The dead end of the far left

The rise and fall of Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone, left, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and Jeremy Corbyn in 1983 REX FEATURES

All the best ideas start on the fringe and move to the mainstream. From the 1870s through to the 1960s, the socialist movement raised demands that the respectable regarded as absurd. And yet the right of working-class people to vote and form trade unions and the need for a comprehensive welfare state are still with us, and their respectable critics are gone.

For most of my life, the Green movement has announced radical ideas the rest of society has had to confront, and done so with increasing urgency. As for the left? Or rather The Left, for although no one can ever define it, you know it when you see it. The Left has been undone by its support for or indulgence of dictatorships. Tyrant worship is a disease that specifically targets the British left. In the US, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren helped reinvigorate the Democrats, without shaming themselves by endorsing dictatorial movements, as so many of their British contemporaries did.

The double standards of supporting freedom at home and oppression aboard are familiar. I wrote a book about them way back when. In our time, Jeremy Corbyn’s inability to stand up to Putin and his willingness to work for the misogynist and homophobic Iranian regime did for him when he was Labour leader

A more significant figure is Ken Livingstone. Unlike Corbyn or any of his other contemporaries on the far left of the late 20^th century, Livingstone won elections and held actual power: first as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s and then as Mayor of London in the early 2000s. Now no one, or hardly anyone, wants to remember him.