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.

On Wednesday last week, HIV expert Rebecca Balira was jailed for 6 months. She had been convicted of keeping a young Tanzanian woman as a slave, and of assaulting her.

The court heard that Balira took the young woman’s passport away from her, that she gave her no pay, that she was forced to share a bed with Balira’s 12 year old son, and that in a fit of rage, Balira had taken scissors and cut the young woman’s bra off her body, piercing her skin.

On the same day Nicolas Robinson was also sent to jail for 6 months. His crime? He had stolen £3.50 worth of bottled water from Lidl, during the riots. This, I think says rather a lot about how much importance is placed upon protecting the property of businesses, and how much importance is placed on protecting the bodies of young immigrant women.

Jailing Mr Robinson will cost around £25k. Indeed, while the aftermath of the riots may be expensive to clean up, locking so many young kids into the criminal justice system is likely to be a hell of a lot more expensive, not just now, but for decades to come.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

On the Monday just passed which saw the heaviest rioting, I was getting something to eat from my local Chinese takeaway in Ealing Broadway when 40 masked and armed youths ran passed me towards the shopping centre. It was 8pm and I was relatively surprised to see the riots spread to the now baptised “leafy and affluent” Ealing. I shouldn’t have been, though. The concentration here is on the various reactions to the riots as I think they proved to be a valuable mirror for all of us to peer in to, as well offering my own rudimentary take in due process.

Speaking for myself: I have lived in the Ealing borough all my life and know the area very well, including the council estates which are often ignored and are on the fringes of the community. I can’t describe my experience here as entirely pleasant, as I have been involved in attempted muggings, fights, and all sorts of violence growing up. My feelings can be best described as sadness for seeing it the way I did the day after the riot, especially upon hearing of the tragic death of 68 year old Richard Mannington Bowes, and a rather tentative understanding for why the violence and vandalism occurred. This previously invisible segment of our society, here in Ealing and elsewhere, should not be treated as a storm that flew overhead and has now thankfully dissipated. The riots were only a natural phenomenon in the sense that the socially exclusive society we live in ushered in their inevitability.

David Cameron returned from holiday recently and issued a “fight back”, almost declaring an intrastate war on those he branded the “sick” and undesirable. “We have seen the worst of Britain, now I believe we have seen some of the best of Britain”, he beamed afterwards when commending those who came out cheerfully with their brooms to clean up the mess. These are the “true” citizens, he said. Ultimately, the sick attitude of the rioters, according to Cameron, can be explained thus: “Their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and act as if there are no consequences.” This is from a man who leads the House of Commons – a place largely populated by those who have lied, been bribed by selling their influence to corporate interests, and pilfered from the public purse, relenting only when caught.

The police are said to have no political leanings, and their actions are completely restricted to upholding an supposedly impartial law. The rioters are said to be mindless thugs looking for loot and a laugh. Such narrow concepts are satisfying for a deluded observer, but human beings are infinitely more complex than whatever singular roles you ascribe to them. The political elite have depicted these two entities as such to have a monopoly on any potentially damaging socio-political commentary. The partitioning of society into units deprived of political content, as these two have been, is a manoeuver to clear the arena of destabilising ideas. These ideas will undoubtedly rock the boat and interfere with the transition to a more authoritarian neoliberalism.

The fact that we as human beings create order means it cannot contain us completely in our efforts to continuously improve it.

So, expecting retorts and plenty of furrowed brows about how I managed to get from stealing a TV to the decadent nature of our social (mal)structuring (as many bloggers I’ve noticed have fallen victim to), I will say that these rioters are but a symptom of the disease, and in no way do I endorse the chaos and destruction committed as the answer to our problems. Similarly, mindlessness on such scale is all but impossible in our golden age of information. Considering how many people were involved in the riots (with over 1,500 arrests made so far), it would be foolish to pin any one reason, good or bad, to the 5 day saga.

Some commentators prefer to slander sympathetic commentary as misguided and detached, and obviously confuse sympathy with curiosity. Agency is key here, they claim, and the rioters must have known what they were doing, right and wrong, etc. I am not disputing that – but in the haze of their self-gratifying spiels, they do not identify the fact that consequences don’t seem to matter anymore, especially if you hear day in and day out of the massive robberies occurring in our society, the aforementioned corrupt and unpunished politicians, the banks, and the deep and targeted cuts. You have EMA scrapped while banks are bailed out for unaccountable millions. You don’t have to be a professor of economics to have an opinion about this – this is the nature of the state right now: it is calculated, socially, legally and economically biased, and primarily looks after the wealth “creators” (or rather, accumulators).

The argument for deprivation stands up if you broaden the terms of deprivation and look at the legal and political capital these alienated youths will never benefit from.

An anthropologist named John Hartung calls religion a “blueprint for in-group morality”. Modern day consumerism is much the same, and its tenets are selfishness, greed, and affirmation through material and ideological power over others. The in-groups are determined by your wealth and connections, and of course, your options. In a society where our social status is primarily assessed by what we have and wear and where we therapeutically shop, these largely “disqualified consumers” have rebelled against the laws of consumerism itself, of property, of the ironically called “free market”. It is free insofar as the ones who have the means to indulge in soporific consumption can feel momentarily liberated from the oppressive norm. It is said to really know a system, you have to experience it from the bottom up without the hallucinogenics associated with climbing a socio-economic tier or two. Many of us can’t fully appreciate this regardless of our imaginations, including myself, but we’re quick to think we do. I concede there is a lot of symbolism here, but I make no apology for it: I did help clean Ealing Broadway up, but that’s just the start of the aftermath – all experience, personal or otherwise, would be nothing without reflection afterwards.

As human beings, we gravitate towards communal bonding to survive, share and prosper together. Yet, we are bombarded with almost mocking, ludicrously arrogant and divisive adverts such as Apple’s recent offering: “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone”. When someone religiously buys into the ideology of the big brands, they are hailed as heroes by corporations, infinitely more valuable than their average consumer and rewarded as such. They have gone beyond being merely persuaded to consume into a sainthood defined by unflinching devotion to the consumption. The ugly consequences of this is that you will have those who have become so detached with the concept of labour, they’re prone to potentially treating all property with alienated disgust – a relationship of love and hate develops with the product or brand.

With shops putting the wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” in their repaired windows, it can be said the atmosphere in our society is one becoming defined by oppositional themes. Bullingdon Boys Dave and George relish this. The locus of our experience here is revealed by the vitriol and almost genocidal anger many felt towards the rioters. For a lot of people (and I mean a lot), the compulsion was to indulge in retributive impulses and thereby unite in adversity. However, this time, it isn’t a foreign aggressor as is popular during more modern scheduled wartime, it is your much maligned and forgotten about neighbour. If order can only be maintained through the identification of a common enemy, foreign or otherwise, there are deep structural problems in society.

I believe there is a reason why the rioters didn’t burn Westminster, go to Canary Wharf and assault the suits who ghost in and out of their money-making citadels: in times of famine (in this case, ideological famine or, rather more coyly, an alienation from one’s food source), cannibalism often increases and you lash out at those closest to you rather than attempt to articulate the distress in a globally appreciated way. This is not relegating the agency of rioters at all, in fact, it is quite the opposite. They did not abstract themselves away from their own immediate living conditions. Sometimes by acting as if there were no consequences, much to the detriment of those around you, an honest communication of how one really feels is revealed.

The riots have illuminated very uncomfortable facts in our society which have resulted in tragic deaths, whether you are a “true” citizen, “false” citizen, the thing in itself – how abstract should I go here? Moral appraisals aside, we need to think carefully not only about what is really going on “out there”, but what is going on regarding our own dispositions and aspirations. Aspiration without means usually results in vandalism and violence, and a community without cohesion is a crumbling and doomed community.

On Sunday night, the community here in Harringey were out on the streets. Groups of young Turkish and Kurdish men stood outside each of the shops that line this great high road, ready to defend them. Meanwhile other groups of young men, all masked up, came in by rail, ready to loot. The deterrent seems to have worked. While a few small businesses were smashed in, along side the retail park near the overground station, most were left untouched, and last night Green Lanes was quiet.

The night before, in Tottenham, I had seen another community out in streets. As I reported I found residents and onlookers to be broadly supportive of the disorder. Yet even those who felt the police were getting what they deserved felt that the targetting of small businesss was “out of order”. Indeed this anger at the targetting of small shops seems to have been something of a theme amongst the reactions of residents.

Richard Seymour considers the expression of such concerns to be “sanctimonious”. In fact this defensive attitude towards shopkeepers is deeply routed in the lived experience of North East London. In some parts of the city, small shops are boutique type places, and exist to serve middle class folk who are too authentic to go to a supermarket. Here in North East London, small family run outlets have survived the Tesco-isation of Britain partly because they serve the particular wants of the local immigrant communities in a way that supermarkets can’t. “Hard working people” is a term that gets wheeled out to justify inequality, and to put down the poor and unemployed. Yet it is a term that can be very accurately used to describe the shopkeepers who make our high street what it is. These are people who keep their shops open at all hours. Their capital is basically the stock in their shops. Like the rest of us, they live primarily from the labour power that they sell. They work bloody hard, they know their customers, and here in Green Lanes they run the best shops in London.

The word “community” can be very slippery. When the mainstream media refer to the “local community” in Hackney or in Tottenham, they tend to forget that this category also includes those who were out on the streets causing trouble. Meanwhile, in a couple of weeks, those in a position of political authority will hand pick some “community leaders”. They, invariably, will be people who are willing to tell young people that the fighting against poverty is simply a matter of working hard at school and having the “right attitude”.

But it is also possible talk rubbish from the other end of the spectrum. There is always the temptation to look at the visceral image of a smashed store or a burning barricade, and to imagine that this is the most authentic, unadulterated expression of communal feeling. It is tempting to sweepingly assert that “the community” – usually a a couple of thousand in a borough of a couple of hundred thousand – has “risen up”.

It is obviously ridiculous ignore the context and the motivations, and to dismiss those involved as mindless thugs. Yet it is equally a mistake to imagine that the “politics of the riots” can be abstracted from their messy reality, that the straightforward dialectic between the police and rioting youth can be disagregated from the experiences and perspectives of so many others who have been drawn into the events of recent nights. These perspectives must also be part of any political analysis of what has gone on. Politics, after all, is not a game played by a few thousand rioters, but by a few million citizens.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Mathew Bell’s interview with Lord Tebbit, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, predictably touched upon immigration. “When he steps off the train into London” the interview asks, “doesn’t he see an exciting and creative powerhouse, fuelled in part by the injection of foreign blood and money?”

No, he says, he worries that Londoners are being pushed out of their own city. But weren’t most Londoners once immigrants themselves?

And then the piece moves on. For some reason, this smart alec response from the interviewer gave me a jolt of discomfort. Yes Tebbit’s desire to blame immigrants is worse than wrongheaded. Yet in referring to the phenomenon of Londoners being pushed out of their own city , Tebbit is putting his finger upon an unfolding social tragedy that is every bit as real as it is painful. Right now half a generation of Londoners face a future of economic exile, of being uprooted from the city in which they grew up by stagnating earnings and sky-rocketing property prices.

The implication that this is a non-issue, simply a red-herring, because “hey we’re all immigrants really” – this just doesn’t cut it. Bell could have pointed out that the decimation social housing – carried out by Tebbit’s party – is a major factor driving Londoners out of London, as indeed is the growth of huge inequality. But instead he stuck to playing word games. After all, if we’re all immigrants really, who cares who gets to stay and who has to leave.

There is no overlooking the fact that for the last decade at least, its the right who have been making the weather over the question of immigration. And if this is all we have to offer i response then they will continue to do so. We cannot adequately defend mass immigration by simply telling people they need to relax about the status quo – because for many the status quo is not working.

There is no necessary reason why immigration must bring harm to any particular section of the population. But neither will it automatically work for the benefit of us all (immigrants included), regardless of the social and economic conditions in which it takes place. When housebuilding is kept in check by restrictive local planning, when no efforts are made to replace mass of social housing lost under previous governments, and when the scarce living space that exists is simply allocated to the highest bidder – then, under those circumstances, the immigration of hundreds of thousands into London may make it more difficult for the children of some of those already living here to afford to stay.

If we are to resist calls for tighter and tighter controls, then we must do so by making a call for change. Only by offering an alternative vision for our city can we make clear that settled and immigrant communities are not competing in a zero-sum game. It is all well to talk about London being a “cultural and economic powerhouse”, but that is not its only function. For millions of us it is also home, and that is the function that, first and foremost, it must fulfill.

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.

It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve just completed my first week in paid employment as a fully-fledged journalist and, having begun to appreciate the true value of weekends, I am determined to spend them doing something thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive. Thus, after a deeply thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive night on the town (well The Hobgoblin in Angel), I’ve woken up late and gone for a fry-up with my hungover girlfriend.

That still leaves the best part of a very warm and sunny afternoon left to burn. But where should the sensitive socialist take his hippy better-half for a romantic day out? Half-way through following a north London nature trail we’ve discovered, I realise we’re near Highgate and decide to take her to the cemetery to see Karl Marx. What, you might think, could possibly be better than that?

Well, for one, not paying the £3 entry fee. I was half-tempted to try to convince them that my great great uncle Karl was buried there and that they should let me enter for free, but I wasn’t sure they’d buy that tactic. After flashing my student card in front of the official’s face fast enough for him not to spot that it is two years out of date, we get into Highgate Cemetery East for £2. Not much to moan about, one might imagine, it’s hardly going to break the bank – even if I do have a girlfriend who insists on ordering the most expensive item on the menu when I take her out to dinner – but it’s the principle!

Highgate Cemetery is a museum of the dead, replete with famous figures, splendid architecture and stunning surroundings and it’s worth the entrance fee. But I object to paying any amount of money (unless it is going to help the world’s poor) to see the founding father of communism. It’s one of the ironies of modern society, like the image Che Guevara, slapped on t-shirts and posters and sold mass-market to thousands of teenagers around the world who haven’t the faintest idea of what he was rebelling against, just that he was a symbol of rebellion. Kind of like the kids who stick photographs of Charles Manson on their walls just to be cool. I digress. If things like religion and the afterlife weren’t just opiates of the masses, Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I’d never seen Marx’s grave before. As a socialist and social sciences graduate, it felt like a kind of pilgrimage to me. When I got there, I was surprised to find there were still fresh flowers at the base of the headstone. I should have expected it really. Family members will often bring flowers to the graves of their loved ones, and among communists, everyone’s a brother or a sister! Pinned down by stones, I found messages written by the people from all over the world who had taken the pilgrimage before me. Skipping past the one written in Chinese that I couldn’t understand, I found one in English that read: “The struggle carries on, comrade!”

The struggle carries on. So long as there is injustice in the world, so long as there is poverty and inequality and starvation and war and oppression, the struggle carries on. Because it has to.

In 1967, a young sergeant named Mario Terán entered the schoolhouse in the tiny Bolivian village of La Higuera to execute the world’s most famous revolutionary. Upon seeing him, Che Guevara uttered his famous last words:

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

Because men are mortal. But ideas like justice, equality, freedom and peace never die.

Several decades later, Mario Terán received free eye surgery from Cuban doctors.

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.

The art and craft, the subtlety and subterfuge, the pomp and pageantry, and the dealings and misdealing of international politics easily lead to the conclusion that in the world of international diplomacy nothing – but nothing – is ‘a given’.  And not even it would seem is it any longer a given that countries can afford swish embassies in the likes of Knightsbridge, from which to conduct their wheelings and dealings.

This is the North Korean Embassy to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  It is an end of terrace with a naff extension in Ealing!

The tiny Pacific Ocean nation of Tuvalu has its embassy in Cottenham Park, in south-west London.  Guinea-Bissau, for instance, handles its British diplomacy via a PO Box in, of all places, Tunbridge Wells.  Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “It’s a small world”…