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High-rise Ken must come back down to earth
WHAT’S come over Ken Livingstone?
In the early part of his mayoralty you could put up the right boxes, and he would come up smiling.
• Congestion charge! He got it right.
• Revamped bus service! Now, thank goodness, it’s almost like a taxi service!
• Affordable housing! He insisted on 50 per cent affordable of all residential developments. Yes, he got that right, too.
• London tubes. He fought against privatisation, pushed through by Gordon Brown, and lost – but it was a fight worth having.
Then something strange happened about two years ago.
He became infatuated with London’s big-time developers – and infatuated with skyscrapers. High land values in London mean developers, financed often with overseas cash, have to build high – to keep profit margins high!
Social requirements are not necessarily treated as part of the equation.
Morality takes a back seat.
Now, whenever architects put a skyscraper drawing in front of him, he can’t help saying, yes, please!
Far too many were approved for the Thames skyline.
Now, he’s nodding through high-rise monstrosities in other parts of London.
You don’t have to be an obsessive conservationist to realise that if Ken Livingstone carries on in this fashion the London skyline will mimic that of New York, Chicago and Shanghai.
His latest blunder is to approve the massive redevelopment of the old Middlesex Hospital – once a hospital, now to become a gigantic block of, largely, luxury flats (See page 6).
With seven months to go before the next election, he has begun his campaign by firing off shots against his biggest adversary – Boris Johnson.
He attacks him on race. He pokes fun at his buffoonery!
But he’s weak whenever the argument turns on the preservation of our ancient capital.
One cannot go so far as to say it’s his Achilles heel.
There’s probably not a great many votes in conservation.
Once, in his early days at the Greater London Council, it was second nature for Ken Livingstone to keep our historical city intact.
Now, Ken Livingstone appears to have sweet-talked himself into a bed with high financiers – men and women who remain unmoved by passionate arguments of civic pride and civic need, arguments that must have once, presumably, inspired him to enter politics.
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