ON A BITTERLY cold night, several dozen London Irish, wrapped up in coats and scarves, have come to the Labour Party headquarters on Victoria Street. Over the next few hours they and others will make hundreds of calls on the phone bank, cold-calling voters around the city in search of votes for Ken Livingstone in the mayoral election in May.
The fight between Livingstone and the man who defeated him in 2008, Boris Johnson of the Conservatives, is intensifying, following a series of Christmas polls that put the Labour candidate ahead. Until then it had seemed that Johnson could look ahead with more hope than is usual for a candidate from a government party at a time of austerity.
Each candidate is now targeting core support, with Livingstone hopeful that first- and second-generation Irish voters can be brought on board. In the 1980s he had a high profile among them because of his interest, unusual then for a British politician, in matters Irish, even if he was, in some eyes, too close to Sinn Féin. At that time some of his focus on Ireland was motivated by his own needs, as he was a Labour parliamentary candidate and, later, an MP in Brent East, the constituency with the highest Irish vote in Britain.
Equally, though, many Irish immigrants, who were mainly Labour supporters and often working for the Greater London Council, which he then led, held him in high regard.
Old wounds in the community rarely heal for those with long enough memories, however, even if their numbers are declining, particularly over Livingstone’s stand on Brent Irish Centre. Then, persuaded by those who wanted the centre to be a left-wing political stronghold rather than a cultural location, he rounded on those who had made it a top performance venue for Irish acts.
In 2008 Livingstone lost the vote in the suburbs, where many of the Irish have moved, though since the new year he has launched a relentless campaign to win back support.
“Livingstone has got his nose in front since the turn of the year,” says Gerry Ryan, a Labour councillor in the southern suburb of Croydon, whose parents came from Sligo and Donegal.
Beset by questions about his age and enthusiasm for running London again, Livingstone, who is 66, is running a simplified campaign, focusing on transport and crime. Under Johnson, fares for buses and the Underground have increased sharply, leaving Livingstone able to capture the public mood in a new-year leafleting campaign in the days after the latest price rise.
So far, few can explain the rapid turnaround in Livingstone’s poll fortunes, but if it reflects voters’ disillusionment as cuts bite deeper, Johnson’s campaign will struggle.
Johnson has worked hard to boost his image with blacks and Muslims in London over the past four years, but few would argue that he has done anything similar with the Irish. Earlier polls indicate that Johnson’s work with blacks and Muslims has produced results, leaving him still with a minority share but, nevertheless, a far greater one than the Conservatives enjoy nationally.
There has been no survey of Irish opinion in the city, one in five of whose seven million people is said to claim or have some link with Ireland. Irish community leaders have long said that the 2001 census, which included a question that led many of Irish heritage not to declare their ethnicity, downplayed the numbers.
Livingstone’s head of policy, Michael Burke, whose parents came from Kilkenny and west Co Cork, accepts that they are not a homogenous voting bloc. “Overwhelmingly, it will be the same message that will be going out to all Londoners: that you will be better off under Ken,” he says.
Because of his past, Livingstone has a reach into some elements of the Irish community that is not shared by Johnson, who cut funding for London’s St Patrick’s Day parade.
Sally Mulready, who is a Labour councillor and a member of Ireland’s Council of State, says, “I would not agree with everything that he did, but, historically, we owe Ken.”
During the 1970s and 1980s the Irish in London voted solidly Labour, though the party for the most part ignored their needs as an ethnic group. Today the legacy of their political interest is reflected in voter registration figures that are higher than for many other immigrant communities in the city.
Labour’s Irish4Ken campaign is encouraging the newer wave of Irish immigrants to register to vote. “Just look at the numbers coming over. That tells you how things are in Ireland, because they are not coming to a paradise here,” says Burke, a former economist with Citibank. “Boris stands as a non-Tory. We have to pin a blue rosette on him in the public’s mind over the coming months, rather than letting him get away with the licensed spats that he has with [David] Cameron. The reality is that he is to the right of Cameron, if anything, who, at least, is prepared to go along with the 50p tax rate, even if he would like to be rid of it, too,” he says. “Boris is the man who said that £250,000 a year for a newspaper column was [chicken feed]. When you talk people through his record, they agree with us. We have to show people that record.”
But Livingstone’s greyness compared with the effervescent Johnson is a danger for the Labour campaign. “Johnson wins on the jocularity stakes. He can get away with things that no Conservative candidate would be able to get away with,” says Ryan.
