Londoners, don't vote for Ken! (reason no. 953)

Very much a last minute job, this. Blame moving house, changing my religion etc. Plus I really thought that someone in the MSM would have a long enough memory to pick up on this one. In fact someone had done, only three years ago and thus before Colonel Gaddafi declared war on the Libyan people. It's a much. much more pertinent story today, so here it is for the record.

Once upon a time there was an exceptionally repellent totalitarian sect called the Workers Revolutionary Party. Being not only exceptionally repellent but also unusually well-funded, it was able to put out a daily paper, the Newsline. Party members were expected to devote 25 hours a day to selling this product. On a good day they would come across somebody prepared to part with money for it.

In the early Eighties it evidently dawned on the WRP that the Newsline was not reaching the masses, so they decided to try to broaden their influence by launching a "Labour" paper. And so the Labour Herald was born, a classic front organization. As well as having "Labour" in its name, it was to be fronted by a Labour editor - and no less a figure than the Leader of the Greater London Council was waiting in the wings.

Here's a sample of the paper's content. Anti-Semitic? I'm sure Ken would no more think so now than he did then.

And now I'll let Keith Dovkants of the Eve Stennit tell the rest of the story:-

'The paper was printed by a firm based in Runcorn, Cheshire, which also printed News Line and publications sponsored by the Libyan government.

'When Private Eye ran a piece claiming Ken Livingstone, then leader of the GLC, was editing a paper financed by the Libyans he successfully sued for libel. It has to be remembered that at that time Gaddafi was encouraging the assassination of his political opponents abroad and wiping them out at home. In 1984 his thugs fired on demonstrators outside the Libyan embassy in St James's Square, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher.

'Although no one doubts Gaddafi was subsidising News Line and Labour Herald there is absolutely no evidence Ken knew about it. But he did support the WRP when it published an extraordinary anti-Jewish rant in News Line.

'On 20 March 1983, BBC2 ran an investigation on its Money Programme. Its central thesis was that the WRP's newspaper, Ken's Labour Herald and other publications were being funded by Gaddafi. Looking at the transcript today one sees a thorough, rather measured, piece of journalism. The response was quite different.

'Under the heading The Zionist Connection, News Line published an editorial denouncing the Money Programme's investigation. It blamed a "powerful Zionist connection" that ran through the Labour Left, Mrs Thatcher's government, to the BBC. It cited the placing of Stuart Young, a director of the Jewish Chronicle, as chairman of the corporation and the appointment of his brother, David Young, to head the Manpower Services Commission. The Jewish Chronicle, the editorial noted, gave "support and advance publicity" to the Money Programme.

'On the day of its hysterical editorial News Line ran a piece in which Ken suggested the Money Programme report was indeed the work of Zionists. In the same piece he blamed "smears" against him on agents working for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin's government.'

So when confronted with the facts Ken preferred to endorse the WRP's theory that the Money Programme was in the grip of a Zionist conspiracy (we all know how much Zionists like their money, don't we?) rather than acknowledge that he had unwittingly taken a bloodstained tyrant's money.

Has Ken ever retracted this position? His Wikipedia entry passes over this strand of his career in silence. It wouldn't be the only case where "Sorry" has been the hardest word for him. Employing Lee Jasper still isn't a cause for regret, it seems. Sorry, but Ken's not fit to be Mayor.

Ken Livingstone: an apology

In commenting on the incident in which Ken Livingstone likened a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, I have implied (see my comment on this post) that he would not think of subjecting a black person to a comparable insult.

It has now come to my notice that I was mistaken. This is Nick Cohen in the Observer:-

'[...] Livingstone used public money to produce propaganda against Trevor Phillips, which culminated in the mayor saying that the head of the Commission for Racial Equality would 'soon be joining the BNP', a revolting insult for a white politician to throw at a black man and one that makes a nonsense of his anti-racist postures.'

I would like to apologize to the Mayor of London for any distress caused by my error.

Ken the Unrepentant

I promised more on Mayor Ken, and I just know you've been waiting with bated breath.

Well, we're still on the Oliver Feingold case, about which I blogged here and here. Pandora of the Independent suggested that he had wasted a substantial amount of public money (£198,000, to be precise) by his failure to apologize for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.

Ken's reaction in full:-

'Sir: Pandora (31 October) fails to mention that I won my High Court appeal because the judge found that I had not brought the office of Mayor into disrepute and the decision to suspend me was wrong. Mr Justice Collins found that the Adjudication Panel for England had misdirected itself. The sole reason therefore that there is now a cost to the public purse is that the Adjudication Panel launched an action against me that was proved totally without merit. Your complaint about cost should therefore be directed against the Adjudication Panel.'

(from)

Which is being interpreted, f*** off. So the mayoral lips still refuse to form the magic word 'sorry', and Oliver Feingold is still like a concentration guard. If you're Jewish and offended, f*** off. If you think that, whatever the letter of the law may say, Ken's unrepentant tailoring of personal abuse to the ethnicity of the abusee brings him and much of what he professes to stand for into disrepute, f*** off.

That 'sorry' might have enabled me to regard Ken's commissioning of a report on Islamophobia as something more than a piece of cynical vote-grabbing. Though it would still have been difficult, given that one of the report's authors is Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB. Mr Bunglawala, of course, could do a lot to counter Islamophobia by simply keeping his trap shut.

I'd still like to see Ken quizzed on the contrast between his fate and that of Councillor Miles of Wellingborough, but nobody other than yours truly seems to have picked up on it. Doesn't anybody do any research these days?

As I wrote last year, if Ken had been mayor of Berlin he'd long since have become the ex-mayor. Not because Germany is under the thumb of the Lobby, but because the country which produced concentration camp guards has managed to learn a thing or two from its history. Unlike Ken.

Rubbish plans flawed, says mayor

Thus a BBC headline. So I was a little disappointed not to find a report on a tense meeting of Ken's election campaign team. Boom, boom! OK, sorry, but please understand that Grumpy is still a child at heart. And he does have perfectly serious reasons for not trusting Ken further than he can throw him - more on that anon.

More on Mayor Ken

I'm not a betting man, but I wish I'd had money riding on the Grauniad's reaction to Ken Livingstone's suspension. So, so predictable: the great edifice of political correctness vanishes in a puff of smoke, and instantly the paper is gung-ho for the sacred right of an elected office-holder to indulge in a spot of racial abuse when he feels the urge.

Of course there's a case for seeing the Adjudication Panel for England as a typical product of New Labour control freakery. But hands up anyone who thinks the Graun would have taken up the cudgels on behalf of Councillor Miles of Wellingborough's democratic right to use the "n" word.

It's humbug but what kind of humbug, exactly? Is it about special pleading on behalf of Ken, or special pleading on behalf of anti-Semitism? As Shalom Lappin makes clear in his posting on normblog, it really comes to the same thing. We've heard ad nauseam that it is inconceivable that Ken should do or say anything anti-Semitic, since he is anti-racist to the very core of his being. I believe this is an instance of something known as essentialism, upon which the best authorities frown. It's becoming increasingly clear that anti-racism doesn't quite protect Jews in the unconditional way it protects other groups. Ken is indeed a doughty fighter against anti-Semitism - so long as the anti-Semites are the right kind of anti-Semites and the Jews are the right kind of Jews. And in this the Grauniad is clearly right behind him.

The right kind of anti-Semites are the ones who wear jackboots and swastika armbands, and not the ones who sport keffiyahs or long beards. And the right kind of Jews? Not Oliver Feingold, whose entitlement to elementary human decency is forfeit because of his employers' shameful fascist sympathies seventy years ago (support for contemporary tyrants somehow doesn't have the same impact on Ken). Not the Board of Deputies, who are not entitled to receive a simple apology. Not any Jew living in Israel, since, as Ken's honoured guest Sheikh al-Qaradawi has made abundantly clear, they are justly under sentence of death for being in the wrong place - a sentence passed by a jurisdiction which does not recognize a minimum age of legal responsibility.

But if you've proved yourself to be a Good Jew who acknowledges that Israel is the most evil state in the world, and you get any aggro from the BNP, no doubt Ken is your man.

And, as all the Grauniad pieces remind us, all this a distraction from the real issues in London. His congestion charge has been an outstanding success. If only he is allowed to get on with his job he will make the trains run on time and make a triumphant success of the Olympic Games!

Talking of which, if Mayor Wowereit of Berlin had compared a Jew to a concentration camp guard, he could have started clearing his desk on the day the story hit the newsstands. They take anti-Semitism seriously here. It's a pity they don't in London.

A tale of two bigots

On Monday the Adjudication Panel for England gave its judgement in the case of Mayor Ken Livingstone of London. It was alleged that the Mayor got into an argument with a black local government officer and her brother, in the course of which he said "shut up you fucking bunch of niggers". He denied using the "n" word, but the Panel did not accept his version of the incident and found that he had brought his office into disrepute. Accordingly he was disqualified from office for 18 months.

Of course I've made all this up. Well, no, actually I haven't. I've just changed one detail. This was the case of Councillor Miles of Wellingborough District Council. Ken got one month's suspension for comparing a Jewish journalist with a concentration camp guard.

Can we now expect to see Ken standing up for Councillor Miles' democratic right to call people niggers? And just what is it that makes Councillor Miles' outburst eighteen times more offensive than Ken's?