This week’s issue of the East London Advertiser carries a letter from George Galloway congratulating local campaigners on preventing the construction of a multi storey hospital in a densely populated part of the borough. He goes on to make a couple of correct points about the role of democratic scrutiny of planning decisions and and the need for grassroots local campaigns.
It’s the last two paragraphs that I thought were interesting on account of what they did and didn’t say.
“The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has laid down a “social” housing target of 50 per cent for new homes. That should be a minimum requirement. But Tory mayoral candidate Boris Johnson has said he would abandon Livingstone’s target.
That is one of the reasons I will be vigorously campaigning against Boris the Buffoon in the GLA elections.”
The Tory voting readership of this site is pitifully small despite my attempts to court them so we don’t need to worry about hurting anyone’s feeling. The question is, if you were not planning to vote Tory who you should vote for? George seems to be obliquely hinting that he might back Livingstone on the strength of his fifty per cent “social” housing “target”. There is also his support for the Venezuelan revolution in his favour and his opposition to the war.
Targets are the curse of modern working life and it’s not unknown for figures and statistics to be manipulated to prove that the damned things have been met. Can anyone provide any evidence of a significant number of instances where this “social” housing “target” has been met? The more general impression is that Livingstone and New Labour are more favourably disposed towards the filthy rich than they are to the people who live in squalid, overcrowded, overpriced accommodation.
Another problem with Livingstone is that he has turned into the scab’s friend, particularly when the RMT takes action. As for Venezuela, the reception he organised for Hugo Chavez has been eclipsed by his enthusiastic defence of the organisation that summarily executed Jean Charles de Menezes.
Certainly the view of supporters of Socialist Resistance is that we do not think that it is possible to support Livingstone and we will argue this view inside Respect. As things stand at the moment Lindsey German is the only likely candidate to whom we will give our support for exactly the same reasons as we did the last time she stood for election. She has consistently supported workers who take industrial action, she is willing to criticise a police force that can execute innocent people with impunity and every vote for her is a vote against Livingstone’s vision of a London fit for finance capital and tax dodging billionaires.
Liam redux 
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