Ordinary Gweilo

Strangest endorsement of the week comes from The Economist, who are supporting Ken Livingstone in Thursday’s election for Mayor of London.  I find this strange, firstly because Livingstone is normally regarded as a left-winger and The Economist is a right-wing newspaper, but also because it’s hard to see why they need to express an opinion at all.  The mayor of London doesn’t have a great deal of power, and it goes without saying that it extends only to London itself.  One of the strengths of The Economist is that it takes a less parochial view of the world than most of its competitors, normally managing to take a broader view of events than daily newspapers in Britain and avoiding the American bias of Time and Newsweek.

So what is so interesting about the mayor of London?  Presumably the fact that the staff of The Economist work in London and are directly affected by what happens there.  I can’t deny that it is interesting to me (having lived in London for many years), but I guess I’m in a fairly small minority amongst the overseas readers of The Economist.  Ah well, there’s always the Big Mac Index for everyone else. 

Ken Livingstone has had a very strange career.  He became leader of the Greater London Council in 1981 in a ‘coup’ just after the Labour Party (lead by the more moderate Andrew McIntosh) had won the election.  His best known policy was reducing bus and tube fares to encourage more people to use public transport – it was popular, it was effective, but it was also ruled illegal by the courts.  He then found himself out of a job when Margaret Thatcher abolished the council in 1986 because she was upset that the people of London stubbornly refused to vote for the Conservatives.  Then he became a rather obscure backbench Labour MP who regularly said controversial things and got quoted in the newspapers, but was otherwise irrelevant. 

When the Labour Party decided to introduce a directly-elected mayor for London (14 years after the abolition of the GLC), he was the obvious candidate – though in fact he ended up standing as an independent because the leadership of the Labour Party thought he was too much of a maverick.  He won easily, and last year he was re-admitted to the Labour Party and is standing this time as their official candidate.  Ironically, although he will most likely win this week, he would almost certainly have done even better as an independent!