Ken Livingstone

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Kenneth Robert Livingstone (born June 17, 1945) British politician; Last leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to its abolition in 1986; Labour Member of Parliament for Brent East (1987 - 2000); First elected Mayor of London (2000-present)

1 Sourced
- 1.1 Response to London bombings (7 July 2005)
- 1.2 Press conference (8 July 2005)
2 Attributed
3 Quotes of others about Livingstone
4 External links

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Sourced

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It
- Title of his 1987 autobiography.

George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics... You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president... This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.
- Public comment about the administration of US President George W. Bush (8 May 2003)

The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism.
- The Independent (18 November 2003)

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history— the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.
- Commentary in The Guardian (4 March 2005)

To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.
- The Guardian (4 March 2005)

Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the routemaster.
- In 2001 (four years before getting rid of it.)(telegraph comment)

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
- The Guardian (4 March 2005)

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims— and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments— not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.
They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong— but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.
- The Guardian (4 March 2005)

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.
- On journalist Oliver Finegold quoted in Guardian Unlimited[1] (13 December 2005)

When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot. (On 4x4s)

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Response to London bombings (7 July 2005)

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners— black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old— indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for caste, for religion or whatever.
That isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it is just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder— and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other.

Finally, I wish to speak, through you, directly to those who came to London today to take life.
I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange for taking others— that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you do fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society, and I can show you why you will fail.
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations, and even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

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Press conference (8 July 2005)

In this city 300 languages are spoken and the people that speak them live side by side in harmony.
This city typifies what I believe is the future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we share and we learn from each other.

I want finally to thank Londoners for their solidarity. There are some places in the world where such an incident would have unleashed internal strife and physical violence. London has stood together, we haven’t had any problems of the sort you might see in other parts of the world and I think it says everything about what is right about this city.

If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that “city air makes you free” and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours have come for that. This is a city that you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That, I think, is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear that freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail.

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Attributed

Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.

I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi Royal family are swinging from the lamp-posts and they've got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia.

I'd like to see him locked up in the next cell to the former Serb President Slobodan Milosevic.
- Comment about Ariel Sharon

What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.

When reporters say to me I'm only doing this because it's my job... that's the same abdication of moral responsibility at the thin end of the wedge that in its most extreme and horrific version ends up with others being prepared to stand as a concentration camp guard.

World wide capitalism kills more people everyday than Hitler did. And he was crazy.

One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.

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Quotes of others about Livingstone

He has every right to his own view but not to express it when he is mayor of this city.
- Conservative mayoral candidate Steve Norris after Livingstone's criticisms of the administration of US President George W. Bush.

First of all, I've never heard of the fellow. Second, I'm not going to dignify it with a response.
- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, in response to questions about Livingstone's comments of May 8th 2003 about the Bush administration.

We look to the left and to the right
And we need help but nobody's in sight
Where is the man that we all need
Tell him he's to come and rescue me.
- Kate Bush in the song Ken written for an episode of the British comedy series The Comic Strip Presents... "GLC: The Carnage Continues..."  (1990)