Ken Livingstone's Opposition to Thatcher is Based on Double Standards

Ken Livingstone's spleen against Thatcher is hypocritical given that he is on record as greasing up to China, to get more capital into London, by making an odious comparison with the Poll Tax Riots of 1990 with the Tianamen Square protests against a one party state.

The Poll Tax Riot contributed to the downfall of his enemy .Chinese protesters were protesting for the democracy the British take for granted. Given Livingstone is without any ethical sense when making such comparisons two conclusions are necessary.

1) Livingstone, as a 68er, believes in a faux cultural left politics of a sort that appeals to "identity politicians". That leads him inviting repellent Islamist ideologues as Quradawi to London just to get votes, despite this clerics illiberal views and detestation of the secular left.

2) Livingstone poses as being against Thatcher because she was ultra-capitalist and did not care for workers. Yet he seems to think Chinese state capitalism is quite a good thing.. No less than Thatcher, far more so in fact, Livingstone espouses authoritarianism.

Linvingstone is 'objectively pro-capitalist' ( to use a phrase, ironically, of the communist USSR he once was in symapthy with ) He supports the City of London's grotesque expansion and revolting buildings as The Shard ( built with UAE capital ).

Livingstone would regard this as "realism" just as he did when giving qualified support to the USSR.

"Red Ken" then opines,

"Thatcher's great friend Augusto Pinochet used machine guns to control labour, whereas Thatcher used the less drastic means of anti-union laws. But their goal was the same, to reduce the share of working class income in the economy"

No, but Arthur Scargill, whom Livingstone supported, was quite content to oppose Solidarnosc in Poland, a workers movement whose striking members in Bytom in Upper Silesia were shot dead. No word on that.

By all means Thatcher destroyed London governance by getting rid of the GLC. Yet Livingstone's policy of being sympathetic to the IRA alienated him too from electors across Britain.

Thatcher may have supported Pinochet , yet Livingstone gave qualified suport the the USSR, a state that over a period of under half a century murdered 20 milion people. Perhaps, Livingstone should re-evaluate his own myths before commenting on the myth of Thatcherism. He then states,

Labour will win the next election due to the decline in Tory support, which is even lower under Cameron than Thatcher. But Labour must come to office with an economic policy able to rebuild the British economy – which means a clean break with the economic policies of Thatcher

The policies are then what? Go ahead and explain then. Nobody wants more political cany about what Labour "could, should or must do" in rhetorical terms. The sort espoused by witless nonentities as Neal Lawson of the "Compass". think tank  How about a real set of concrete proposals drafted in ethical language.

As opposed to bland platitudes and windy drivel. Which was not the case in London's past. From the Leveller's in Putney, to Christian Socialist George Lansbury and Poplarism. Does it really need an anti-neoliberal Tory in the tradition of Cobbett and Dr Johnson to point that out ?