KEN LIVINGSTONE, FORMER MAYOR OF LONDON 2000 - 2008:  I have no interest in sport. I was the smallest boy in a school of 2,000. I was last in everything. So I had no interest in sport. And before I became mayor, I had only been to one sporting event in my life. That was a cricket match at the oval and I fell asleep. So for me it was only ever about regeneration, because that area of the East End after the docks closed in the '60s, no government put any money in. They just assumed the people there would travel somewhere else to get work. It is incredibly rundown - the most polluted place in southern England. Now all that soils gone, we’ve got a park, we’ve got some great sport facilities, we’ve got an Olympic Village, but we’ve also got the transport infrastructure.

YALDA HAKIM:  This massive regeneration hasn't gone without casualties. We have just spent a couple of days, actually, in Carpenters Estate and we met so many people who have lived there for decades. In fact, there was one woman, Mary Finch, who's been there for 42 years and she says she's heartbroken because her lovely, safe community is being torn apart. They are all being moved away from there. What would you say to her and people like her?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:   Well, no-one should be being moved away. If people are moving, it's not because of the Olympics, it's because this huge churn in that area of Britain. You've most probably got people moving more frequently than anywhere else. Most probably the biggest site where immigrants arrive, they are there for a few years and then they move on somewhere else. It's not a wonderful old settled village down there.

YALDA HAKIM:  So many of the people we met have been there for decades. They were saying that it's not regeneration, it's actually gentrification.

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  It is regeneration, because you have created the Olympic Village and half of the properties will be affordable, not in just market rents. You have got the best upgrade of the transport system they have ever had.

YALDA HAKIM:  There has been plenty of rhetoric though about affordable housing in East London. The people we have met said they could never afford to live in these new high-rise apartments that are being built there?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  There is a separate problem here. Mrs Thatcher 30 years ago stopped building council housing. To his shame, Tony Blair carried on that ban on council housing. And therefore we've now got a huge housing crisis and that's not related to the Olympics. We should have been building 50,000 homes a year in London. We have been building about 16,000 and almost all of that has been private sector.

YALDA HAKIM:   Part of the Olympic Village has been sold to a Qatari company. Would you have approved something like this as Mayor?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:   If I had been mayor over this last four years, the priorities would have been different. They would have been more a preponderance of building homes for rent. I might quite happily have done a deal with the Qataris, but it would have been on, I suspect, quite different terms. London has elected a mayor who's very much a free marketeer.

YALDA HAKIM:  Given the fact that 32,000 people are waiting for housing in Newham, wouldn't it have just been to their benefit to give it to those people?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  Well, in one sense, the answer to that is no. You want a mixed community and to get the balance right, gentrification is a bad thing if all that happens is poor people are moved out and rich people are moved in. But a better mix of community, in which you've got a balance between working-class and middle-class people is pretty essential if you want local schools to work and job opportunities to arise.

YALDA HAKIM:  If we look at the intellectual property of the Games, we've spoken to a number of architects who have designed for these Olympic Games, but they can't submit their designs to international awards. I mean, because of the intellectual property that they are bound by - doesn't that disadvantage them?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  If I was still mayor, I would mostly say, "Look, it's time for you to loosen up a lot of the rules and regulations." Jacques Rogge himself recently said he's worried about sponsorship by McDonald's and Coca-Cola when we are heading for a world obesity crisis. I think my advice to the IOC would be to say go for a slightly scaled-down Games and reduce the level of sponsorship there. Because I think - it totally degrades the whole idea of what the Olympics is.

YALDA HAKIM:  Can the UK really afford this, given you're in the grip of a recession?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  Oh, God, it would be a disaster if we hadn't done this. I mean, London has - I mean, the British economy is basically gone back into a double-dip recession, but not in London. Because we have still got the work and income being generated by the Olympic Games, the shard, the transport upgrades that went around all this. Anywhere else, it would be as a new town. But it's been worth every penny, because without that, that level of investment by government, London would have been deep in recession.

YALDA HAKIM:  Well, you narrowly lost the mayoral election to Boris Johnston in May, in fact, very narrowly. That must have hurt?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  Um, it was a poisonous campaign, but I have been in politics 40 years. Nixon got elected, Berlusconi gets elected. Even Hitler got elected. Elections don't automatically choose the best person.

YALDA HAKIM:  And did it hurt? I mean, the way you talk about what you would have done...

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  Every day, I mean, I had been leader for five years, MP for 14, mayor for eight. Except for those handful of people who have been prime minister or chancellor, I mean, almost no-one in British politics has had such a good innings. It would have been nice to have had another couple of terms or to be prime minister, all those things. But I have achieved a lot. I am still doing a lot, active in the Labour Party.

YALDA HAKIM:  Have you retired now?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  I won't run another election but I am still campaigning around issues, I have just been writing an article about the need to build 50,000 homes here in London.

YALDA HAKIM:  How would you like to be remembered?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  I don't care. I am not worried about monuments, it’s a question of what you achieve when you hold power and I think my record on that has been quite good, actually, compared with most others.

YALDA HAKIM:  And the association you have to the Olympics, is that something you're proud of?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  I'm delighted we got that legacy, but I still have no interest in sport, really. I will go to the Opening Ceremony, because I should, but the rest, I will watch the highlights on TV. I will be doing my neighbour's garden.

YALDA HAKIM:  Thank you.

Former mayor Ken Livingstone, known by his political enemies as 'Red Ken'. With more time on his hands now, he says he's re-reading Karl Marx and doing plenty of gardening. You can see that interview in full and read more of tonight's stories on our website. Plus - tell us what you think of the Games and whether it will be good for London. That's at sbs.com.au/dateline.
 

Camera
JORGE ZARATE

Producers
GEOFF PARISH
PETER CHARLEYWell, as you can see, London is jam packed right now. It's holiday time in Europe and it seems everyone who possibly can has turned up here. With the Games just three days away, there's an incredible air of expectation. Let the party begin - sums up the mood.

REPORTER:  Are you guys excited about the Games?

GIRLS:  Yeah, yeah. It makes you proud to be British that is for sure.

MAN:  I think it's a good thing for the nation. I think we're really proud to host it and I would hope we beat everybody. That's the main thing.

REPORTER:  You won't beat the Australians though.

MAN:  Well, we'll see.

MAN 2:  Yeah, everyone's excited. It's hard to get around, though but still worth it, really.

GIRLS:  Yeah. It's gonna be great. It will be great.

REPORTER:  And will the city turn into a big party?

WOMAN:  I hope so, because I like to party!

In fact, it seems like London has had one celebration after another this year. Hundreds of thousands turned out for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and now the Games, the biggest sporting celebration of all, are ready to go. Including this 115m-high tower, Britain's largest-ever sculpture. The cost of all this planning, building and security could blow out to £11 billion. That's a staggering $16.5 billion Australian dollars - the original estimate was less than half that.

Even though there's been a big hiccup in supplying security here, which has meant thousands more troops being brought in, many believe the organising and construction of the Games has been a great success. However, the extraordinary expenditure on the Olympic facilities is occurring slap bang in the middle of a very tough recession.

Aside from the recent celebrations, London has also seen one demonstration after another. Including an estimated 500,000 in this march, protesting against what's been described as brutal budget cuts. Everyone, from pensioners to public servants, has been hit hard. Even the police, the very people meant to maintain law and order, have marched 30,000-strong to protest a 20% cut to their budget.

POLICEMAN:  You can only stretch a service so far before it breaks and I think we are at that point right now, we are at breaking point.

So there's a strange feeling here right now - big spending and big austerity cuts. You can see this contrast almost within the shadow of the Olympic site -  here in Newham, one of London's poorest boroughs. This is the Carpenters Estate, it's currently being demolished and the residents moved out. Part of the council's plan to regenerate the area. A London university even wants to build a new campus but those who live here, like Joe Alexander, are fighting back.

JOE ALEXANDER:  And what they are trying to do is replace it with these, like, um, you know, high-density, yeah, high-rise buildings. And they, again, are not gonna really house a proper community.

I went to see Mary and Brian Finch.

BRIAN FINCH:  There you go.

They have been living on the estate for 40 years, now the Olympics is literally bearing down on them.

BRIAN FINCH:  It's an ad for the Olympics. It's, uh, a cyclist, by the look of it. They put it up yesterday. It was two guys on ropes, abseiling down, sticking it up. At the bottom there's an advert for Gillette - Gillette gives you a better shave.

Even though the Games are about to commence just across the road, Mary says she feels like an outsider.

MARY FINCH:  How can I be part of something that's gonna take my home?

REPORTER:  But they promised to resettle you - is that not something that's satisfying you?

MARY FINCH:  No. No. Why should it? Why should I even think of it? What gives them the right, surely be to God there's, um, there's a law somewhere that says you cannot do that. If it was falling down, I would understand. But it isn't!

JOE ALEXANDER:  And we have the highest waiting list for flats.

REPORTER:  For people wanting to move in?

JOE ALEXANDER:  Yeah, I think it's 32,000 at the moment. And that's quoting him.

REPORTER:  Yeah.

JOE ALEXANDER:  And we've thought about 60 years now we've had empty homes here. We've had all these wonderful homes. People could easily move into them – families - two bedrooms, one bedroom. There's only one unit in this block that's occupied, I think.

REPORTER:  It must be so difficult to see so many elderly pensioners struggling to keep the homes they have had for 40 or more years?

JOE ALEXANDER:  Definitely. A lot of them have been suffering health problems because of this. Mary Finch, she may not have told you, she actually had a heart attack, I don't know if she told you that.

Joe Alexander, Mary Finch and the other residents are locked in a bitter battle with the council and especially the Mayor.

JOE ALEXANDER:  The regeneration did start with the Olympics, but it's kind of sped it up and it's also given the local Mayor here an opportunity to call us anti-Olympics. He's using it as an excuse to try and keep us down. We're not anti-Olympics. We want to save our community.

We approached the local council for an interview, but they declined. They did say, though, they had given the university that wants to build here until September to develop its vision for the neighbourhood.

REPORTER:  You said earlier you were heartbroken?

MARY FINCH:  Yeah, I am. I really am. This has been my life, really. You know? I... It takes a long time to put life into your home. It takes a long time for a house to become a home. We have a lovely, lovely little community here and it is a lovely little, safe community. So why would you want to break it up?

Mary Finch and Carpenters Estate - fighting hard to save her community. She says if she and husband Brian are forced to leave, they will have to drag her out.


Reporter
YALDA HAKIM

Camera
JORGE ZARATE

Producers
GEOFF PARISH
PETER CHARLEY

Fixer
ASHLEY HAMER

Editors
MICAH MCGOWN

Original Music Composed by VICKI HANSEN

Additional footage courtesy of the Police Federation of England and Wales, produced by Tinker Taylor Limited.