"Red Ken" and the Greens in London.

• Author: Hawkins, Howie
• Position: Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London

Green parties in Europe emerged in the 1970s directly out of the "New Left" of the 1950s and 1960s, which projected a new participatory-democratic socialism as an alternative to both the repressive democratic-centralism of Communism and passive parliamentarism of Social Democracy.

Indicative of this new politics, when German Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly decorated the door of her new office as a new member of the Bundestag, she put two posters on it. One, with the slogan, "For a Socialist Germany," was a picture Rosa Luxemburg, the martyred revolutionary who was assassinated for her resolute insistence on the unity of freedom, anti-militarism, and socialism during World War I and the Russian Revolution. The other was a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., also a socialist, but better known for his militant nonviolence, which highlighted Kelly's conception of the "anti-party party" that didn't compromise on principles like the old parties did, and, unlike the old parties, combined nonviolent direct action with electoral action. [1]

In the UK, with its winner-take-all electoral system, rather than develop an independent Green Party, the bulk of New Left activists worked through organized caucuses within the Labour Party. From the 1960s to the 1990s, they struggled with the Labour Party's right wing, which finally prevailed in the mid-1990s with the ascendance of Tony Blair's New Labour project of reshaping the formerly socialist party into a corporate party on the model of the US Democratic Party. [2]

By 1999, the New Left vision seemed defeated. In the UK, many were leaving the Labour Party they had spent 30 years trying to radicalize. On the continent, the Greens looked very different from the insurgent party that had emerged 15-20 years earlier. Now in governing coalitions in Germany, France, and Italy with their Old Left nemeses, the Social Democrats and Communists, Green cabinet ministers were supporting the expansion of NATO and its bombing of Yugoslavia. It seemed to radical Greens and Reds that the Green movement had been co-opted into the system they had started out to transform.

Turning point

The May 4,' 2000 elections in London, however, have rekindled radicals' hopes for a Red and Green New Left. "Red Ken" Livingstone was elected Mayor, running as an independent who urged a Green vote in the party preference vote for the London Assembly. With 11.1% of the party list vote, the Greens seated three members in the 25-member London Assembly.

Writing in Red Pepper, the UK's green-socialist magazine, the Greens' mayoral candidate, Darren Johnson, who was elected to the London Assembly and appointed to the environmental post in Livingstone's cabinet, wrote about the need for Reds and Greens to work together:

It was when the Daily Telegraph and Tony Blair both went out of their way to warn the London electorate -- in vain -- against me, as well as Ken Livingstone, that I realized our red-green cooperation was on to something. We have converged on a radical agenda.... In our mayoral campaign...