One Week With John Gulliver - Who will be Labour's leader?

Published: 12 August, 2010

WHO will Labour Party members in Camden vote for on Monday when they start filling in ballot forms for Labour’s leadership?

You’d think the local contenders, Ed and David Miliband, would be favourites.

Ed (pictured) appears to be – but David seems to be lagging behind.

The equivalent of an opinion poll suggests Ed will take most votes while Diane Abbott will come second.

AT a recent party meeting at the Irish Centre in Camden Town, attended by 80 members – roughly 10 per cent of the membership of the parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St Pancras – a good majority voted for Ed.

I gather Diane came second. 

Hampstead and Kilburn members will probably follow the same pattern.

It seems family loyalty comes second to political choice for Marion Kazok, Ed and David’s mother, who lives in Primrose Hill. 

An established Labour intellectual, Marion, with her late husband Ralph, were leading radicals of the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, espousing policies well to the left of the Labour Party.

Ralph, a writer and academic, edited the “bible” of socialist thought in an annual book, the Socialist Register.

I’m not surprised to hear Marion is backing Abbott.

But I was surprised the other day when I discovered a leading Labourite in Camden didn’t have the foggiest idea about Ralph’s seminal works. I have spoken to several since and drawn a blank.

Isn’t all this part of today’s culture of shallow “celebrity” politics?

Ken in a return to form

YOU can’t keep Ken Livingstone down. You may have thought that after his defeat by Boris Johnson for the mayoralty of London, he would have packed his bags and retired.

But not Ken who, though 65, is now starting up his campaign to wrest the seat from Johnson  in the 2012 elections.

Ken goes back in politics longer than the vast majority of well-known politicians – several years further back than Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.

He was establishing himself around the Harold Wilson days in the mid-70s. By the end of that decade he was Camden Council’s housing chairman.

Both Johnson and David Cameron were at Eton when Ken was learning about Town Hall politics. He was elected a councillor in May 1971 – the same month that George Osborne was born.

I have seen him speak many times but on Friday I saw him give – without notes - a polished, almost statesman-like, speech.

He was on one of his favourite subjects – nuclear weapons and why they must be abolished. Speaking to more than 150 people in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury (see page     10), he covered the year 1945 when the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and why, in his opinion, they signalled the start of the Cold War.

It wasn’t so much what he said but how he said it. He was on top form, a formidable challenger Johnson should not ignore.

Bomb exhibition fails to state who’s responsible

I VISITED a horror show on Tuesday. 

I felt stunned as I wandered round an exhibition of blown-up images of burnt corpses of babies and women, of a devastated flattened city centre the size of Camden and Islington, of a baby who will die 10 days later because she is too weak to suckle, one dreadful scene after another.

Like a lot of people I knew of the two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan in 1945. I had seen here and there images in newspapers of the victims of the catastrophe.  

But I had never been close up to large images of some of the 140,000 people who had died in that air raid.

Most poignantly of all, perhaps, was a photograph of two bald children, a brother and sister, who had begun losing their hair two months after the bombing. They both later died from the after-effects of radiation – the boy in 1949, his sister in 1965. It is a vision of hell.

Nor had I ever seen some of the objects recovered from the bomb sites – the remains of what looked like rice and vegetables now, burnt in the flash of the bomb; the torn, burnt jacket worn by a young boy, killed in the raid.

The images and artefacts – loaned by Japanese peace groups – were on display in London for the first time at an exhibition at Friends Meeting House in Euston, held on the anniversary of the disaster 65 years ago.

This exhibition ends today (Thursday) and has been visited by several hundred people, but it should have been seen by thousands, especially school children.

But the organisers, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Quakers, were not able to mount it until after the schools broke up, and then only for a short time.

Within days these precious panels and artefacts, reminders of man’s inhumanity, will be shipped back to Japan.

I did wonder why some of these panels could not be displayed at Camden Town Hall and returned to Japan later.

Yet, something was missing from the exhibition. Here were the victims, here was a panoramic view of a devastated city, here were terrible artefacts. But who dropped the bombs?   And what was said internationally at the time? 

From the exhibition, silence. 

Here is the epilogue in story form of what is probably the biggest crime in history, but it remains a whodunnit? without any perpetrators.

The bombs, in fact, were dropped by the US, whose generals argued that they speeded up the end of the war and saved tens of thousands of soldiers who would have been killed fighting city by city in Japan.

But others believed they were dropped to establish the US as a military superpower, the first step of what became a Cold War with Russia.

For years, news of the devastation was sup­pressed. 

Two British newsman, James Cameron and Wilfred Burchett, were put under a cloud after they had written about it in the late 1940s. It was only 10 years after the bombing that the public in Britain began to become aware of this shameful secret.  Around this time, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was born.