TN: How does that work for a city?

KL: It means you have to try to stay at the front of cultural change. Twenty years ago, when we were finalizing our campaign to take over the GLC, we were still thinking in terms of how can we rebuild our manufacturing base in London, how can we constrain the City? That battle's over, the City won. Thirty-three percent of our employment is financial-services related. The only survival for London now is to make sure that your goose is not killed off by Wall Street or Tokyo. Because if we stopped being the largest financial center in Europe, all the other jobs that rest on that come down with it. You've locked London into a generation of decline, and it would be a disaster.

TN: You have this economic wave or world order that's uniformly capitalist now and doesn't seem to be viewing movements for more democratization or accountability with anything but hostility. So what can you do locally?

KL: You're part of that global resistance. Clearly the neoliberal tide has run out of steam. The tragedy is, the space that was created in the 1990s with the election of Clinton and Blair and Schröder--none of them has actually tried to articulate a radical breakthrough in the way that, say, Roosevelt did in the 1930s, and that is their failure of leadership. I suspect the real challenge is not going to come from any Western city. It's going to come from the excluded people. The question is, What is the left going to do to work with the forces bubbling up from below, people like Lula in Brazil, around the world? What sort of alliance of forces is going to effectively challenge American economic hegemony? It will be when India or China decides to make a stand. My guess is that fifteen or twenty years down the road the Chinese will say, We don't really think the dollar deserves to be the global reserve currency. At that point, what might Europe do? That'll be the most dangerous time since the Cuban missile crisis, as America loses that predominant position and has to accept that it shares power with other peoples, the majority of whom aren't white.

TN: But aside from cheering on the Third World, where does that leave you in London?

KL: If I can bring in the congestion charge [Livingstone has proposed a 5 pound fee for all cars entering central London] and get re-elected, mayors around the world will copy it, because it's the way forward. But until somebody else does it, no one's going to volunteer to be first. There's two things: I have a chance to influence the way the federal agenda develops in Britain by how I conduct myself. And I have a chance to affect urban transport patterns all over the world for the rest of time if I can get the congestion charge right.

TN: So why is the Labour Party so afraid of you?

KL: Well, don't forget that the whole Blair project was based on the fact that no one from the left could win, but we've shown that that's a load of old rubbish. It's very nice to have the business community showing a 20 percent swing in my favor since the election. They also still think I'm a socialist. I deal with them and we have respect and we honor the deals we make, but they also know that this isn't the world I would create if I was given a free hand. I'm making the best of what I've got.

TN: What's your view of the political future in the longer run?

KL: I think we are locked into a long period of movement towards progressive politics. There'll be temporary setbacks, but if you actually look at the patterns, if you look at the Gallup poll figures on capital punishment, the only time there was a majority in America against capital punishment was '67-'68, at the end of twenty-five years of economic growth. I believe in Kondratieff long-wave cycles. I think we've just been through a twenty-five-year down wave. What prevents things from taking off is that every time the world economy starts to pick up it quickly overheats, because America, and to a lesser extent Britain, is disproportionately pulling in capital. But when that long wave does get under way, you'll get what you had then, increasingly progressive politics.... Come back in twenty years' time and it will be 1968 all over again. I'll be on my zimmer frame [walker] then. You've got to have that perspective. I'm sure lots of your lefty readers will say, What a ghastly little shit Livingstone is, he's compromised with business and so on, but you've got to know where you're going over twenty-five years, and you've got to build alliances now that allow you to move forward.

TN: So where are you going over twenty-five years?

KL: I'll be on my zimmer frame saying, Charge! We'll get it right this time.

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