Jonathan Derbyshire:
If Saturday's discussions are anything to go by, the movement already has a momentum that the former mayor will find it difficult to control.The principal reason for this is that the political landscape in London has been utterly transformed by the global financial crisis. The pre-eminence of the capital on the world stage, for which Livingstone claims much of the credit, depended more or less entirely on the success of the City. Livingstone's London was a deregulated city-state whose growth was driven by a combination of mass immigration and the financial services...
Among the many victims of financial meltdown, then, has been Livingstone's economic strategy for London, though you wouldn't have guessed it from listening to him rail against the iniquities financial capitalism in his set-piece speech. It took a member of the audience at a session on the global economic crisis to point to the elephant in the room, and remind everyone that Livingstone's embrace of the now-disgraced Masters of the Universe had been more or less total.
Fair comment? It's all here.
