Livingstone's London
Sir: While putting Auberon Waugh up with Richard Ingrams near the top of my list of 'great journalists of all time', 1 think that both suffer from the weakness of not living in London, and, in the end, not caring what happens to it. If this were not so, I think that Mr Waugh would not so casually identify the new Greater London Council leadership with the destructive elements he castigates (13 June).
Who, after all, has destroyed the fabric and way of life in London and our other cities to a far greater degree than is the case in France or other European countries? Not left-wingers and trade unionists but planners: planners who have destroyed public transport and smashed through mighty motorways, and who have unleashed the skyscraper builders on us. And who backed these planners but the bland moderate politicians of the Heath-CallaghanThatcher type, into whose arms Mr Waugh seems so close to falling?
Ken Livingstone of the GLC is the first politician I have met who seems free from the mysterious element in British life which Mr Waugh compared (6 June) to the P2 revelations in Italy. I think he will try and may succeed in slowing and even reversing the destruction of our capital, and if so he deserves to be admired more than the utterly despicable moderates and 'conservatives' who have turned out to be nothing more than sophisticated public relations men for the real destroyers of our society the corrupt anonymous bureaucrats who have turned our city into the decaying dying hulk we know today. I am, I think, to the right, politically, of Mr Waugh, but I would remind him of the observation of his father, that the Conservative Party has never put the clock back even by five minutes I would add to this that if anything they have been more destructive of everything British than their opponents. Socialism is harmful, yes, but let's not assume that people who are said to be left-wing socialists will bring us socialism faster than those said to be more right-wing experience suggests the opposite.
George Stern 6 Eton Court, Shepherds Hill, London N6
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