Ken Livingstone has lauched Progressive London, a ‘coalition… to promote progressive policies in the city’.
With a logo which echoes Mr Livingstone’s previous “LondON” branding, and with a hint of his independent-purple colour scheme, the organisation has a distinctly leftish tinge. So what is it for?
MayorWatch reports that “the coalition is expected to campaign against Mayor Johnson’s recently announced above-inflation fare increase.” So, it’s a campaigning body, right?
However, not all on the left are happy - Workers Liberty call it “quite transparently a vehicle for Ken Livingstone to return to City Hall in 2012″ and then go on to castigate Mr Livingstone’s convenient memory-loss over his own above-inflation fare increases.
Mr Livingstone has stated that he’d like to return to his old job in the past. Is Workers Liberty correct to assert that this enterprise is his poorly-disguised Trojan horse?Until Progressive London do more, it’s going to be hard to tell.
Perhaps Mr Livingstone himself is unsure - this could be his swan-song: creating a leftish coalition for the capital in order to combat the blueish tinge which currently covers local government. His legacy would be a new candidate, built from the grassroots, and a prize for himself as the grand old man of London politics. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking.
Your thoughts?
UPDATE: Andrew Gilligan writes eloquently on Progressive London and what it means for the capital here.
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