A hammer blow to the Left in London...

After eleven years, the Tories have finally started to triangulate new Labour, gesturing leftwards (albeit without any substance) on the environment, tax and spending,and a plethora of other policy areas. To us on the left, this situation was a totally predictable situation which naturally extends from the logic of New Labour. It was bound, if allowed to carry on, to result in the hardening of a coalition built around neo-liberalism. New Labour is not as well suited, in terms of its material base, to this situation as a well-run Tory party.
Labour may have changed to accommodate the middle class and avoid the firestorm of the bourgeois press; but fundamentally, it will always rely on the votes of the working class, as long as it retains any distinctive character from the other two parties.
Livingstone, for the first time, has lost out from the same process which has blighted Labour across the rest of the country, that is the re-opening of the contradiction between working and middle class voters who congregated around a shared interest in opposing the conservatives in 1997.
The anti-Ken suburbs turned out in massive areas to remove the mayor who had deprived them of the privacy of their morning car journeys. They were fast-tracked there by Boris Johnson’s sophisticated election machine and the dominance of the Evening Standard press monopoly which, though a natural opponent of Livingstone on ideological grounds, has directed special hostility towards him since he publicly drew attention to their support for German fascism during the Finegold affair. Working class turnout was also high, but not as high as that from the suburbs. Perhaps if there was more enthusiasm for Labour generally, the situation would have been salvageable.