
Interview with Ken Livingstone


OE - Is it true that you would like to see a Europe-wide socialist party?
KL - Yes, because capitalism is now truly international. In the same way
that 200 years ago you actually had local trade unions and local
collections of radicals and so on who ended up forming national unions and
national political groupings, because that
 was the only way to tackle British capitalism, now that capitalism is
international you've got to have much wider links with the Labour
movement. Now a step towards generally international working class
cooperation is in the first instance getting Europe an-wide trade union
and socialist parties to make certain we control what is the economic unit
of Europe. Capital is now operating on a European basis, labour must do so
as well. OE - And in the 3rd world? KL- Yes, I see it as a step towards
that but from where we're starting the first stage comes through Europe;
then making sure that the government of Europe, when we eventually have
it, is working properly with the Third World and not exploiting them. OE -
How do we avoid exploiting the Third World? KL - We should start by just
writing off Third World debt. That's the single most important thing, the=
n
you should actually allow the Third World to have free trade with the
West. At the moment we force Third World countries to buy our finished
goods on o ur terms and we don't allow them to sell the goods they can
produce on their terms, which is basically agriculture. We have huge
tariffs. So we have this nonsense that out of our taxes we pay vast sums
to farmers to produce food which we don't use which m eans we pay through
taxes to support farmers, we also pay for more expensive food and stop the
Third World from selling us that food. So we're actually paying to
increase starvation and destitution in the Third World. We shouldn't have
this barmy system.=20
 I mean you could act; if you had an economic unit the size of Europe
throwing its weight around behind these issues you'd get somewhere.
Britain on its own can achieve nothing. In a united Europe you could
actually start arguing for international control s on the environment and
working conditions. That means you get workers in the Third World and
workers in the first world co-operating so that what we end up with is
Third World workers being lifted up to the standard of the West rather
than the Western w orkers being dragged down to Third World standards
which is the more realistic prospect that we face at the moment: an
offensive by Capital.  OE - Would you urge any controls on multinational
companies? K - It's not something I've done a study or any detailed wor=
k
on. I assume in all of these areas what we've got to get is
internationally recognised labour protection and health and safety and
environmental protection so that all these companies operate within
constraints, rather than pick on individual ones. If you tackle say
European multinationals and prevent them exploiting the Third World most
probably the American or Japanese would exploit them.=20
 OE - I recently read that one Latin American country had sold off the
future rights to its entire genetic material to an American company - do
you think this is a good or bad thing? Should they be worried?=20
 K - They could be, because early in the next century bioengineering,
genetic manipulation, will most probably be the second largest source of
global profits after information technology. And it's going to be a
tremendous concentration of power amongst th e small number of MNCs that
control genetic engineering and it will be a major struggle to see some
sort of democratic accountability about what they're doing. OE - So
there's no way to stop this thing rolling forward - controls limiting thi=
s
kind of genetic manipulation? KL - No, I'm in favour of it because then
you could breed out from the human race the tendency to produce people
like Hitler and Tebbit and Thatcher. (Laughs) I think with plants what
you're going to get is, instead of having nitrates added to the soils and
pesticides, we'll genetically engineer plant seeds so that they fix their
own nitrogen as they're growing and they're more resistant to disease.
That's t he lesser evil, saturating the world with chemicals or
genetically engineering a portion of the livestock and plant life that you
use. And then when you come to looking at ourselves I think once you've
developed the technique sufficiently - and for that we're talking well
into the next century - you face the prospect of being able to eliminate
diabetes and any other genetically-inherited diseases or problems. Given
that one child in twenty is born with a genetic defect, people are going
to pay to make sure the kids they produce haven't got that. OE - You're=
 in
favour of the development of genetic health technology? KL - Mm, there is
no difference between doing that and people like Pasteur doing work that
eventually led to antibiotics. It's too late to say we should leave
ourselves in our natural state, we aren't in our natural state. We've
changed this world out of all recognition already through selective
breeding of plants and animals and changing the environment. It's not eve=
n
recent, the Aborigines transformed Australia 10,000 years ago. OE - That'=
s
a bit like arguing for a technological fix to cure us of all the ills
we've created in this society rather than actually tackling the
fundamental problems of an industrial society - getting rid of pollution,
reducing the impact of industry. KL - If you get rid of all the pollution
people would still inherit diabetes. We should now be able to lift
ourselves above being simply the creation of random chance and natural
selection. In one sense we've already done that, most people who had any
gen etic weaknesses would've died out in pre-civilisation but we've
stopped evolution working; we no longer actually allow people who have got
diabetes and one leg shorter than another to just simply fail in the
hunting of food and all of that, and die out. Y ou've now got to develop
the mechanisms which eliminate those negative genes otherwise humankind
will become a bigger and bigger reservoir of genetic defects.  OE -
Doesn't this lock us into a high-tech industrial society? KL - What we're
talking about is some people carrying one gene which is defective which
opens up the way to disease A, B or C - it's just correcting that so that
they and their children no longer pass it on. I don't see it as a great
moral issue at all, i t's just a more complicated version of taking an
aspirin for a headache. OE - A lot of people think biotechnology is the
new version of agriculture's Green Revolution, but look what happened=
,
it just exacerbated problems of overeliance on agrochemicals, increased
pollution, and the concentration of wealth and power. KL - And this gives
us a chance to actually reduce these pollutions. There'll be problems wit=
h
it that we can't foresee but there is with every stage in progress. Peopl=
e
had exactly the same qualms about antibiotics when they started, they had
exactly the
 same qualms about breeding selectively 100s of years ago. OE - Aren't we
seeing increases in preventable diseases as a consequence of our
drug-ridden industrial lifestyle; these wouldn't exist in a more 'natural'
state? KL - No, that's a consequence of having five billion people on the
face of the planet instead of 100 million. If you have 100 million people
on the planet in happy harmony with nature doing hunter-gathering - they
don't move around, they mix with the adja cent tribe so diseases don't =
get
around. You can only go back to the idyllic world you clearly hanker after
if you're prepared to eliminate 99% of life among humans. OE - So you
don't think the planet can sustain a population of 5 billion in a
less-industrialised system? KL - Nope, I don't, and I think the more
advanced we get the more chance we have of clearing up our earlier
mistakes.  OE - Would you like to see some kind of reduction in
population? KL - Mm, most people when they have a choice want one or two
children or none. A few people want to have twelve but the majority of
people once they have the choice dramatically reduce the number of kids
they've got. So, as soon as you can actually lift u p Third World people
to some decent living conditions and education and medical help, the
population will start to stabilise and perhaps even decline. OE - What did
you think of the German Green Party's split between 'realos' and 'fundis'
- with the fundis against those who wanted to make a career in politics?
KL - I would not have been a fundamentalist and I think the use of the
term career' is derogatory and inaccurate. The fundamentalists assume
there's some route on their own. I think the realistic wing of the Green
party recognise that the way forward is a Green-Red coalition in which you
actually synthesise socialism and ecological consciousness. If the Greens
seek to create their own political party, which one day wins the majority
of votes that's fine, but the world would've been polluted to death bef=
o
re we got to that happy state. It took the Labour Party forty-five years
to get a majority in Parliament. It depresses me greatly that the Greens
are standing against me in Brent East and not against the rightwing Tory
in Brent North. You target the most reactionary, anti-environmental forces
in all parties, so you don't challenge those people who have got a good
record on environmental issues and then you aim to build a wider
coalition, and what I detect amongst my friends in the Greens is that
they're t aught party chauvinism: this terrible disease that means you
believe your party is the only answer not a broad coalition of interests.
OE - Do you think the Green Party needed its efficiency drive pushed
through by Green 2000? KL - I think they'd be better as a campaigning
group because they've got the chance and stood for Parliament, won seats
here and there but they had their chance and they threw it away. It might
be ten, twenty or thirty years before they get a chance to br eak through
again like they did at the Euro-elections, when they just weren't ready
for it. If they had the efficient party machine there in 1989 and a Tory
M.P. had dropped dead somewhere in the West Country and they could've
broken through and got their
 first green M.P. then you've got to say that they got the chance to brea=
k
through and build up and get somewhere and that hasn't been done. They ar=
e
building a party machine so that they can get two percent of the vote in
every constituency in Britain, p erhaps eventually four or five, I mean,
that's a terrible waste of their time whereas actually putting the squeez=
e
on all existing politicians means you can achieve something. Don't forget
the early socialists; a lot of them didn't think in terms of a Lab our
party that would bring them socialism. I think it was the Webbs that
argued in terms of actually winning the Tory party to socialism. A logic
of planning and intervention, you should be able to reach everyone.  I
think it's a bit optimistic thinking i n terms of winning the Tory vote t=
o
socialism, but that idea that the ideas are what's important not holding
office is the key one. Like the Labour party, you have your councils, you
have your M.P.s, balance of power, get more M.P.s, one day break through.
They're talking about committing themselves to a generation or two of wor=
k
before they see any realistic advance. It's going to be
 too late. OE - Did you like the German greens' idea of having rotating
leadership positions? KL - Well, you have a theoretical attraction. All
that I found in any large powerful organisation is you'll be bloody lucky
if you've got enough to be able to hold down the jobs and do them well;
rotating them so that an idiot gets their turn doesn't nece ssarily carry
any force. When I was leader of the G.L.C. if someone had come up with the
idea - let's have a rotating leadership every two years - I would not hav=
e
been in favour of it because I didn't trust any of the other sods there t=
o
be as progressi ve as I was going to be. Fine if you've got so many peopl=
e
of such calibre all can do the job, rotating posts, then I'm all in favou=
r
of it, but I can't really see such an idealist state of affairs being
around. OE - At a meeting in Edinburgh a year or two back you said that in
1968 you were a sort of anarchist... KL - I was in a group called
Solidarity. I'm not certain, they might even still exist. [Yes: 123
Lathom Road, London, E6] OE - You saw the movements more or less fail and
followed Rudi Dutschke's advice: "the long march through the
institutions". What do you say to the people at that meeting and elsewhere
that inevitably call this a sell out? KL - I say yah, boo, sucks, come
back and see me in twenty years when you're a merchant banker and I'm
still plugging away for socialism. This is the joy: I joined the Labour
party when I was twenty-two, I'm now forty-seven, half my life spent in
the Labo ur party, and in that time I've seen at least three waves of
young radicals appear on the scene, condemn me as a reactionary arsehole,
and then shoot out madly off to the right once they've got their degrees
and started working in the city and things li ke that you know. You get
great confidence in your ability not to be guilt-tripped by juvenile Trots
when you've sort of just seen wave after wave of this happen and you're
still there plugging away. I am a reformist and that's all you can achiev=
e
in these circumstances. I f these were pre-revolutionary times I'd most
probably be a revolutionary. You push through as much as you can get at
the present time. I'm not going to lie awake at night because some sloppy
Trot has condemned me when I know for a fact that in ten years I'll still
be fighting.  Some Trots are pretty good, a lot of people in the S.W.P.
bang away and do what they can.  OE - How much is the Labour party caught
between its traditional base and the newer more 'post-materialist'
concerns of the soft left such as the environment? KL - I think the Labour
party's a coalition between respectable working class conservatives with =
a
small c' and urban perverts like me and Labour wins when both these
groups are together. Now, much of the last fifteen years they've been at
loggerheads, b ut you can't win without both. A party that's just radic=
al
left, that doesn't understand workers fears, educate and carry them with
them ain't going to win. And equally a simple conservative working party
like John Smith's has a problem even holding a com manding lead in the
polls. In 1964/66 Wilson was the last leader to really galvanise both
strands well. The respectable working class believed he was going to make
changes. We haven't had a leader since then who's bridged both these
camps. John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy could do that in America. When
Robert Kennedy was assassinated the working class whites who'd been votin=
g
for him moved straight over and voted for Nixo n, they didn't go for the
other democrats, and so its not an easy thing to define and to articulate.
OE - The Labour party looks as if it is losing the less traditional votes
to the liberals, the Greens and people like that? KL - Yes, it's quite
interesting; there was an opinion poll in The Times the day I was kicked
off Labour's N.E.C. three years ago and they asked people who do you thin=
k
should be the leader of the Labour party and they went down a list and
there was somet hing like Kinnock, say thirty percent or forty percent,
perhaps even fifty, Hattersley about twenty percent, then Smith, Gould and
me with about ten and eight and seven percent. What was interesting was
when you look at the seven percent or whatever it wa s that wanted me to
be the leader of the Labour party, the majority of them weren't Labour
party voters. The majority of them were tories and liberals. I think there
is a desire for radical change which could easily vote for me in Brent
East or vote for P addy Ashdown in Yeovil or the Greens somewhere else.
These people, I feel, don't have a historic lifelong loyalty to one
political party; they look around. A lot of them made the mistake of
thinking Thatcher would bring change and what's interesting is th at when
the G.L.C. was at the height of its success the group which was most
dramatically swinging to Labour were the yuppies - the social class A, B,
C1. Young, white middle class people, well-off, who were attracted to the
G.L.C. I think as much to the style as anything because we seemed to be of
the future rather than old-fashioned and backward-looking and sadly
Kinnock took on board the glitz and the glamour, the advertising and the
polling methods of the G.L.C. but without the core policies which wer e
radical and forward-looking. OE - So Kinnock was the man for the
traditional groupings rather than the newer segments of support... KL - Or
urban perverts. I think that's the term that Mrs. Thatcher would perceive
us to be. We're the sort of people Mrs. Thatcher's parents warned her not
to talk to when she was a little girl; we enjoy ourselves and our bodies.
Mrs. Thatcher was brought
 up in that great English tradition that happiness was a sin and we should
suffer in this life so that you could sit at God's right hand in the next
one and sing hymns - well I'd much rather be happy in this one thank you.
OE - Do you see anything positive in what she did? K - I liked her attack
on the barristers; I liked her attacks on the C.A.P. I have to say that
out of our twelve years in government I think those are the only two
things that I agreed with her on. Everything else - I think she was a
psychopath and needed
 institutional care, not access to government. OE - Because you stand for
all these new and personal politics, would you like to see a new renamed
party, if one day you woke up and the Labour party wasn't there anymore?
KL - If you're going to ask me a hypothetical question why don't you sa=
y
wouldn't I like to create a new world - why stop at just creating a new
party? We are stuck with the world as it is, we start from here. The idea
of creating a new political party wh ich no doubt would be called the
'fruits and flakes', it's just not going to happen because you've actua=
lly
got to transform the Labour party and part of our task is educational. The
thing about Thatcher's style which was so impressive was that she never
 stopped educating, she pushed her views down everyone's throats every
minute of the day and that's part of what politics is: pounding out your
message. So often Labour gets in government and dissappears behind the
chauffeur-driven cars and drinks cupboar ds. Someone like Wilson could've
had a great fight, it would've been far easier then than it is now, he'=
d
clearly understood what was wrong with the British economy - the
domination of the City of London and all that, the high military spending
- and he d id nothing about it. And he became like so many others -
committed to perambulating around like some international circus
pretending to be a statesperson, drinking his vintage brandies and not
actually tackling the dominant economic problems. Wilson went there to be
seduced by the machine. They forget they're only there because they've
actually made a case for change.=20


