More on Ken Livingstone

First, from The Guardian's Comment is Free a piece by Nick Cohen entitled "Why Ken Livingstone is not fit for office". A fine piece of writing which contains much that the BBC would rather the London voter did not know. Nick Cohen's piece starts "To understand why Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London, you have to grasp that he has never moved away from the grimy conspirators of the totalitarian left, who have always despised the democratic traditions of the Labour movement. There is a queasiness about dragging them into the light because so many of the baby boomers now in power wasted their youth in Marxist-Leninist politics. But it is better to overcome queasiness than fail to treat a sickness and Ken Livingstone began by travelling with the sickest sect of them all: the Workers' Revolutionary party." Do read it all...

It also provides a nice preview of tonight's Dispatches programme on Ken Livingstone - which is oddly not being trailed on the Dispatches web page, I do hope Ken Livingstone hasn't managed to get it pulled. Apparently the programme to be presented by The New Statesman's political editor, Martin Bright, "is expected to claim that many of his senior advisers were members of a Trotskyite faction which plotted to turn the capital into a “socialist city state”. In fact the organisation is the little known "Trotskyist cult called Socialist Action" (see Nick Cohen's article). As Nick Cohen says "It is a minute organisation - I doubt it has more than 100 members - but Livingstone has given a fair proportion of them jobs with six-figure salaries at the public's expense. John Ross, Livingstone's economic adviser on £121,000, is typical. He is so lacking in economic knowledge that he decided that the Russian Communist party was a force for the future in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His economic advice at the time was for the ruling class to learn 'that they will be killed if they do not allow a takeover by the working class'."