This article is published in a special issue of Transform – a journal of the radical left – which remembers 1968 on the 50th anniversary of a year that was a turning point in history…

Just as in 1968, we still need to fight together for a better world, for the many and not the few, even when the odds seem stacked against us.

I had no interest in politics as a kid, I spent my time collecting newts and studying astronomy. When I dropped out of school I tried to get a job at London Zoo but they had no vacancies, so I became an animal technician at the Royal Marsden’s cancer research unit in Fulham Road. My parents had always been working class Tories but now I was surrounded by a dozen other technicians, all of whom were working class and Labour. I started work at the end of 1962 just as a new generation of pop music burst into being, led by the Beatles and the Stones. That generation from the 1940s changed our culture, not just in pop music and fashion but with brilliant new actors like Tom Courtney and Julie Christie in Billy Liar. It was not only young people changing our world, but amazingly for the first time in centuries a liberal-minded Pope, John XXIII, began to haul the Catholic church into the 20th century. In the years to come decent liberals like Roy Jenkins threw their weight behind new laws that allowed women to get an abortion and legalised homosexuality. The approach towards women also began to change with banks dropping their rules that a woman could only open an account with a letter of permission from her husband or father.

At lunch time I would go wandering down the Kings Road in awe of what people were wearing.

As all this was going on the establishment came under pressure fuelled by the Profumo scandal but also the daring new radical TV programme That Was The Week That Was in which David Frost challenged all the rubbish we were normally told in our papers. This gave me an interest in politics and also I sat glued to the television during the days of the Cuban missile crisis as the world teetered on the edge of nuclear extinction. The following year Harold Wilson became leader of the Labour party promising to change Britain with the white heat of technology, and after the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson threw his weight behind the campaign for black rights in America. It may seem bizarre now, but the first time we saw a black man kiss a white woman on any television programme was in 1967, the same year that America’s Supreme Court struck down the laws of all those states like California that had made inter-racial marriage illegal.

Although it seemed Wilson and Johnson would lead us into a better world, both failed abysmally with Wilson leading us into years of economic pain by keeping an overvalued pound and, even worse, Johnson unleashing a war on Vietnam which would kill over three million people.

On the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, around the world we were all glued to our televisions as this tragedy unfolded and his assassin was himself shot dead live on TV. I started to read about American politics which was much more exciting than ours, and in the years that followed I also developed a real interest in British politics. I was about to join the Labour party at the beginning of 1968 but could not bring myself to do it when the Labour government banned Kenyan Asians from seeking refuge in Britain.

My generation had been changing culture in the 1960s but as 1968 dawned, for the first time we began to challenge the politics of the day. On 30^th January 1968 a massive assault by the Vietnamese against America and its puppet regime transformed the Vietnam war and across the world we began to see mass demonstrations against America’s brutal war. But it was not just Vietnam. In Paris the young turned out to challenge de Gaulle’s reactionary regime and Dubcek’s new government in Czechoslovakia challenged the legacy of Stalin in Eastern Europe. Demonstrations around the world were chanting ‘London, Paris, Rome, Berlin. We will fight and we will win’. For the first time in my life I found myself on demonstrations. Martin Luther King who had led the campaign for black rights was shot dead and this unleashed riots across America’s ghettoes. A few weeks later Robert Kennedy, who was challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination, was also assassinated. De Gaulle, with the support of the military, crushed the student uprising in France and Dubcek’s regime was crushed by a Soviet invasion.

At the beginning of 1968, as our generation turned to politics, it looked as though we were on the verge of a global revolution, but by the end of the year Richard Nixon was president and the war in Vietnam would continue for another seven years. Across the world the establishment had defeated the progressive challenge. I had no doubt in my mind that the only way to challenge the establishment was by joining the Labour party and working with other progressives.

I would later describe this in my autobiography as the only known case of a rat joining a sinking ship, but fortunately I was the only person to join my local Labour party in the previous 12 months as hundreds had dropped out in despair at Wilson’s disappointing government, so within just a few weeks I had been put on every local committee in the Lambeth Labour party!

Although I had been the only person to join my party, by 1970 a wave of young and others surged back into the Labour party seeking change, much as would happen again after the disappointment of the Wilson-Callaghan governments with the ‘Bennite’ surge and again in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn ran for the leadership of the Labour party.

I like many others who had seen and participated in the struggles that came together in 1968, would take its key points and lessons into the decades that followed.

These included fighting with the oppressed and those struggling for equality, the importance of internationalism and building movements for peace and international solidarity, and the need to build alliances and reject the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the establishment that enabled the partial defeats of some of those movements at that time.

Both the ‘Bennite’ movement of the late 1970s and 1980s and the struggles that accompanied it, including the Miners’ strike and the fight of councils such as the GLC, not only involved many people who had been politically awoken in 1968 but also represented in concrete ways these key principles and lessons of the struggles around the world at that time.

Groups such as Women against Pit Closures and Lesbian and Gays support the Miners showed just how much solidarity had been and could be built between all those struggling for justice. At the same time, Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn, myself and many others backed the right of black people to organise themselves in the Labour Party through Black Sections, something that before the struggles of 1968 and then those of the 1970s against the rise of racism and the National Front, would have  been almost unimaginable.

In terms of my own political career, two years after joining the Labour Party, I was vice-chair of the Housing Committee on Lambeth Council. By 1973 I was the second youngest member of the Greater London Council, and was starting to learn the skills and develop the policy ideas and progressive alliances that would enable me to lead the GLC in the 1980s and be the first Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008.

In both those administrations, the lasting effect of the politics, ideas and movements that sprung to the forefront in 1968 could be seen. Describing our approach at the GLC in the 1980s, and my broader approach to socialism that I still believe in today, to the writer – and a prominent voice of the radicalism of 1968 – Tariq Ali, at the time of the GLC, I explained that ‘I am in favour of a coalition. I don’t believe that society can be transformed solely by the male white working class. But the coalition we need is one which includes skilled and unskilled workers, unemployed, young and old, women, black people, as well as the sexually oppressed minorities. A socialist political party must act broadly for and with all the oppressed in society. This means us changing. The Labour Party needs to listen to new voices and then change itself.’

Whilst (much like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party today) we were vilified by the establishment at the time, the GLC pioneered equality and inclusion programmes, and started to mainstream ideas and struggles that had come to prominence in 1968 but hadn’t yet become the mainstream in Labour, let alone society.

We weren’t ashamed to support – or financially help for that matter – lesbian and gay groups, feminist and women’s movements, disabled people, black and other BAMEorganisations, and many others. We didn’t tell those oppressed groups to ‘wait for socialism’ for equality, but instead threw our resources and weight behind their struggles for liberation, as part of building an alliance for real change.

Support for equality and anti-racism was at the forefront of our socialism and, along with my support for peace talks in Ireland, one of the reasons I was termed by The Sun the most odious man in Britain.

We also understood that the struggle for democratic socialism was intrinsically linked to the campaign for peace.

Later at the GLA we in many ways had much less power and ‘wriggle room’ in some of these areas, but were still able to instigate a series of events, celebrations of diversity and initiatives for equality, including in partnerships with women’s, LGBT, disabled, and a wide range of BAME groups and communities, including the annual free anti-racist festival (named Respect then Rise) that Boris then abolished.

In particular, in order to promote understanding, respect and interaction between these diverse cultures and communities we promoted public, free, celebrations and commemorations of all the main faith and secular cultural festivals and anniversaries observed by London’s communities: from St Patrick’s Day to Eid on the Square, a giant Menorah lighting up Trafalgar Square to mark Hanukkah to St George’s Day, Chinese New Year to Newroz (Kurdish and Iranian New Year), Holocaust Memorial Day was marked each year and we organised a range of events for the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery.

Reflecting the legacy of 1968, we also again worked closely with peace and anti-war groups, including at the height of the millions strong movement against Bush and Blair’s illegal war on Iraq, including of course Jeremy Corbyn himself. As part of this, we also made firm alliances to defend the Muslim community against the Islamophobic backlash that followed 9/11 and accompanied the ‘war on terror.’

Today, fifty years on from 1968, those who fought on the streets that year can be proud of the advances that have been won in a range of areas, but also know there is a lot more to be done, and that we face a lot of growing challenges, not least the threat climate change represents to the very future of humanity and our planet.

Jeremy Corbyn’s democratic socialist programme for the many not the few, includes a commitment to equality for all at its core, plus an understanding of international solidarity, the need to tackle climate change and the need for an anti-war government, as well as support for an alternative economic society that can end austerity and transform Britain.

The alliance  that has come together behind his leadership and in support of a Corbyn-led government for the many – including the majority of trade unions, those community and campaigning groups that are at the heart of opposition to Tory austerity and scapegoating, thousands of students and younger people who refuse to accept the lie that there is no alternative, and so many others – is exactly the kind of alliance that can not only win a Labour government, but also defend and develop the transformative change that Britain, and much of the world, needs more than ever.

And, just as in 1968, we still need to fight together for a better world, for the many and not the few, even when the odds seem stacked against us.

Ken Livingstone was leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 to 1986 and Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008

Bringing the spirit of 1968 into today’s Labour Party is published in a special issue of Transform – a journal of the radical left

Remembering 1968 – La Beauté est dans la rue