JOHN HUMPHRYS: Ken Livingstone, they're not going to let you be the Labour candidate are they? KEN LIVINGSTONE MP: We had two years of people saying I wasn't going to be allowed to stand and then when the electoral college was suddenly unveiled everybody realised I was going to be allowed to stand and they just created the most difficult basis on which I could win, not an easy one. But now, the way the trade unions have all decided to ballot their members, that will cancel out the weight of the MPs and it will be back to the Party members to decide. I'm happy with that. HUMPHRYS: But there are just too many of your colleagues, or former colleagues perhaps I should say, who think that you would be a disaster. LIVINGSTONE: Well of course that's not what they said at the time. You had John Carr on there saying I stand untrustworthy and awful and so on. I remember at the end of the GLC he turned to me and said 'one of the things I'm proudest of is my five years here I've never voted differently from you' and this is just politics. A lot of people in politics will go with whoever has got the power, got the patronage and so on. HUMPHRYS: But this, a lot of that stuff was quite serious wasn't it because what they are saying is you are opposed to everything that they believe in. You could not be less new Labour if you tried and it is new Labour that is in power. LIVINGSTONE: Well you see that's an interesting line, but that's bared up by facts. I've voted against the government about ten times in the three hundred votes or so that we've had. I'm opposed to cutting disability benefits, I was opposed to cutting child benefit to single mums. I support the government in '98 in ninety-nine per cent of the votes. When Gordon Brown launched his welfare to work, he used a quote from me saying it was important to get people back to work on the press release going out. HUMPHRYS: But look at what Margaret Hodge said when she was talking about the reforms to the Labour Party 'Ken is opposed..' I'm reading from what she said 'Ken has opposed every single one of the reforms that have been put through to modernise the Labour Party and create the new Labour Party which is now the new Labour Government. I mean that's true isn't it. LIVINGSTONE: Oh no, you see that's quite interesting. When it was just MPs elected the leader we fought to get it wider. Then when we got the electoral college and Neil Kinnock came along and tried to get that for the way MPs should be selected locally, I opposed that. I actually argued then eleven years ago that it would be better to have one member one vote than a lot of deals behind the scenes. I've gone beyond this now, I think the number of people involved is too small, it's too caucus ridden. I think in British politics we should have an American primary system, let every Labour voter have a say in who the Labour candidates are locally and take it out of these sort of small caucus field. small caucuses and smoke filled rooms. I want to make it wider. The more people you involve the better. HUMPHRYS: But let me just remind you what you yourself said, quoted in a book that's just been published 'I assume all that rubbish about new Labour was something Blair said just to win the election'. All that rubbish about new Labour, you haven't changed your mind have you. LIVINGSTONE: No, in the run up to the election I did not believe that we were serious about not increasing taxes and I said that absolutely clearly and I've been proved to be right. We haven't increased the top rate of tax and the standard rate of tax but we have increased a lot of other taxes, we needed to because there was a huge deficit. Now I was ridiculed at the time for saying there's a huge deficit, you've got to increase taxes but as soon as we got in we did it and we've done it with all these stealth taxes. I just think it would have been better to have honestly told the people beforehand. HUMPHRYS: Here you go again, stealth taxes, that's not the language of new Labour, they say they're not stealth taxes. LIVINGSTONE: Well they're taxes that people don't immediately see. What I am happy with... HUMPHRYS: That's what the Tory government says..Tory opposition says. LIVINGSTONE: What is important is we faced a huge deficit, people like me before the election were honesty saying you're going to have to increase taxes by about twenty billion pounds otherwise we are heading for a crisis, Labour's done it, not the way I would have liked to but these are matters of degree and timing. I want Tony Blair to get a second term. I believe if the mayoralty works it would not just be a boost for Labour getting re-elected but it could be the pattern for English devolution which answers all the problems that have been thrown up by Scottish and Welsh devolutionists. HUMPHRYS: But Tony Blair thinks it's desperately important to win and hold on to the sport of business. We heard Alan Sugar there, a very prominent businessman saying you would clobber the goodwill that has been established. SUGAR: Well I suspect some people may think that if Alan Sugar's opposed to you it's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you look at the opinion polls, every month there's a tracking poll of city opinion, two hundred and fifty top executives are asked who do you think should be mayor. I'm consistently running at twenty-five per cent nominate me as their first choice and people forget, that when I was leader of the GLC and the London business community came to me and said 'we're having a very difficult year, could you cut the rates by seven and a half per cent this year' we actually went away and did it in order to help London business. There's a lot of nonsense in the press but the relationship I actually had with business was a normal working relationship a leader has to have. HUMPHRYS: If you are as much in sympathy with new Labour as you say that you are in the big areas, would you, once - assuming you're selected - and you have your own manifesto, would you hand it over to Millbank and say 'look there you are - can you approve that for me' LIVINGSTONE: No, you've got to have the situation where the mayor will be answerable to Londoners not to some central party machine and Tony Blair.. HUMPHRYS: ..it would be a Labour mayor. LIVINGSTONE: But Tony Blair has given the country devolution. We've got to let go, you can't run it from the centre. My manifesto - there's only one major disagreement I have in the field of local government with what the government is doing. I oppose privatising, semi-privatising the tube. I do not believe it is right to given Railtrack a third of our tubelines. HUMPHRYS: Come back to that in a second if I may, but just on this question of your manifesto being approved by your own leadership. LIVINGSTONE: If I'm elected as the Labour candidate you've got to sit down and talk about what basics are going to be in the manifesto, who your deputy is going to be, how the campaign is going to be run. I wrote to Tony Blair nearly two years ago saying on all these things we should be able to sit down and come to a sensible.... HUMPHRYS: But if there's no compromise and Blair says I want it this way, what do you say? LIVINGSTONE: There will be a compromise. London Labour Party members will go out and vote, some of them for me, some of them against me. If I win all those people who are voting for me, they don't want me to be there to attack the Labour Government, they want me to run London, they want me to work with the Government, and between the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London to get a good deal for them. HUMPHRYS: Alright, but take the question of the tube, hugely important for London, I can't think of anything that's more important. They want to privatise it, you do not want to privatise it. LIVINGSTONE: And this is why, I mean when I, if I'm allowed to stand and seek the Labour nomination I'll make quite clear that is the basis on which I'm standing. And that will give London Labour Party members a chance to vote for or against on that key policy because it's the central one. Seven billion is involved, and it seems to be madness to borrow money at three times the rate you need to. If we were to issue bonds which is the way New York financed the rebuilding of their Underground we'd get money at about four-and-a-half to five-and-a-half per cent interest. If we go down the private finance initiative route it will twelve to fifteen per cent. That's an extra thousand pounds interest for every man, woman and child in London. That's a bad deal. HUMPHRYS: Right. Now all of that may or may not be true, but the fact is there is very clear conflict between you and them on a hugely important issue, on the question of the bonds for instance. You heard Nick Raynsford, the Housing Minister say in that interview that you would not have the confidence of business if you set about trying to raise a bond issue. His quote was frankly laughable. LIVINGSTONE: Well it's quite interesting because a couple of years ago we were involved, my involvement through London Zoo trying to raise forty million pounds from the City to build a major aquarium. We had no problems getting the commitment of City people to come up with forty million. Our problem was getting it out of the Millennium Commission, the other matching forty. If you actually offer a good deal the City will lend you money. The City is not ideological . They look at what the bottom line is and the Mayor has the constant stream of income from fares, the constant stream of income from the new congestion charge. There's no problem of paying the interest on that. And I just think, take a leaf out of Mrs Thatcher's book. Look at this as you would your own family budget. Who in their right mind would take out a mortgage at fifteen per cent interest when they can get it at five per cent interest. HUMPHRYS: You talk about the fares. You want a four year freeze on fares. That is the case isn't it, you want conductors on the buses, no longer the Routemaster buses that's true, but you still want conductors on buses. You'd have no money to pay for it. LIVINGSTONE: Well you do actually. You've got coming in the congestion charge which the Government is going to try first in London . HUMPHRYS: That'll take a while to start coming through. LIVINGSTONE: Well, no, it won't take a while. I mean the business community has come up with a scheme where you can do it quite quickly using the existing traffic wardens and with a paper scheme rather than wait for the ... HUMPHRYS: We're talking about year nonetheless. LIVINGSTONE: My objection would be to get that in place by the autumn of Two Thousand-and-one. You can't put that off. We have huge congestion problems. And if you get hat money there is the money to freeze the fares, to make it more attractive, make it safer with conductors back on the buses. You can't say to people as we have for the last fifteen years the rate of increasing fares in London has been twice the rate of inflation. We've now got the most expensive fares in the western world. People will not leave their car at home if they're clobbered with big fare increases every year, and even with a four year fare freeze they would still be higher than they were when the GLC was abolished. HUMPHRYS: But again, Government sources say you can't do what you want to do legislatively until Two-thousand and three at the earliest. It's a long time. LIVINGSTONE: I think they're wrong because it's not a question of legislation. The legislation will be passed next year. The question is the diligence of the Mayor in motivating the bureaucracy to get it in place, and if you take the City's work that they've done, we had all the major businesses in the City saying this is the way a congestion charge would work, instead of actually creating some new scheme, take the scheme they've drawn up, London First is the organisation, and run with that one. HUMPHRYS: How would it be, how much would it be. How much would the congestion charge be for a car? LIVINGSTONE: The charge would be five pounds a day to drive into Central London, that's the area between Park Lane and the City, between Euston Road and the River Thames. And it would be free for people living in there because you.... but it's to try and discourage people driving in. We want to get them out of their cars, and we estimate you could raise about two-hundred and fifty million pounds from that, but you also might get fifteen per cent of people leave their car at home, once again London would become living... HUMPHRYS: But you'd have an awful lot of resentment wouldn't you from the people who'd be..... LIVINGSTONE: Well hang on, think like this. This is the City and businesses arguing for this. It's not some loony left scheme that's come up from the ... HUMPHRYS: Yes, but people wouldn't like it, and that's exactly what Tony Blair would worry about. You'd make an awful lot of people think: Don't like the Labour Government, they'll associate it with the Labour Government... LIVINGSTONE: Seventy per cent of Londoners say transport is the worst problem in London. We all know you can't just go on more and more cars on the streets. If the Mayor actually raises the money that, I mean all the money that's raised from this goes into improving public transport, if you actually provide a better system you're not stopping everyone driving into London, you're just saying for some of your journeys use public transport and not the car. HUMPHRYS: Something else you want to do with money is have London taxis stay, or more of them at any rate stay in London rather than go off to Scotland for instance. You don't have the power to change that. LIVINGSTONE: This is where the Mayor's got to actually mobilise support. If the Mayor could get on board the Borough leaders, the Evening Standard, the City, saying look, London for years has put billions of pounds extra into Central Government than it gets back, now here in London we have got fourteen of the twenty most deprived Council areas in the country, we have over ninety per cent of the poorest council estates. We are not saying London shouldn't continue to put money into national need, but a bit more of it needs to be kept back to tackle the appalling poverty and unemployment. HUMPHRYS: It's another conflict with the Government, isn't it, because that isn't government policy. LIVINGSTONE: This is what regional government is going to mean..... HUMPHRYS: ....exactly, that's why Tony Blair is so worried about it, that's why he doesn't want you..... LIVINGSTONE: .... they will be going in there arguing for their corner. There is no point having regional government if the person you've elected isn't fighting for their region. That's the job of the mayor. To actually fight for London. Not to turn around and say, oh, governments having a terrible problem. People won't want a mayor if it is seen simply as a stooge of government. HUMPHRYS: And what about your wish for us to become a republic - very topical at the moment of course, the problem with that is that the monarchy and all the things that go with it and all the flummery and the trappings and the parades and everything else and the changing of the guards and God knows what bring an awful lot of tourists and an awful lot of money into London and you want to get rid of all that..... LIVINGSTONE: And I have no plans to abolish the monarchy. HUMPHRYS: Well, I am not sure even you would have that power, but do you want to...... LIVINGSTONE: I suspect the monarchy may see me out. HUMPHRYS: You reckon. LIVINGSTONE: I reckon it most certainly will. HUMPHRYS: You reckon. Alright. But you would be arguing for it still, you wouldn't dump it? LIVINGSTONE: I have always believed it is more sensible to have a republic. But this is not the immediate issue. Nobody on the streets stops me and says I am worried about having a republic. They do stop me and say you've got to do something about this congestion and pollution and the accidents. HUMPHRYS: But the point, the real point I am making, and Margaret Hodge made it in that film for Terry Dignan, you thrive on conflict, you're greatest motivating force is to promote yourself. LIVINGSTONE: No it is not true. You could not possibly have survived as five years as Leader of the GLC I did with all the dispirit factions in the Labour Party if you couldn't bring people together, if you couldn't unify them. And I really don't pay a lot of attention to people who were loyally supporting me when I had the patronage, now loyally support someone else when they got the patronage. Look at the people who switched sides, I mean, can I just one quote, Bill Bush, who was the head of my office at the GLC, he is now senior policy adviser to Tony Blair. What he said was this, "he was an astonishingly good bureaucrat, he read papers fast and got to the point. On the big issues, I don't remember him ever being bounced by officials into an ill considered decision. He got through a lot because he was good at delegating." Now I am assuming Bill Bush is giving that same advice to Tony Blair today, so I have got a fan in there. HUMPHRYS: Who knows. But be that as it may, you can't have any doubt any longer can you that they are trying to stitch you up. LIVINGSTONE: And that's politics. But they are letting me run. HUMPHRYS: Are you sure about that. LIVINGSTONE: I am sure of that. The last time I met Tony Blair he said, do not believe what you read in the papers, this is done simply to damage the Labour Party and cause disruption and bad feeling. HUMPRHYS: He's hardly going to say to you, we're trying to stitch you up Ken, would he. LIVINGSTONE: Well no, but he's also not going to look me in the eye and lie like that. And I've been saying, and you've interviewed me loads of times, for two years I have been saying, I'm sure they'll let me stand, and everyone's been saying, no, no, no, they wouldn't. The electoral college shows they are going to let me stand. They would rather have me .................... HUMPHRYS: But again, seeing an electoral college biased in favour of somebody like Frank Dobson because of the way that the votes are weighted and all the rest of it, and the other things that we have been seeing this week, the electoral lists that have become a great cause celebre during the course of the week and the letters that have gone out with labour party code numbers on them and all the rest of it. I mean, that surely must have removed any doubt that the party, at least the Downing Street end of it wants you not to be there. LIVINGSTONE: Yes, they would prefer to have Frank Dobson. I agree with all of that. I mean, none of the points you've made.....contest that. But there is a difference between wanting Frank Dobson and a British Prime Minister rigging an election in full view of the world. He has looked me in the eye - he's made it quite clear that is not going to happen and I believe him. HUMPRHYS: Could it turn Nelson's eye perhaps to what they are up to. LIVINGSTONE: No, no, this is politics. It's too late for me to complain. It can be a grubby old business. I mean, people have taken sides. The one thing I would say is this - perhaps one of the reasons I am so popular in the polls is because people see all the big-wigs do line up against you, they think actually you might be on the side of the ordinary people. HUMPHRYS: Do you want those membership lists now at this stage, because apparently they are not going to give them to you, even if you do want them, until after you have been selected, if you are allowed to run, that is. LIVINGSTONE: I think it has been a great row. I looked at the Data Protection Act. I don't think the Labour Party has broken the law, or Frank Dobson's broken the law. I think it is insensitive and it has given an impression of unfairness, but it's not illegal. And the truth is, if they had given me the lists, it's nineteen-thousand-pounds to write to every Labour Party Member in London, just the postage and printing - I've not had nineteen-thousand-pounds to write to the London Labour Party, they could have given me the list, I wouldn't be able to do much about it. HUMPHRYS: If you do manage to make it through to the next stage and you do not get the support of the constituency section of the vote, you said you wouldn't run. LIVINGSTONE: No, I think for any candidate, if they can't win a majority of the Members, their candidacy is dead in the water. HUMPHRYS: Frank Dobson said this morning he didn't believe you when you said that. LIVINGSTONE: I'll make this clear now. If the only way I got there was by overwhelming the constituency members, because they are the people who have got to go out on the doorstep and win it, and I mean, I give that commitment now, as Glenda Jackson has done. If you can't win amongst the Members, your candidacy is dead in the water. HUMPHRYS: We've seen endless stories this morning again that the selection panel is effectively the panel that's going to decide whether you are able to go through to the vote or not, whether you are able to go through to the electoral college or not, saying, that their minds are made up. There is no way they are going to let you go through Baroness Uddin who is one of the members of it who has gone public saying she didn't like you. LIVINGSTONE: Well, that's a mistake, because this is effectively a job interview. I mean, you're supposed to come with an open mind........ HUMPHRYS: Where do you think those stories are coming from? LIVINGSTONE: Well perhaps the Baroness didn't realise she's supposed to be impartial, but, I mean, I have to make a statement, and I shall lay out what I am planning to do, how I plan to work with the Party, they will question me, and I think I will be able to allay a lot of the fears that have been whipped up mainly in the media and by a few characters who have gone a bit sour in their older years. HUMPHRYS: Where do you think all of those stories, if you believe that there is not a concerted attempt to stitch you up, where are all of these stories coming from? LIVINGSTONE: There is clearly a concerted attempt to get Frank Dobson in. But what you have in the Labour Party is an awful lot of young men, overwhelmingly young men, who have joined it relatively recently, don't have any background or standing in the Party, don't understand it's culture, they prop up the bars around Westminster and they pontificate about - I can tell you what the Prime Minister wants - and Tony said to me - these people have never had five minutes alone with Tony Blair in their lives, and a lot of gullible journalists carry on buying them drinks, and I frankly don't think they should be printing this rubbish. My broad view is newspapers shouldn't print anything that somebody is not prepared to put their name to. HUMPHRYS: But if the result turns out to be that you will not be allowed to run or to enter the electoral college stage as a Labour potential candidate, you would then effectively have to leave the Labour party wouldn't you? LIVINGSTONE: No I wouldn't, I have said all along, if Frank or Glenda win this, I will back them..... HUMPHRYS: No, no that's different. I am not talking about them winning it. I am talking about who is allowed to go through to the next stage. So if they were, effectively to throw you out, so that you would then be an Independent, the Party would have left you, rather than you leaving it, to quote somebody else from many years ago, you could then, could you not, run as an Independent? LIVINGSTONE: No, I mean, if that interviewing panel bans me from standing, I shall appeal to the NEC, and mobilise a campaign to try and persuade members of the NEC, including Tony Blair, not to make this mistake. What the opinion polls all show, is that if I am the candidate against Jeffrey Archer, I might win by as much as a thirty per cent lead, i.e. the last opinion poll showed actually that Frank Dobson was behind Jeffrey Archer..... HUMPHRYS: And if you lose that? LIVINGSTONE: No, no, let me finish this point, it's important - I think the average Labour party member has their preference between Frank, me and Glenda. What they overwhelmingly want is a Labour Mayor. That's why we chose Tony Blair, because he was most likely to win the election. I just want the same logic applied to my candidacy. HUMPHRYS: Ken Livingstone, thank you very much indeed. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.