biggest plane in the world.’ It was indeed a well big plane.

Down at the football club, some friends joined in going round the picketers and talking about various ways the strike could go. The vibe this weekend wasn’t just upbeat, it was pretty off-the-wall. There was a large bouncy castle set up for all the kids, some people in shark costumes (presumably having something to do with Willie Walsh behaving like a shark) and a mobile picket in the form of an open-topped double decker bus, which drove round and round the perimeter of the airport, complete with Unite flags and bad limericks about Willie Walsh.

This week there was also more of a feeling that the strikers were in it for the long haul (sorry, irresistible pun). A few cabin crew talked about how they’d been putting money by over the last few months, knowing that they needed to save up for the dispute. “This was always going to happen” remarked a crew member.

That seems to be the feeling all round, and made sense once I’d got my head round some of the history of the workforce. A lot of the cabin crew, particularly the younger workers, have already been employed by Ryanair or Easyjet, where the pay is actually quite a lot better than BA, but the hours are longer, the conditions worse, and the perks non-existent (sounds quite a lot like the customer’s experience too). One guy told me how he held down two bar jobs while working for Easyjet.

Once they’ve got some experience however, they try for jobs at BA – the conditions are better, the brand holds some sway, and generally you get a better treatment from customers. But that’s all been wrecked by the recent management tactics. Over the last few years, BA have consistently reduced pay and attempted to remove terms and conditions. At Heathrow, the cabin crew’s union, BASSA, really came into its own when the members changed the constitution to give them ultimate sway over negotiations after their Union leader sold them out in a deal, bumping the retirement age up from 55 to 65 without a change in pensions.

The example BASSA members gave time and time again as a comparison was Gatwick. Over at BA’s second busiest airport, there’s hardly any unionisation and, consequentially the management have been able to hack away at pay, conditions and morale. There’s hardly even a picket line over at Gatwick apparently. Most of the workforce is concentrated in Heathrow though, as BA pulled out of most other airports around the country. A couple of crew were down from Manchester, from where they usually commute to work – by plane, of course. Nonetheless, on strike days they’ve been meeting up there, 100 or so in a meeting. That’s some pretty strong rank and file unionisation.

After the football club, we went and caught the number 90 bus to Grow Heathrow. The long walk down Sipson Lane shows you what the area’s like: little suburban, semi-rural lanes with roaring technology a few hundred metres overhead. It’s a strange mix.

The site that the Transition Heathrow group have taken is an old tree nursery, consisting of a few long, tunnel like greenhouses, and some surrounding grassy patches. Many of the panes have been smashed, and the glass lies shattered in the waste that’s dumped around. Eerily, a huge pile of car parts lies to one side, bumpers, seating foam, big sheets covered in oil. We spent a while bagging it up, hoping that one day someone will come and take it for landfill.

To the back of the site is a huge area of bramble and thicket, a Holiday Inn lauding over it all (and of course yet more planes circling in the distance). If you take a walk down there, through the bushes and bits of plastic bag, it’s easy to forget that you’re standing on some of the most politically contested ground in the country: the site of the proposed Third Runway.

And so it’s really quite inspiring to see long-time Sipson residents, socialists and some nice young anarchists getting their hands dirty, building compost toilets and grey-water systems. It’s a lot like the Climate Camps in some ways – creating something positive next to the sites of the climate crime itself. But it’s also got that long-term Transition Town element. Keith, a carpenter, was busy replacing panes into the nursery shelters, while others were making food for everyone.

The Sipsonites, however, didn’t seem too bothered about what was going on round the corner at the strike centre. ‘It’s nothing to do with us’ said one. And, true, in some ways it isn’t – hardly any cabin crew live in Sipson, or near Heathrow at all, especially as you can always fly into work like the Manchester folk. All the same, it’s difficult to ignore that the BA strike has grounded more planes in a week than climate activists have in 3 years, and while the partial legal victory over the Third Runway gives cause for hope, enough money and political drive could easily see Sipson buried under concrete.

There’s so many great things going on down in this suburb to the far West of London, and it’ll be really interesting to see what happens if everyone starts talking to eachother.

“Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers of my school notebooks.”

- Walter Benjamin, “Tiergarten”, Berlin Childhood around 1900

Over the last few weeks thousands upon thousands of people have been joining a facebook group called ‘Secret London’, and similar groups have been set up for other cities around the world. The point, apparently, is to tell absolutely everyone about those great places that aren’t already filled with tourists. The result, I can only assume, will be for all of those lovely little places to quickly become overcrowded and not-so-lovely little places, but that is only the beginning.

Already we live in a city that is fractured, or rather shattered by transport. If a place doesn’t have a tube station it barely exists in the consciousness of the average North Londoner. Where there’s a tube that will take you somewhere, most people will never walk. London is split into confined areas set around specified destinations, and through this already begins to lack identity as a city.

A few weeks ago, standing outside the Tate Britain, a couple of people asked me and a friend how to get to Liverpool street. We’re both Londoners and gave the answer that the best way would be to “go up the river for a couple of miles, perhaps there’s a bus that will take you along the Thames”, but this way of thinking about London, the geographical connection of places, seems rarer and rarer. It is as a result of a lack of this kind of thinking that people even feel they need groups about how to find cool places to go.

It might seem that I am simply arguing for a quaint old-fashionedness in an approach to a city, flâneurism even, but my point is more that the way that the city is split is of course not a result of the wills of the people who live in it. Maybe a better solution, instead of telling people where they can find a secret spot that is quite cool, would be to demand they challenge this edifice. To reclaim the city through a process of understanding that is so much challenged by the edifice of tube maps, transport systems, tourist information bureaux, city guides, etc. Without a doubt almost all of the secret places listed are random finds, so if we universalise this system of finding good places to go, we not only run the risk of losing our own secret places, but the entire way secret places may be found. And if the same principle is applied across all cities, that they become a mere collection of places rather than spaces, we may lose the entire reason why London is London.

A Progressive Agenda to Stop the Right in 2012

Saturday 30th January 10am-5pm

Congress House, Great Russell Street, WC1H

www.progressivelondon.org.uk/conference/progressive-london-conference-2010.html

An Interview with Ken Livingstone

They say never meet your heroes. You’re only ever gonna be disappointed. And having had some bad experiences in the past – a particularly awkward conversation with a very reluctant Mark Steel, and managing to pour beer down the very beautiful Sian Berry, whilst coming out with lines that wouldn’t persuade a hooker in a brothel, being two I don’t care to dwell on – given all this, I was particularly trepidatious about meeting Ken Livingstone.

Despite my fluctuating and ever more ridiculous emotional relationship with the Labour party, like many of the young generation on the left, I could never bring myself to vote for them. When I was in VI Form, we got tuition fees. Whilst at university, they took us to war, got rid of trial by jury, threw millions at the private sector through PFI and paved the way for variable top-up fees. But then I moved to London, and suddenly there was the chance to vote for Ken. He was anti-war, anti-fees, anti-PFI and a member of the Labour Party… It was a Labour vote you could be proud of.

But no… I’m an interviewer now for a very reputable blog. I want to push him. I want to ask him some difficult questions that need answering, regardless if it shatters my boyhood dreams… But what if he starts calling me a ‘concentration camp guard’ like he did with that guy at the Standard? Perhaps I should have just let Reuben or Jacob do the interview…? At least they could always fall back on the old “Im jewish and I find that offensive” catch-all gem. Too late… door bell has been rung. And the person I got this contact off said he could be really stern or just disinterested with journos… God, this is going to be awful. Another dream shattering dose of reality, just like the time I told the ticket inspector I didn’t believe in class, that he and I were in the same proletarian boat, and then promptly got issued a £50 fine for sitting in the wrong carriage.

The shutters opened from the darkened front room and a pair of beady eyes glared out at me. “Who are you?’ an authorative voice demanded…

“My name is David… and I’m here to see your Daddy,” I said. Ken opened the door laughing. “Can I offer you a drink? Beer, wine, tea, water…” He was instantly charming and introduced me to his children, Thom and Mia. Panic over. Just as his political reputation suggests, Ken was to prove the exception to the rule.

I thought I’d start strong – attempt to blindside him, ala Frost/Nixon. ”Are you going to run again in 2012?” He laughed and smiled. “I would have thought that was pretty obvious by now.” No exclusive there then.

So what’s the point of Progressive London? And what is it going to achieve? “Well, when we analysed the election results, we looked at our agreement with the Greens. And I made every effort to try and get the Liberals into that too, because broadly in London, Liberal activists tend to be left of centre. And when you looked at both the votes for Mayor and the London Assembly results, bringing them and Respect and the like in, there was a progressive majority of 54%. But the fractioning of that let the Tories come through. So I just thought it would be a shame to let that necessary alliance drift further apart. And that is why we started Progressive London. We want people’s input into a genuine progressive agenda, and this weekend will be asking people to sign up to working groups through which they will define that agenda through 2012 and beyond.”

I mentioned that, as a resident of an inner-London borough, I felt aggrieved that voters in the nether regions of Sutton and Harrow forged the central plank of what became known as Boris’ donut election strategy – a blue ring with a red hole in the middle.

“The few bits of London that don’t really want to be in London are a big chunk of Hillingdon, then Havering, Bexley and Bromley. It is very interesting that when you look at the results, out of 32 boroughs, Boris’ majority comes from just 4 – the four least cosmopolitan.”

“Should they really be considered ‘London’ for electoral purposes then?” I asked. “They don’t have the same experiences and concerns as those of us who feel more acutely the impact of the Mayor’s legislation?” Ken laughed again. “One of my first meetings after the election was down in Bromley. The local paper asked me what my message was. I said, ‘I forgive you.’”

I laughed and presumed that would be the end of it. But what was slowly becoming very clear about Ken Livingstone was that behind his public image as a stalwart of the left, he is incredibly informed about the minute practicalities of seemingly every London borough, and has a real love and knowledge of the city, and a vision for its transformation that is far fresher than his political opponents have succeeded in making out. “The bizarre thing is, who has been screwed the most since Boris’ got in? He accepted my policy of 24/7 on the Freedom Pass but didn’t do what he said he would and extend it to trains. Now if you live in that pocket of South East London, on the outskirts of Bexley, then this hurts you the most. Why won’t they extend the tram link from Croydon up to Crystal Palace where the East London Line is coming in? It was the cheapest of all the proposals we had. So no, we don’t need to axe them. We’ve got the arguments to win down there as well.”

So does he blame the Labour party nationally for his defeat? “No. If you can’t mobilise enough supporters after eight years as Mayor to win an election you need to do things differently yourself next time round.”

Ken is clearly as alive and up for the fight as he was in the days when he taunted Maggie with unemployment figures across the Thames. But I feared that the party, let alone the electorate, would not see it as a matter of policy debate and qualification, but a time for a new face and someone who they thought had a better time of, well, out Borising Boris:

The conversation meandered at my asking to take in his views on Venezuela, Obama and the recession and emerging economies. But I didn’t want to leave without pushing him on two things: namely, could Labour still be a vehicle for progressive politics after all that has happened in its recent history? And secondly, which would be more difficult, why should people like us support him again? I still wasn’t even sure if he could win.

There is much to admire about Ken Livingstone. Unlike so many others in the Labour party today, you know where he stands and you know that he will stand firm. But electorally speaking, that can be a very difficult line to tread. And as a young man who wants to see Labour move forward – not in a Blairite sense, but in terms of how it is perceived as a genuine vehicle for hope and change for the working class – I couldn’t help feeling going into the interview that Ken was perhaps just not the man for the job any more. Like Arnie Vinick in the West Wing, convinced he could win the next time around, was it not perhaps time to pack it in and pass the batton to someone else? I couldn’t see voters going for him again. But I left with the feeling that they should.

To buy into the hype of youth and image, be it on the left or on the right, is to the detriment of our politics as a whole. The final clip, which I found the most telling and most uplifting, came when I really tried to push Ken on his lack of political razzamatazz. I had previously thought it the reason he lost the last election. Having heard him talk about it, I now think it speaks to a depth of character that our politics may not crave, but which it most definitely needs. And it is the reason that I will vote for him next time around.

Two events, at each end of the last week here in London, have highlighted the real range of activities and viewpoints of the left community in this country. The 7th annual Historical Materialism Conference, held last weekend at SOAS and Birkbeck, offered a fantastic opportunity for over 700 attendees from around the world to discuss Marxist theory. Today’s actions of “The Wave” followed by the beginning of a 48-hour climate camp in Trafalgar Square represented the cutting edge of British lefty activism. The question is, then, why can one not find the same faces at both events? Why are our theorists disinclined to involve themselves with activism, and why are our activists not engaging with the theoretical debates that surround the issues they wish to tackle?

At the Historical Materialism conference, there were literally hundreds of papers given, on topics ranging from political economy of the current crisis, to climate change, to aesthetic debates in the 1990s, to the poetics of containerisation. Despite this being a conference focussed on Marx’s thought, and on later Marxist thought, there can be no doubt about how great a level of heterogeneity there was in the viewpoints expressed, nor of ongoing polemics that occasionally bubbled to the surface. The atmosphere was lively, and unusually for a bunch of academics, the attendees were all serious about changing the world. Let us not get this wrong, despite the Marxist tradition often being highly intellectual, there were no punches pulled about the necessity of the forcible overthrow of the status quo. When on the first night, a Canadian academic gave a paper on the use of historical materialism is social scientific study to aid social democratic ends, he was absolutely taken apart, and the conference ended with Frederic Jameson arguing that we have to make the choice between Socialism and Communism.

Today’s “The Wave” march was equally heterogeneous. Finding myself marching with everyone from the Socialist Workers’ Party, to the Lib Dems, to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (who happen to act like a rather right-wing pressure group most of the time), with everyone kitted out in blue garb. Everyone was coming together to make what they see as necessary political demands. Of course, the climate camp taking place later in the day was rather less diverse, with attendees being a range of hippies, students, recent graduates, and NGO workers. The Wave, itself, is of little political interest, it was not particularly left-wing, and the demands were broadly reformist, but this is not the case for climate camp.

And yet, climate camp is a heavily anti-theoretical environment. One finds oneself surrounded by the most conservative discourses on nature, in which people consider the rolling back the industrial revolution. Both nature and creativity become a fetish, in the here-and-now climaxing most ingloriously in a hedonism whose claim to make demands for the future are, with the creative obsession and the throwing away of history, held firmly and problematically in the present. Maybe I give the climate camp a bad press. They do amazing work, and get the sort of media attention most Marxists could never dream of. Nonetheless, as an urbanist of sorts, and as a modernist, I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable about banners that say “Nature doesn’t do bail-outs”. Somehow I think that, “Humanity shouldn’t do bail-outs” would be more appropriate to the cause.

And yet the academic Marxists have their problems too. Surrounded by the most erudite and eloquent debates on theory, a session on Israel and anti-Semitism was banal at best. The imposition of a Realpolitik was awkward and confused. The one time in the weekend when I felt that this was really being addressed was in a fantastic session on “Apocalypse Marxism”, with one of the papers being given by a PhD student at University of California Santa Cruz who also happens to be involved in the ongoing student struggles across California. Maybe the collaboration of theory and praxis are going better elsewhere

Amongst the book stalls at the conference, the SWP’s seemed rather out of place, with its emphasis on popular Marxism and Trotskyism not quite hitting the spot. The problem is, for many Marxist academics, that left-wing activists seem inherently dogmatic. Academics would often rather be debaters than involve themselves in the sort of demagoguery needed to run a vanguard part.

The challenge to integrate theory and praxis has been long-discussed, and it is perfectly possibly that my judgment is clouded by the demise of Adorno at the hands of May ’68ers, and their slogan of “Adorno as an institution is dead.” I see their legacy in climate camp. I see it in the lifestylism that allows placards that read “you can’t eat meat and be an environmentalist” or in any challenge to capitalism at the point of consumption.

If we carry on as we are, any revolution will not be theorised, and yet we cannot afford for this to be the case. Maybe we can analyse this split in terms of Marx’s famous final thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In its popular, although incorrect, interpretation this is a call for activism, to throw out philosophy. The other interpretation is that Marx demands a philosophy that itself changes the world. But take with it the argument that philosophy should be immanent to all elements of human existence, and you have a fine argument for a ground in which philosophers must partake in praxis, and activists must at the same time critically examine their status rather than simply assuming it. And yet to simply make this argument is not enough, as we must start to think very carefully about how these two important elements of the left can be integrated, and in fact must be integrated, to effect any real change.