Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone (born June 17, 1945, Lambeth, London, England) is a British politician, who made constitutional history on May 4, 2000, when he was elected mayor of London—the first time that British voters had directly elected a candidate to an executive office at any level of government. He served as mayor until May 2008.

Livingstone was born in Lambeth, an inner London borough. He left school at age 17 and started work as a laboratory technician. By his early 20s he was an active Labour Party member. He was elected to the Lambeth Borough Council in 1971 and to the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. Between 1977 and 1981, when the GLC was run by members of the Conservative Party, Livingstone led a left-wing faction within Labour’s group in the GLC. In the GLC elections of May 1981, Labour won a majority. Livingstone immediately challenged the party’s moderate GLC leader, Andrew McIntosh, who had led the party to victory. Backed by a majority of Labour GLC councillors, Livingstone took over the running of the council.

Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s Conservative prime minister, was appalled by the left-wing domination of a number of cities, including London. She took action when Livingstone, popularly dubbed “Red Ken,” sought to intervene in national controversies (for example, by inviting to London leading members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing). Thatcher abolished the big metropolitan councils, including the GLC. She achieved her goal in 1986 but at the price of turning Livingstone into a political martyr.

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Livingstone entered the House of Commons in 1987 as the Labour MP for the northwest London seat of Brent East, but he was shunned by successive Labour leaders because of his left-wing views. His chance to reclaim real power came after 1997, when the incoming Labour government redeemed its pledge to restore a citywide authority to London. This time the government decided to establish a directly elected mayor. Although Livingstone was the preferred choice of 60 percent of Labour Party members in London, he lost the mayoral primary contest to Frank Dobson, who enjoyed the backing of most London Labour MPs and trade union officials who, together, commanded two-thirds of the party’s electoral college. Condemning the result as a fix, Livingstone left the party, stood as an independent, and won a convincing victory. He gained support from voters across the political spectrum by describing himself as a “London nationalist,” rather than a left-wing socialist, and by promising to work closely with his political rivals and with London’s business community.

The highlight of Livingstone’s first term was a controversial fee-based traffic management plan that was designed to reduce congestion in central London. While critics decried the scheme as simply another tax, an increase in commercial traffic and a booming city economy earned Livingstone praise from business groups. He was readmitted to the Labour Party in 2004 and was reelected mayor later that year. Even his detractors applauded his leadership in both the successful campaign to secure the 2012 Olympic Games for London and his response to the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on the city’s transit system. In 2006 Livingstone was suspended for a month after comparing a reporter to a concentration camp guard; he later successfully appealed the decision to the High Court. In the 2008 elections he was defeated in his bid for a third term as mayor by Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party. Livingstone challenged Johnson again in the 2012 mayoral election, but he came up short after an acrimonious campaign between the two “big personalities” that the British media dubbed “The Boris and Ken Show.”

Livingstone was back in the headlines in April 2016 when he was suspended from the Labour Party for “bringing the party into disrepute” with remarks he made in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Livingstone’s comments were in response to the earlier suspension of another party member for having posted a message on social media that seemed to support a plan to transport Israelis to the United States. Livingstone was taken to task for claiming that he had never heard any Labour Party member make any antisemitic remarks and for his statement that Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler had initially proposed that Jews be sent to Israel, which prompted prominent Labour MP John Mann to brand Livingstone a Nazi apologist. Livingstone’s suspension was extended for an additional 12 months in April 2017, and an intraparty review of the case was scheduled to be concluded by July 2018. Although he was a longtime friend and ally of Livingstone, by spring 2018 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was under increasing pressure from within the party to expel the former London mayor. In May 2018, while continuing to deny that he had exhibited antisemitism or brought disrepute to the party, Livingstone announced his resignation from the Labour Party.