Within the last hour Ken Livingstone’s campaign team sent out a further rallying e-mail, calling on people to back him to take on Boris Johnson and the Tories:
One week ago Boris Johnson confirmed that he will run again. His interview on Andrew Marr’s BBC programme last weekend shows what’s at stake. He said of the government’s cuts: “They’re absolutely right to make cuts and you know we in the government in London have been making you know very substantial cuts for the last two years.”
He campaigned to get the Tories into Downing Street. His cuts are the government’s cuts. In the coming days we will keep up the pressure on Boris Johnson and his colleagues in government because the cuts, privatisation and higher fares they stand for are a big backward step for Londoners.
I hope, if you have not done so already, you’ll use your vote for a serious, united, energetic campaign for 2012 that aims to be a key part of the vital alternative we need. Please vote online to be sure your vote is in time.
The key messages from Ken are the need to oppose the Tories, and unite the labour movement, and wider progressive opinion, into a campaign that can do so. There has been a remarkable contrast between his purposeful and anti-Tory campaign to gain the Labour nomination, and the frothy and divisive campaign that Oona King has conducted, which has seemed more at home criticising Ken than Boris.
But the indictations are that Oona King’s campaign team have tidied their desks and gone home early. Her campaign manager Matt Cooke is tweeting from the David Miliband phonebank – apparently not feeling the urgency to phone for Oona. If her own campaign manager isn’t out there getting the vote for Oona, then is anyone?
