Red Metropolis by Owen Hatherley;

Author:Owen Hatherley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913462215
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rudely Interrupted

Reporting of Labour politics since 2015, with its “Momentum thugs” hell-bent on violent deselection, has made amusing reading for anyone who remembers the first London mayoral election, held in 2000. Blair and Brown desperately tried to keep Livingstone off the ballot as Labour candidate; beginning with personal bullying, they moved on to procedural obstructions, and ended with outright, open ballot-rigging, which saw Frank Dobson, a soft-left former colleague of Livingstone’s at Camden, becoming the official candidate. Livingstone stood as an independent, was duly expelled from the Labour Party, and won by a landslide — 58% of the vote. His victory speech began, “as I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted fourteen years ago”.5 Although he then proceeded to staff his office with members of the Trotskyist sectlet Socialist Action, a tiny split from the International Marxist Group, Livingstone never made any attempt — unlike George Galloway a few years later — to set up an organised alternative to Blair and Brown’s compact with neoliberalism. He lobbied consistently for re-admittance to Labour, and achieved it before he was re-elected, with an only slight fall in vote share against the boorish Tory Steven Norris, in 2004. There was, however, no return to the insurgent popular socialism that had distinguished the GLC. Livingstone was intensely conscious of how little actual power his new role entailed, something which could not have been symbolised better than in Norman Foster’s new City Hall for the mayor’s office and the Assembly. A grub-like glass form appearing like a sort of stray testicle severed from the same architect’s phallic “Gherkin” in the City, it borrowed a metaphorical transparency from Foster’s new dome added after 1989 to Berlin’s bombed-out Reichstag — the appallingly simple-minded view that being able to “see” politicians at work through glass walls amounted to a form of democratic oversight. Now rather worn, muddy and sad, the building looks like an oversized cafeteria for the office blocks of (sic) “MoreLondon” around it, and it is merely leased from their developer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.