Tag Archives: ken livingstone

Mark Pack

Progressive London: a front to elect Ken Livingstone?

By Mark Pack | Sun 25th January 2009 - 8:54 pm

Yesterday Progressive London held a day-long conference in, appropriately enough, London. The organisation was created by Ken Livingstone following his defeat in the last London Mayor election with the stated aim of building a broad coalition of people who share progressive views and oppose Boris Johnson and his policies. (Alix wrote an excellent post earlier today on the thorny question of quite what progressive means.)

Why did Ken Livingstone found Progressive London?

Ken Livingstone himself has been keen to present the organisation as being neither a Labour front nor a front for a future bid from himself to become Mayor once again, as for example in his interview with The Guardian, timed to coincide with the conference:

The “once and future mayor,” as Livingstone has been known to describe himself, rebuts the suggestion that Progressive London is a five-syllable synonym for the Re-elect Ken campaign and his planned journey back to his natural habitat of City Hall.

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Posted in London | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

British politics and the internet: why I disagree with Seth Reznik

By Mark Pack | Fri 23rd January 2009 - 2:48 pm

Blue State Digital (BSD), one of the key firms behind Barack Obama’s campaign, is certainly an impressive outfit which gets the internet. But that makes all the more surprising the piece published today on The Guardian website by Seth Reznik about British politics and uses of the internet.

Let’s take a few quotes:

Ken Livingstone, despite his disappointing loss, was one who learnt those lessons. Working with BSD, his campaign set out a range of ways in which barriers to involvement could be torn down. Instead of hiding activist events behind password-protected firewalls, any Londoner could find information about ways to …

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Posted in London and Online politics | Also tagged and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Bright vs Livingstone, round five

By Mark Pack | Thu 24th January 2008 - 10:14 pm

Martin Bright responds to Ken Livingstone’s response to Martin Bright’s response to Ken Livingstone’s response to Martin Bright’s original trailing of his Channel 4 documentary on the New Statesman website today.

It’s a robust response, but of as much interest is the left-wing group think in many of the comments on the piece which really boils down to, ‘Hey left-winger! How dare you criticise another left-winger when there is an election a few months away?’

The question of whether or not the accusations are true doesn’t seem to matter to them, and the resignation of one aide for lying in …

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Posted in London | Also tagged | Leave a comment

As Ken and Tories go to war over London bus passes where are the LibDems?

By Martin Hoscik | Mon 11th December 2006 - 7:51 pm

This week has seen Mayor of London Ken Livingstone and Conservative Assembly Member Roger Evans trade harsh words over the policy of free bus travel for the capital’s youth.

Commenting on his blog Evans said if the eventual Tory Mayoral candidate solicited an opinion he’d recommend axing the scheme. Livingstone responded to the comments by penning an article on Comment is Free and issuing a press release.

Evans in turn wrote a rebuttal for Conservative Home and took his point of view to the wider public with a Comment is Free entry of his own.

Looking at their

…

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Posted in London and News | Also tagged and | 18 Comments
Mark Pack

Chairing a meeting, Conservative style

By Mark Pack | Fri 24th November 2006 - 10:01 am

You are chairing a public meeting with Ken Livingstone, put on to allow Londoners to question him about his job as Mayor.

Do you:

(a) Call half a dozen Tory councillors to ask questions rather than half a dozen more members of the public

(b) Not give away any indication that you know that any of Tory councillors you call to ask questions are indeed Tory councillors

(c) Both of the above.

If you’re Tory Bob Neill, the answer is (c). (And yes, they were all local Tory councillors he knows).

Hattip: Duncan Borrowman

Posted in News | Also tagged | 4 Comments
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