Spare us Citizen Ken's dodgy new comrades

Published in the Evening Standard September 14 2006

You've got to hand it to Ken. No one can do a political stunt better. Tony Blair used to command his aides to find an 'eye-catching initiative,' but he was asking the wrong people. He should have called the mayor of London, who can dream up wheezes to make both your eyes pop out on storks.

The latest is the 'oil for brooms' deal, still in negotiation, with the lion of Latin America, the new Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez. Under the plan, Londoners would benefit from Venezuela's cheap oil while the poor of Caracas would be treated to London's wisdom on everything from rubbish collection to CCTV. The deal's not done yet, but it should be signed and sealed by Christmas.

It's not your usual international transaction. For one thing, there won't be any physical transfer of oil - no pipeline from Latin America to the Thames - but rather a trade-off, whereby regular UK suppliers would provide the black stuff to London, and then receive the equivalent amount from the state energy company of Venezuela. Ken would use this cheaper fuel on London's buses, especially, we're told, those that run in the capital's poorest areas. The saving might even allow him to give free Oyster cards to London's least affluent travellers, so insulating them from the coming wave of cash fare rises.

What's more, there need not be any transfer of money. This will be a
barter arrangement: for every barrel Chavez gives us, we'll give him a masterclass in social housing or wheelie bins. That's not new to Chavez: he already runs an oil-for-doctors swap with Cuba.

But what makes the London arrangement so unusual is that Venezuela's
partner will not be another nation-state, but a city. Ken Livingstone used to be mocked for trying to run his own foreign policy at the Greater London Council: how silly, they chortled, to declare the capital a nuclear free zone! Yet here he is, two decades later, signing a bilateral agreement with a foreign government.

Should we welcome it? The Tories are up in arms, suddenly concerned with the plight of the Venezuelan poor who, they say, will lose out if their most crucial national asset is "siphoned off" and given away cheap to a prosperous city like London. The Lib Dems insist we should be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, not buying them at knockdown prices from Latin America. To which Ken replies that, since, for the moment, London's buses run on petrol, he's right to seek the lowest possible prices. Anyway, the mayor is no slouch on green matters. From the congestion charge on, he is doing more than most politicians to make a change.

Even so, there is something troubling about this move. First, Chavez may be a hero to the same international left which still lionises Fidel Castro, but his human rights record is deeply suspect. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused the Venezuelan government of gagging critics with the threat of prosecution, while Amnesty says Chavez has failed to end the decades-old brutality of the country's security forces. Many among the millions who signed a 2004 petition seeking Chavez's removal from office testify that they have since been denied employment and been subject to discrimination, their names etched onto 'la lista' - a dreaded enemies' list.

Ken's people are not too fazed by that, arguing that if Chavez really was the Latin American dictator of cliche, those who plotted an attempted coup against him in 2002 would no longer be at large but would have 'disappeared.' Besides, they say, he is doing "inspiring" work, bringing basic shelter, education and medicine to the most deprived shantytowns of Caracas.

All of which makes Chavez just the kind of guy whose face belongs on a Ken T-shirt. The Venezuelan would have appealed to the Ken of old, too - the Red Ken who saw himself as part of the great international socialist struggle. These days, the mayor has less opportunity to dress up in that outfit: he has to stay loyal to Tony Blair, he has to be a responsible chief executive, he has to win the trust of the City and the admiration of business, he has to keep in with the big property developers. All of which he has done remarkably well.

It's only on foreign policy that the mayor gets the chance to strike some of the old, leftist poses. I am sure that the folk at City Hall are sincere in their admiration for Chavez's social reforms - but they also love that El Presidente styles himself as George W Bush's great Latin nemesis. Standing next to him gives the Livingstone circle a rush of ideological blood.

The less forgivable example is the relationship with Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric still hailed by Livingstone as the voice of moderate Islam - yet who recently added to his earlier positions condoning wife-beating and the stoning of homosexuals with a declaration that today's Jews bear responsibility for the death of Jesus. The mayor likes Qaradawi's tough line on Israel - the sheikh supports suicide bombings against Israeli civilians - so he ends up hugging a man who bends Islamic theology to take on the vilest tropes of Christian antisemitism.

Most of the time none of this seems to matter. Ken is doing a good job running London and most Londoners probably reckon that if he indulges himself on international politics every now and then, no real harm is done. But London will be under an unforgiving spotlight from now until 2012. And it won't help this city if, each time the mayor wins new friends in Caracas and Cairo, he alienates others somewhere else. Ken Livingstone needs to remember that he's not just a political partisan anymore, waving placards at a demo. He has to represent the people of this city, all of them - not just to a roster of his ideological heroes, but to the entire world.

Posted on September 14, 2006 10:37 AM

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