It’s Flashback Friday. Every Friday we bring back a golden oldie article from yesteryear. A chance for you to re-read it and see if it is still relevant today!
I feel like a person must feel when they come out and admit, to themselves at least, that they are gay. Being in denial all their life, possibly even having a wife and kids, they suddenly give in and ‘come out’. So, it is not without considerable wrestling of my conscience that I ‘come out’ myself about something.
I have to tell you that for as long as I can remember I’ve disliked the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. There’s something very scary about him, and a legacy from the mad days of the Greater London Council that I can’t forgive. Unfortunately polarised and polarising dogmatic figures like Livingstone end up being voted into positions of power. Not unlike the IRA leaders who got into positions in Government. Or a guy jailed for making bombs later becoming a leader in South Africa.
To my horror, Livingstone is still Mayor and is still there, each day when I awake assuming it may well have been part of some weird dream. It never is.
So, as an anti-Livingstone man, I find it hard to come out and admit that he is very right in his latest row with a doorstepping overbearing journalist. But, there, I’ve done it.
The background is that a journalist from a newspaper he didn’t like followed him persistently asking questions. A drunken Livingstone, emerging from a party that had been thrown at taxpayer’s expense to ‘celebrate’ 10 years since another politician had ‘come out’ about being gay, got into a name calling exchange comparing the journalist hounding him to a concentration camp guard. The annoying journalist just happened to be Jewish, so as you can imagine all hell broke loose and suddenly our Ken is branded a racist. Actually, for reasons that escape me, when a person says anything against a Jewish person, they have their own special name for it, “anti-Semitic” replaces the word “racist” shared by everybody else.
Rent-a-quote mobs come out from under their stones, and suddenly Livingstone is evil and should apologise. Even the Prime Minister says so.
Livingstone has, quite rightly in my view, refused to apologise. Good on him. He obviously wasn’t being racist, it was a comment referring to the hounding he was getting from the journalist who was acting like he was Livingstone’s guard. There was no reference to the chosen religion or race of the journalist. Livingstone didn’t even know it until later.
Livingstone has stood fast. Why should he apologise when he wouldn’t mean it, he asked. Excellent. The man is being honest. I can’t argue with that at all. That’s the bit the worries me. I am now being defensive of Ken Livingstone. Good grief.
No doubt he’ll have to capitulate eventually, but let’s hope that when he does apologise he has his fingers crossed so it means nothing.
England's England 