By ANNE McHARDY
LONDON - Voting opens this weekend in selected polling stations for the new office of Mayor of London, with political interest concentrated on who will come second and who will take the 25 seats in the equally new London Assembly in the final tally next Thursday.
The winner is in little doubt. "Red Ken" Livingstone, the former Greater London Authority leader who left the Labour Party to stand as an independent after Prime Minister Tony Blair's administrators gerrymandered to block him as the official candidate, has a 33 per cent lead over all the other candidates, including Blair's choice, former Health Minister Frank Dobson.
Polling is by a system introduced not for the mayoral contest - which is attracting extraordinary emotion for a local election - but as an experiment for the other local council elections. Local authorities all poll in the first week in May but not all poll each year. A number of others in this year's quota are experimenting with extending poll periods.
The elections are a vital test this year, potentially a dry run for the next general election, a test of how much of his massive popular vote Blair has managed to retain in his three years in office. Selecting polling stations open for several days is an attempt to increase the usually apathetic turnout that local elections attract.
The Labour Party will be anxiously watching the fate of Dobson, who was pushed by Blair into resigning from the cabinet to stand, and that of the 25 official Labour candidates for the GLA. The candidates were all handpicked by Labour's administrators. One observer from the Association of London Government, the umbrella set up to coordinate the capital's local authority policies after the Thatcher Government axed the GLC, described watching the candidates being picked as "brutal. They just dumped anyone who wasn't a Blair loyalist."
The mayor will not be able to function without building alliances with the GLA, since a standing scrutiny committee will have final authority over budget spending. Livingstone has not attempted to run his own candidates, but an umbrella organisation of extreme left-wing parties, the Socialist Labour Alliance, is putting up its own slate of 25, hoping to capitalise on Livingstone's popularity. They are all unknowns with one exception, the left-wing campaigning journalist Paul Foot, whose uncle is former Labour Party leader Michael Foot.
Livingstone, who is attracting as many Conservative and Liberal Democrat as Labour voters, has kept a careful distance from the SLA, and has said that he expects a reconciliation with Blair and Labour after a suitable cooling-off period.
The signs from Blair, who has waged a public and bitter campaign against Livingstone, writing in most of the British newspapers in turn about his reasons for believing that the "Red Ken" tag given to Livingstone in GLC days remains valid, is that reconciliation is improbable.
Blair believes that it was the left-wing policies of men such as Livingstone, which he equates with the SLA, that made Labour unelectable during 19 years of Conservative government. He created New Labour to rid the party of their policies. Livingstone counters that most of his policies, including improved public transport and negotiation with Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, are now official New Labour policy, and he says he agrees that many Old Labour sacred cows were outdated.
Across the rest of England and Wales, the interest will focus on just how much of its traditional vote the Labour Party is able to turn out.
Blair's New Labour Party has been increasingly criticised for having dumped the baby of Labour values with the bathwater of sterile left-wing tactics.
Livingstone's huge popular vote turns partly on the success of his policies in the GLC, where he concentrated on coordinating transport and environmental policies, but also on the same disillusion with New Labour that will keep voters at home in deprived areas elsewhere, notably the northeast, Merseyside, and the West Midlands, where the sale of British car firm Rover to asset-strippers by owner BMW is adding to Blair's problems.
Official Tory candidate Stephen Norris, a former Transport Minister, who resigned because of publicity over his serial infidelities, which he describes as "my tabloid lifestyle," was imposed on London after the novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer was forced to resign when he admitted bribing a friend to lie for him in court. Norris this week has appeared to be trying to boost his standing by criticising Conservative leader William Hague and those close to him as too right-wing.
All eyes on vote for London Assembly
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