Transcript of Ken Livingstone Interview

On 20th November 2011 Andrew Marr interviewed former London Mayor and current Labour Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone.

PLEASE NOTE "THE ANDREW MARR SHOW" MUST BE CREDITED IF ANY PART OF THIS TRANSCRIPT IS USED

ANDREW MARR:

Ken Livingstone was once dubbed "the most odious man in Britain", but that was the verdict of the Sun newspaper, so for Red Ken, it must have been a badge of honour. Few public figures have been so reviled by the press, but still hit a real popular chord; and even the victor in the last London mayoral election, Boris Johnson, praised Ken Livingstone's very considerable achievements. The old adversaries will be up against each other in next year's race for the City Hall, of course. In the meantime, Ken Livingstone's been hard at work on his memoirs. Welcome.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Greetings.

ANDREW MARR:

And substantial memoirs they are too. One thing that will surprise people is that you came from a very Conservative background family-wise, didn't you?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Well actually about a third of working class families are Tory. I mean we've always known that. And I mean I was the first person in my family ever to vote Labour. My grandmother, who was very frail at the time, my mother said, "You can't tell her. It might finish her off." I mean I had an uncle who was in Mosley's Blackshirts. The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative. Churchill was seen as the greatest living Englishman. And my parents wouldn't even buy a TV when there was only the BBC and it was state TV. They waited till ITV came along.

ANDREW MARR:

So was your conversion to the Left a reaction, do you think, against your family?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Not really. I mean I was in my late teens as the Tory government of Harold Macmillan was disintegrating, the sex scandals, the recession. Everybody you know was falling in love with Harold Wilson, the sort of Tony Blair of his day. We all thought he changed Britain for the better. So initially I just moved from sort of a Tory background to being a traditional Labour one. I only moved to the Left once I saw Wilson really …

ANDREW MARR:

Yes

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

… quite miserably fail to deliver.

ANDREW MARR:

Interesting that you didn't join any of the kind of revolutionary groups that were so popular - the Trotskyist groups and the Communist type groups and so on. You went into the Labour Party. Why was that?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Well I mean I'm very much a pragmatic person. I mean I look at what works, I'm interested in what changes you can make. I'm not really interested in debating what an ideal world would be like. I'm much more focused on can we cut the fares next year - you know things like that. That makes an impact on people's lives. Creating a master plan for a socialist utopia after a violent revolution, which I didn't think was going to happen.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes. And you weren't much impressed by the sort of student protests of the time. I'm just wondering in the …

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

(over) Well no, I w… I mean they were against the war in Vietnam and I felt very angry about that. But I wasn't a student. I'd dropped out of school, and so I always assumed you know I'd spend a lifetime working at London Zoo or something like that.

ANDREW MARR:

So what does that mean for your perspective on, for instance, the anti-capitalist protests going on at the moment? All those people camped outside St. Paul's and around the world don't seem to have an agenda in quite the old way.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

No because I mean Leftists in the past had spent years reading the works of Marx, so it was all clearly worked out. This is much more a spasm of anger. And I think they're right to be angry. We saw a couple of weeks ago that the FTSE top 100 companies, their chief executive had a 49 per cent pay increase on average.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

And then you've got the government saying well we can't afford to have the pensions that you were expecting to get, and these are only about £3,000 or £4,000. There's a deep unfairness and it's got worse over the last thirty years. Inequality has doubled in Britain and I think I grew up in a world where we assumed we would continue to get more equal, not less.

ANDREW MARR:

But there isn't a sort of … there isn't a programme, there isn't an agenda.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

No.

ANDREW MARR:

Nobody seems to have an answer to these things.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Well I think actually if you listen to Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, there's a clear answer developing there, which is about the sort of big public works programmes, and there's rumours in the press over the last couple of days that even David Cameron may have been persuaded by the Liberals to say we need to start building affordable housing again. I think the government's now recognising the strategy they started out with, you can cut your way back to growth, hasn't worked. They're looking for something else. It will never be characterised as Edward Heath's big u-turn …

ANDREW MARR:

Yes.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

… and they can't go on like this.

ANDREW MARR:

Are you nonetheless a little disappointed by the sort of … the way the Miliband brothers have turned out? You almost portray them as if they were kind of one on each knee (Livingstone laughs) and you were talking to them about the English Revolution when they were wide-eyed children. And now look at them. One's New Labour and one's the highly pragmatic Labour Leader.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

I mean I sat there with their mum and dad talking about would there be an English Revolution. I think they most probably decided I mean we were being too optimistic. No, I'm deligh… I work very closely with Ed Miliband and I think we share that same agenda. When he talked about the difference between predatory and productive capitalism, I mean I've been banging on … I've got writings going back thirty years, we need to invest more in our manufacturing. When I left school every boy in my school, two thousand boys in Brixton left school and got a job, and there were a million and a half jobs in manufacturing. Now Germany's kept that. They've still got good jobs for working class people. What we've seen is all those jobs wiped out, and I think a lot of what Cameron talks about a "broken society", he doesn't understand it's the real fact that unless you've got a university degree - and only about four in ten have - you're left behind.

ANDREW MARR:

During the paper review - you may have heard Maureen Lipman doing a very good Margaret Thatcher impersonation - we talked about the new Meryl Streep film out. What did you really make of her because one of the themes in your book is actually you get on much better with sort of ideological people on the Right than you do with a lot of members of your own party?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Well I get on with people who believe in something. Now I think Thatcher was a remarkable person because she had a core set of beliefs - all of which I think are wrong - but she drove them through a party which was quite suspicious - all the old toffs - and pushed them all aside. She changed the face of Britain - I think very much for the worse, much like Reagan did in America. And, therefore, I respect the fact she believed something, was prepared to risk her career to achieve it, but tragically it turned out to be a disaster.

ANDREW MARR:

And what about your relationships with the Labour leaders because you didn't get on well with Tony Blair, but that was nothing to the not-getting-on-wellness of your relationship with Gordon Brown, was it?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

I think just the problem was Gordon was … I mean he was … he just wouldn't meet, you know. It was a bizarre thing. Even when I became Mayor. And I got on very well with … His effective number two was Ed Balls and I did all my dealings with him and we got the funding for Crossrail and things like that; got money to expand youth provision for kids. But Brown only met me really once he became Prime Minister. And I mean we had this real problem. The very first meeting, I was able to say to him, "Well I'm afraid your partial privatisation of the underground's about to go belly up and we'll need a couple of billion", and he just said, "Ooh someone better get in touch with the office." That's the only sentence he ever uttered. But we got the two billion.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah, you got the two billion. Looking ahead and looking backwards, may I put something to you about the last mayoral election? There are all sorts of reasons you could say why you lost to Boris Johnson to do with the newspapers or to do with Labour's national standing, but isn't the truth that he watched how you had behaved - you were the sort of maverick; you were very funny; you were not getting on terribly well with the national leadership of the time; you were a character; people kind of quite enjoyed you - and he just did that better, his jokes were better?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

Oh I don't deny for one minute. I would never miss Boris Johnson on Have I Got News For You? I've sometimes almost fallen off the chair laughing.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

He tells better jokes than me. The polls are quite interesting. Polling shows he beats me on charisma 2-1. On competence, I beat him 2-1. And in the sort of times we're now in, do you want someone who makes you laugh or someone who might be able to cut the fares, get more housing built, restore the cuts in policing? I think people are getting much more concerned about someone who can run a machine rather than take off several weeks to actually write a book.

ANDREW MARR:

Hmn. And you've got … That was a crack at his last book for those who haven't spotted it. And just generally you know looking ahead, we haven't heard from you for a while, how worried are you about the economy, particularly of London but of Britain generally? We are at a very dark moment.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:

I think there's a real danger that - I think because broadly I mean Europe isn't getting its act together, America's stymied because the mad Tea Party people won't cooperate with Obama - I think there's a real chance we go into a decade of low growth. And that's why this idea that Ed Balls floated a year ago - start building housing, put people back to work - what we should immediately do I mean is revive all those school replacement schemes all ready to go, architects' drawings all ready, because you can put people back to work and then those builders spend money in local shops on goods and services.

ANDREW MARR:

Alright, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning, Ken Livingstone.

INTERVIEW ENDS

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