It’s been a big day in London mayoral politics. Tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme, presented by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, has levelled a number of serious allegations against Ken Livingstone, detailed here in The Guardian.
The most potentially damaging – if true – are that:
– the Mayor’s former senior adviser on Asian issues, Atma Singh, admits that while employed by the Greater London Authority with a salary paid for by taxpayers he and other mayoral advisers raised large sums of money for Ken’s 2004 re-election bid: a clear breach of local government rules barring local authority employees from working on political campaigns during office hours; and
– that many of the Mayor’s senior advisers were appointed not on their own merit, but because they are members of a Trotskyite faction called Socialist Action, plotting to turn London into a “socialist city state”.
Dispatches also examined Ken’s relationship with the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez; questioned the impact today of the congestion charge; and scrutinised Mayoral expenses run up on a trip to India.
So far, Ken’s defence has been weak, brushing aside Dispatches’ allegations by claiming the programme is a hatchet job. If it’d been made by Peter Hitchens fair enough: but Ken’ll have a harder job arguing that Martin Bright of the anti-war Statesman is part of a capitalist / Evening Standard / Channel 4 conspiracy. The Mayor’s lazy, broadbrush response has been of a piece with Ken’s campaign so far: tired, petulant and backward-looking.
Did you see Dispatches? What did you think of the programme?
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is due out next month.
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