On 11 May former London mayor Ken Livingstone told the Daily Express that the coming Labour leadership contest would offer "a clear choice between left and right", and classified Ed Miliband and Ed Balls as the possible "left" candidates.
Speaking at a "Next Steps for Labour" meeting on 17 May in London, however, Livingstone spent much of his time rubbishing the younger Miliband.
He pointed out that Ed Miliband's story about New Labour having "lost its way" glossed over the toxic suppression of Labour Party democracy and aggressive disdain for the unions in the early Blair years after 1994.
Livingstone is still "chameleon Ken". As usual, he sought to disarm critics by sheer effrontery, saying of the current London mayor, Tory Boris Johnson: "No-one is as cynical as Boris. He makes even me look like an innocent".
Livingstone's latest sidestep into "Red Ken" mode may thus signify that he perceives a more left-wing mood in Labour circles. Let us hope so.
The meeting was sponsored by the group Livingstone has set up to prepare his next contest for mayor of London, "Progressive London"; by the magazine Tribune; and by the post and telecom union CWU. Besides Livingstone, the platform included CWU general secretary Billy Hayes; MPs Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy; New Statesman editor Mehdi Hasan; and Tribune editor Chris McLaughlin.
The meeting room was packed out - standing room only, and not much of that - with something over 150 people.
It was a younger crowd than in some far-left and union meetings these days. It was not as young as the 200-strong Compass "after-the-election" meeting last week, where, so I'm told, the average age was around 30.
On the other hand, it was more plebeian than the Compass event, where apparently the typical participant seemed to be an MP's political researcher, a think-tank employee, or an NGO apparatchik.
At the Livingstone meeting, many of the speakers from the floor announced themselves as Labour councillors or as union officials (including the regional secretaries of both Unison and Unite, Linda Perks and Steve Hart, both of whose contributions were bland).
I noticed no rank-and-file CWU members there, despite the CWU sponsoring the event and CWU general secretary Billy Hayes being on the platform. Livingstone's terminology was revealing when he called for a restoration of Labour Party conference as a "parliament of the working class and middle class". But Hayes and Tribune editor Chris McLaughlin got a warm response when they called for defence and restoration of the trade-union role in the Labour Party.
McLaughlin attacked Compass - as he has done in a recent Tribune article - as working towards an end of the trade-union link.
The meeting organisers were trying to stake out a position in the Labour Party clearly to the left of Compass or Ed Miliband or Ed Balls, yet by no means unequivocally working-class or socialist.
The chief practical demand from the meeting was for a long rather than a short timetable for the Labour leadership election. That demand has been granted.
The platform speakers did not name any Labour leadership candidate as deserving support, and no-one defended Ed Miliband from Ken Livingstone's criticisms. No-one mentioned John McDonnell.
Themes in the platform speeches which won applause included:
- Opposition to British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan;
- Defence of civil liberties;
- Opposition to anti-immigration demagogy;
- Calls for more social housing;
- Attacks on "New Labour";
- Attacks on "neo-liberalism".
Livingstone's denunciation of Blair's restructuring of the Labour Party after 1994, and his call for democracy in the Labour Party, was the clearest and most trenchant note in the platform speeches, but stopped short of precise demands or campaign proposals.
Hayes also spoke about fighing the coming public service cuts, and about the defence of unions' right to fund political parties. That right is likely to be under threat if the Lib-Con government takes up the proposals from the Hayden Phillips report commissioned by the New Labour government.
The term "socialist", or any synonym, was not used from the platform, and synonyms for "working class" were not much used. Issues not mentioned in the platform speakers' attacks on the New Labour record were privatisation, PFI, anti-union laws, tuition fees, SATs, and Academies.
Platform speakers praised the New Labour government for rescuing "the economy" by bailing out the banks in 2008, rather than censuring it for handing over billions to the bankers without taking effective democratic public control of high finance.
The meeting organisers, however, seemed to feel themselves both buoyed up by, and anxious to capitalise on, a mood in the Labour Party and the unions in favour of democratisation and a visible if not yet clearly defined shift to the left on policy. Socialists should also tap into that mood.
