And at this point Citizen Ken brings on the reptiles. Everyone who can read a paper knows that he keeps lizards and salamanders; given the sort of press he gets, millions probably think he uses them to enrich the cauldrons of lesbian separatist covens dancing on Peckham Rye. In fact, he uses them not for food but for thought. Some lizards, he explained to Carvel in the second part of this immortal conversation, reproduce by parthenogenesis – females reproducing themselves without male involvement. (First the Russians discovered such a lizard. The Americans denounced it as a fraud until they discovered one of their own. ‘So it’s now established that the superpower blocs have parthenogenic lizard parity,’ says Livingstone.)
He sees an analogy here with his view of human development. The lizards who developed parthenogenesis at once collected an enormous short-term advantage: by avoiding all the dangers and uncertainties of sexual reproduction, they solved the problem of keeping the species going. But in the long term, the solution must lead to extinction. The gene pool is not mixed, healthy mutation and adaptation cease, and a population of identical, mindless little creatures without an original idea or physical variation among them will be easily wiped out by some catastrophe.
It is not difficult to see what the chairman of the GLC is getting at. On that cursed day when hunters first broke the soil and threw seed into it, the human race began a parthenogenic leap forward: all the variations and mutations of social relationships were abandoned for the gigantic increase of security and population that agriculture guaranteed. Society lost the capacity to adapt, locking itself into one mould of greed and competition. ‘We may be just trundling along on a dead end which suddenly cuts off the whole of the human race very violently and rapidly.’ Unrestricted population growth, or pollution, are as likely to bring humanity to that dead end as nuclear war.
And is there no way back? John Carvel inquires. No way back to the state of nature and the pursuit of berries and tubers, the chairman implacably returns. But by establishing little islets of non-competitive association, rafts of co-operative production on the capitalist sea, a start can be made on restoring society’s capacity to mutate and adapt. With the help and subsidy of GLEB (Greater London Enterprise Board), humanity can begin retracing the wrong turning taken by the Neolithic revolution.
All this will reduce many archaeologists, many professors of anthropology, probably many GLC ratepayers, to speechless fury. Hunter-gatherers? Lizards? Thoughts like these, even the affectionate John Carvel concedes, ‘in the atmosphere of workaday politics … sound positively loopy’. So much the worse for workaday politics. Ken Livingstone is a Utopian socialist, a man who does not fit most of the categories crammed round his neck by the media. He is anything but a Trotskyist, although he will gladly use small Trot groups for support when it suits his tactics. He is not a working-class politician formed by poverty, but neither – as Carvel points out – is he a ‘paperback Marxist’ from a ‘lumpen polytechnic’. He had no real higher education, and his grasp of theory, as the hunter-gatherer-parthenogenesis hypothesis shows, is wonderfully sketchy and personal. In most ways, he is more of a classical anarchist than a Marxist. His style is to work through a constantly changing series of caucuses, cabals and temporary alliances; one of the reasons why the Parliamentary Labour Party hates him so fervently is that Livingstone dislikes the discipline of permanent political structures, even though he still seems anxious to enter the House of Commons. If there is anyone in European politics whom he resembles, it is Erhard Eppler, the veteran Social Democrat in West Germany, an infinitely graver and more consistent thinker who nonetheless commands a similar coalition of leftists, life-stylers, Green-minded socialists and nuclear disarmers, whose outlook is also pessimistic and who was the first in his party to welcome the ‘end of growth’ and put forward a sweeping reform programme which did not amount to the mere redistribution of capitalist surplus in years of expansion.
Ken Livingstone complains that the society he lives in has almost killed off the capacity for social ‘mutation’. But, as a matter of fact, he himself is a mutation. Citizen Ken is one of the first known examples of a new strain of politician entirely resistant to all known forms of media poison. The last ten years have brought campaigns against the personal and public lives of selected left-wing politicians of a viciousness scarcely seen in Britain since the Victorian period, but none of these campaigns – not even that against Arthur Scargill – acquired the intensity of the hounding of Livingstone. Scargill and Benn, of an older generation, have developed signs of paranoia under this treatment; Tatchell was nearly destroyed by it. But Livingstone actually feeds on pesticide. The more hysterical the abuse, the more provocative he becomes. The quotes about the IRA, the Royal Wedding, gay rights and black pride continue to flow; his wretched Labour group on the GLC have often paid the price, pockmarked by the shower of missiles aimed at their leader and obliged to watch many of their most ‘popular’ measures obliterated from view by the latest scandal over ‘Red Ken’ and his big mouth. Meanwhile, Livingstone himself was turning the publicity steadily to his own advantage, emerging as a skilled, unflappable and charming radio and television panellist and interviewee. Increasingly, his case has been heard, and Londoners have developed for him both affection and some respect. Carvel observes that ‘Livingstone’s crucifixion in the media formed the basis of his subsequent political strength and popularity.’
Most of this book, naturally enough, is about local government and London politics. Livingstone was welcomed to power with the headline ‘Red Ken Crowned King of London’. John Carvel shows what a mockery those words were and are. Britain is the most over-centralised state in the Western world, in which local authorities have always been tightly hobbled, and today the Government – through ‘rate-capping’, through the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties – is engaged on reducing that slight room for manoeuvre even further. Political prejudice against Labour-dominated authorities plays its part, but the real situation is little short of a creeping nationalisation of local government by Whitehall – by the Treasury in particular. The Daily Express last year published a cartoon showing ‘Red Ken’ digging the grave of democracy, but the whole bizarre, impudent, exhilarating history of his administration at County Hall shows that he and his colleagues have been trying to give local democracy the kiss of life on what appears to be its deathbed. The sullen, morose sea of overcrowded humanity that is London has never been encouraged to develop a sense of active community. Who, after all, is remembered as a leader of London? Dick Whittington, perhaps Herbert Morrison. Ken Livingstone has dealt mostly in symbolic politics – there was little else left to deal in – but he will be remembered as the man who gave Londoners their only revelation of common identity since Marshal Goering abandoned the Blitz. He could not be a giant-killer, but he made fools of the giants. Michael Heseltine, as Secretary for the Environment, bungled the legislation to cut the GLC’s revenue. The judiciary made imbeciles of themselves in their eagerness to crush the cheap fares policy by pronouncing, in effect, that all forms of subsidy were a misuse of ratepayers’ money. The onslaught by the gutter press made Citizen Ken into a folk-hero. Mrs Thatcher, in her eagerness to suppress him and to destroy what remains of local authority freedom, has deeply offended the Conservative conscience in a way which may well contribute to her fall.
Ken Livingstone has also been lucky. Like many obsessive manipulators, he has almost come unstuck on many occasions, saved usually by the blunders of his enemies. He was rescued from taking the consequences of the appalling financial muddle which had developed at the GLC after his first six months as leader only by the surge of sympathy after the judges condemned the fare cuts. The Labour group might well have unloaded him for his ‘they are not criminals or lunatics’ remark about the IRA bombers, and for his invitation to Sinn Fein to visit County Hall, if the Home Secretary had not changed the focus of the uproar by ‘excluding’ the two Sinn Fein MPs from the British mainland. He declared that Labour would stay in offi
ce and simply refuse to raise transport fares after the law lords’ judgment, and was saved from a terminal collision with the law by the mess the Tory GLC opposition made of the crucial debate. And luck has repeatedly frustrated his deplorable hankering to get into Parliament: he was only narrowly defeated at Hampstead, and although he was winning the murderous guerrilla faction war for the nomination at Brent East in 1983, Mrs Thatcher called the election before the sitting MP, Reg Freeson, was finally ‘deselected’. Why Ken Livingstone wants to enter the House remains a mystery. The place is full of ageing gadflies who achieve nothing beyond turning the Speaker’s face purple, and who lack the delicious power to do things like cover London with nuclear-free zone notices and witty posters at the ratepayers’ expense.
He is no administrator and, really, no hero. He has a cheerful super-rat gift for dodging upwards through chinks in situations. He is a shameless carpet-bagger and opportunist with a gift for bringing together coalitions of people who all slightly suspect him for different reasons but find his flair irresistible (in this, he has something in common with Lech Walesa, whom he probably regards as a clerical fascist). As a schoolboy, taught at Tulse Hill Comprehensive by the expansive Philip Hobsbaum, he became, in his own words, what he was to remain: ‘an argumentative, cheeky little brat.’ John Carvel, who obviously admires him, often seems in this book to shake his head with exasperation over the chances Ken takes with his reputation. And yet, if the GLC is to die, Ken Livingstone has ensured as the last leader of Greater London that it will perish in a display of vigour, ideas, experiments and sheer entertainment that dims any Lord Mayor’s fireworks on the Thames. It may be because he has such a passion for the Irish – seeing them perhaps as hunter-gatherers in arms – that he has turned a sober funeral of democracy into a spectacular wake.
[1984
A review of ‘Citizen Ken’ by John Carvel (Chatto, London, 1984).
The Great Cash-In
Under the surface of London, there are strange tremors. Something is rising to the surface, and when it bursts through it will – so I begin to believe – create a new and almost unrecognisable type of urban society. It will shatter our expectations about social progress, and eventually threaten the whole management of the British economy. That something is middle-class money.
A few months ago, I wrote about the way that London was ceasing, to be a city with a large, organised factory proletariat and reverting towards a capital in which a huge, underemployed plebs or ‘people’ works to service a wealthy minority. Since then, it has become clear that the coming changes may be far more dramatic and frightening. What I didn’t see was quite how wealthy the minority would be.
This theory starts with something now familiar: the price of private housing in central London. Ever since about 1970, the value of this housing stock – above all old, ‘gentrified’ and renovated houses – has been rising steeply. So far this year alone, the prices of second-hand houses in the central area have gone up by around 20 per cent, although in other parts of Britain the value of all private housing has scarcely kept pace with inflation or even dropped below it. One colleague lives in a one-bedroom, third-floor flat in Paddington which cost him £60,000 some 18 months ago and can now be sold for £80,000.
Until now, there has been a habit of regarding these colossal values as ‘fairy money.’ If you have to pay as much or more to buy another when you sell a flat or house (unless you move to the provinces), then its effect on your bank account is slight. But this may be about to change – a thought I owe to Michael Elliott of the Economist, who is writing a book about it.
For cashing-in time is coming. It’s a matter of time and generations. James and Lavinia Yupsley, journalists in their late twenties, are living in a mortgaged house in Islington worth £120,000. His father Daniel Yupsley, a successful solicitor, and his wife Vanessa are living in a paid-off flat worth much more. Just possibly, old Bill Yupsley, James’s grandfather, is living in yet another inflated-value house, having decided not to retire to the country after his career as a smart dentist. All this may also be true of Lavinia’s family.
Now the older occupiers of ‘fairy money’ houses and flats are beginning to die. Their heirs do not need the property left to them, and will sell it. What this means is that in the next decade or so the upward-mobile middle and professional classes of London will acquire staggering reserves of liquid cash. Even after current mortgages and tax are paid off, the possession of £500,000 spending money will become common. On television’s ‘London Programme’ this month, an estate agent boasted: ‘You can’t get very much for a million pounds in central London these days … a fairly ordinary four or five bedroom family house is about £850,000.’
The inward migration of professional talent and ambition to London will go on, so that – unless the economy suddenly collapses – the private housing demand will be maintained. At the same time, the outward migration of working-class Londoners will continue, keeping up the supply of housing to be ‘privatised’ or improved.
This is very big money. How will it be spent? For spent it will be: savings and investments will absorb only a fraction of it. Country houses, villas on the Mediterranean, yachts will take up some of the new wealth. But the social profile of London will be transformed, as there arises a minority equipped with a purchasing power comparable only to that of the Kensington Arabs, whose standard of living will be out of all imaginable proportion to that of the majority of the city’s population. This will mean a return to degrees of inequality unknown in Britain for a hundred years.
A segregation as blatant as that of apartheid is approaching, founded on inequality of wealth but built up into an entirely separate way of life in separate institutions. This segregation is already beginning, growing out of the traditional division of London classes by urban areas.
Take education, for example. Twenty years ago, the liberal middle class of London sent children through the whole state system. By the late 1970s, there was an embarrassed consensus that comprehensives ‘weren’t good enough yet’, but state primary schools remained acceptable. Today, the same group not only assumes that comprehensive schools are unthinkable, but is beginning to pay hundreds of pounds a term for private primary education at new day schools in central London.
With the new wealth, this simply means that a large hereditary caste with its own culture will regain the monopoly of power once enjoyed by the products of the public schools. The period when class barriers seemed to be crumbling and growing permeable will appear as a brief reversal of the normal trend, a 20-year blip in the history of class in England.
But this development converges with the other process I mentioned at the outset: the transformation of the London working class. As Ken Livingstone saw, Labour’s vision of London is out of date. The big-factory epoch of the city is almost over (it lasted for only 40 or 50 years), and the great union-organised workforces of the past have disintegrated. Londoners are reverting to older patterns of employment: trading, small crafts, a multitude of transient jobs that add up to servicing the main possessors and generators of wealth themselves. In this way, too, London is travelling backwards through time towards a relationship between wealth and labour that is almost pre-capitalist.
Stripped of big words, what does this mean? Among other things, the return of servants. Not living in, like ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’: there isn’t room for that. But commuter servants, as in Johannesburg, who catch a 5 a.m. train in a distant suburb to wear maid’s uniform or even butler’s livery all day. On another page today, Michael Dineen quotes a brochure for a Bayswater apartment block illustrated with the picture of a pretty Victorian tweeny, all white lace and black bombazine.’
It means a huge service and craft population, making clothes and cutlery, furniture and designer rugs for the rich, mending their electronics and guarding their homes. It means a capital city not unlike the pattern of eighteenth-century Paris, where almost all employment depended on the needs of the Court and the thousands of
privileged royal functionaries around it.
Once again, outrageous wealth will be justified because it ‘keeps people in work.’ It will also keep them in a squalid new servitude, as the public transport, health and education of the capital rot away – not least, for lack of rented accommodation for those who should run them.
This New Class of the capital would tower over the rest of Britain, distorting its whole development. In the end, its power would not be tolerable. Perhaps the provinces would challenge it. Perhaps the Londoners themselves. Cabinet-makers, coachmen, lawyers’ clerks make the bloodiest revolutions, not orderly factory workers.
There are bad dreams here. Let the new money flood London: for a time, it would be Ben Jonson’s ‘Fleshfly, summer is with thee now!’ But then a very hard wind would rise.
[1986
Capital
Coming back from anywhere to London depresses me. Coming back from the contented provincial splendour of Lyons makes for specially gloomy reflections. Etymologically, they are the same place: Lugdunum and Londinium both denote the ‘dun’ (stronghold) of the Celtic god Lugh – who is dimly remembered here as King Lud, as in Ludgate Hill.1 Lyons in 1987, however, is on the way up, whereas London is all too squalidly on its way down.
In the Roman centuries, temples and imperial palaces covered the slopes and summits of the Fourviére hill. The villas of the rich and powerful can be located, but where the common people lived, the potters and bakers and those who cleaned the marble plazas with mop and bucket, is not at all clear. Models of ancient Lyons, showing the stone but not the clay and thatch, strike me as an extreme, mad projection of how the capital city of the British state may end up.
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