“Progressive London”: A Popular Front for reactionaries

I have an aversion to the word “progressive”. My grandparents were lifelong Stalinists, and used the word to refer to those who were not actually Party members but were sufficiently fellow travelling for their tastes (“useful idiots” being the less polite behind-the-scenes designation).

Today in Britain, the Cameron/Clegg Coalition government has annexed the term to refer to the social liberal, One Nation Tory and civil libertarian veneer thinly stretched over their slash and burn neo-liberal policies, further devaluing the word.

Ken Livingstone is among those seeking to recapture “progressive” for the mothballed left that used to own it outright. He is hosting a big shindig of the old left at Congress House today entitled “Progressive London”, under the strapline of “protecting London, opposing Tory cuts”.

I agree almost word for word with Ken’s criticism of the Cameron government and Boris Johnson city hall. The Tory cuts bite harder on London than on many parts of the country, and already London is seeing higher transport fares, chaos for commuters due to staff shortages and mismanagement, and cuts in the number of police on the streets. Boris has defended the interests of high finance, been needlessly belligerent with transport workers, and dismissed the interests of the large number of FE and HE students in the capital who are financially affected by the cuts.

But Ken’s “Progressive London” tent presents a poor alternative.

Ken is facing two wrong directions at once. On the one hand, he has secured nomination for Labour’s candidate for London mayor, so he needs to play to the party, and so speakers include Labour local authority mayors and MPs. Local Labour parties are in an unenviable position. The Coalition cuts are allocated politically, and fall disproportionately on Labour authorities (averaging 7%, as oppose to 6% for Lib Dem councils and 5% for Tory councils). As people feel effects of reduced council services much more immediately than they feel effects of cuts in central government budgets, and the Comprehensive Spending Review asks councils to start their cutting much quicker than it asks government departments, citizens will feel resentment against the councils who will be withdrawing their services. A situation reminiscent in some ways of the Thatcher years, when Labour councils had the job of implementing the hated Tory poll tax. In these circumstances, an anti-cuts campaign that puts Labour councils at its heart has very little scope for making a difference.

On the other hand, Ken’s big tent seems to have the most room for forces outside the Labour Party and indeed on the extreme right. While the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is co-opted into a military junta that is seeking to crush working class militancy, Ken has Salma Yaqoob speaking, a representative of the Brotherhood’s UK franchise, the Muslim Association of Britain, and its electoral front, Respect. While the theocratic regime in Iran cracks down on democratic and trade union dissent in a wave of arrests and executions, Ken has Mehdi Hasan speaking, an apologist for the Ahmadinejad regime.

There’s Ismail Patel of the British Muslim Initiative and friend of Hezbollah; Intissar Ghannoushi, their speaker on Tunisia, also comes from the BMI, i.e. representing the Islamist movement in Tunisia and not the pro-democracy movement. There’s Sarah Colborne of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Bob Lambert, Moonie-funded ex-copper and apologist for Islamists. Also speaking are Kate Hudson of CND and John Haylett of the Morning Star, both members of the Communist Party of Britain, which is progressive like Joseph Stalin is progressive. We have ambassadors from Bolivia and Cuba, members of the ruling oligarchies of an authoritarian and totalitarian state respectively. We have Viva Palestina, an organisation closely tied to the fascist Hamas. And we have Lindsey German, representing Stop the War, a woman who has described organisations of the far right, like the Iraqi insurgency, Hamas and Hezbollah, as “the resistance”, and equated them with democracy, and who described gay rights as a “shibboleth” created by Zionists. There is the London correspondent of Al-Jazeera, a former PLO representative to the UN,

So, a whole host of speakers who make the word “progressive” at best a joke, at worst a swearword.

Also pertinent is the question of what these speakers have to do with London. An internationalist viewpoint is essential, and London’s radicals have always been connected to liberation struggles elsewhere (from the time of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, which closely followed the French revolution, to the South London draymen who threw the Austrian general who crushed the 1848 revolution into the river Thames, to the Reclaim the Streets activists who made common cause with the Zapatistas in the 1990s). But it seems highly imbalanced to devote such a large part of an event supposedly about “protecting London” to an eclectic collection of distant struggles.

Actually, although eclectic, the selection is not arbitrary, but reflects Ken’s pet passions, which in turn reflect the cultural code of the most cobwebbed part of the left from which he comes. Hence no representatives of Tamil resistance to Sri Lankan genocide, no representatives of Iran’s Green movement, no one speaking for the Pakistani women locked up for blasphemy, no one speaking about the horrific conflicts across Africa, no delegations from Chinese trade unions.

I’m not sure about a “progressive” London, but it seems to me that a radical London needs to take as its starting point the everyday issues that ordinary Londoners are dealing with: endless waiting lists for council housing, libraries and children’s centres being closed down, the socially divisive secondary school situation that means children are travelling miles every day, hospitals in need of sustained investment, a transport system crumbling under the weight of so many million commuters, the constant danger of terrorist attack, the degradation of our public spaces, gang and knife culture among our youth, the processes of gentrification that are driving us out of our neighbourhoods, the slow death of our pubs, the fatal funding cuts faced by our community organisations, the vulnerability of those employed in the largest sectors in the capital such as cleaning and hospitality, the growing gap between the lifestyles of the rich and poor.

Previous: Carnival of socialism; Internationalism and other left-wing ideas; Boris, Bob, Ken and social cleansing; Harryism and the Ken clique; Ken's finest moment; 2010 election analysis London.