Ken Livingstone – back at BSix!
Labour's mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone hosted a surprise Q&A with over 150 eager BSix students on Wednesday – his third visit to BSix in just 12 months.
Ken was accompanied by well-known comedian Eddie Izzard who compered the event and helped Ken deal with the avalanche of questions from the highly-engaged audience.
The visit was part of Ken's campaign to become Mayor of London and the questions were varied and displayed a vast level of understanding amongst the students of the issues at play in the race for City Hall.
The first question was about the recent London riots and how he'd have dealt with them had he been Mayor. Ken said the first thing he would have done was to ensure he was on the ground listening to the communities and demanding action of the police asking "how many are you mobilising?" and pointing to the fact that once 16,000 police hit the streets on the third night "that was the end of it."
On the shooting that sparked the riots Ken said; "People need to know the truth. Instead, it was endless rumours. There should have been someone there. I most probably would have been there to meet the march at the police station to talk through what had happened. You can't have a hands-off mayor in a city like this. It won't work."
"If there's underlying tension, despair and anger, and we've got that in quite a lot of parts of London. There are whole chunks of London that get written off and left behind" he added.
"We should be building housing, building infrastructure to get people off the dole and get growth in the economy. That's how we pay the debt down."
Ken went on to answer questions on the economy, stimulating jobs, developing the Olympic areas post-2012 and questions about what he would do for young people as mayor. Afterwards he was mobbed by eager students and staff looking to get photos taken with him.
The event was not only part of Ken's campaign to become mayor but was also the first event in the calendar for the very active BSix Politics Club.
The next event, "BSix Question Time" will take place on October 10th and will feature politicians of all parties. Jeannette Arnold, Chair of the London Assembly has already confirmed to represent the Labour Party.
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