Betty Hunter from the PSC kicked off by explaining something of the PSC’s history and approach. Kiri Tunks spoke on behalf of the local teachers’ union branch and said, among other things that her visit to Gaza had changed her life and that the demonstrations in other parts of the world were seen by Palestinians and uplifted them. A local councillor spoke and said nothing you could disagree with but nothing particularly insightful.

Viva Palestina’s Kevin Ovenden explained how the February convoy was conceived and described the plans for this December’s. He reinforced Kiri’s points about the impact protests outside Palestine have and painted a vivid picture of what the convoy will achieve.

Ken Livingstone gave a good account of how the Labour Party was eventually won over to accepting that the Palestinians had right on their side, illustrating this by reminding the audience that the original decision to recognise the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people had been carried with a margin of 1% at conference. By contrast Livingstone argued that Blair’s tacit support for the attack on Gaza cost him his leadership.

George Galloway did something of an old pals’ act with Livingstone, reminiscing about how he had drafted the Labour conference resolution and contrasting Livingstone with the pro-Israel Johnson. Perhaps rashly, he said that the former mayor would have been critical of the cops who attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators with batons. My recollection is that Livingstone was fairly muscular in his defence of the cops’ right to shoot young Brazilians. On the other hand he explained how the idea for the convoys had been sparked by the East End’s support for Republican Spain.

Two hundred people at a meeting on Palestine organised by e mail and word of mouth is a real achievement. Tower Hamlets PSC has a future.

Two hundred people at a meeting on Palestine organised by e mail and word of mouth is a real achievement. Tower Hamlets PSC has a future.

The high-profile stabbing came just days after 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen was murdered in Lee, south-east London.

Also over the weekend two teenagers, aged 15 and 16, were stabbed in Holloway, north London, and last week barrister Mark Saunders was shot dead by police in Chelsea, west London, after he started shooting out of his home.

London's newly-appointed Deputy Mayor for Young People, Ray Lewis, described the problem of crime in the capital as a "rising onslaught".

"I think we need to ask ourselves why we are where we are in the first place," he told the BBC's Newsnight.

"Because this isn't a blow-out, this is a slow leak.

"This has been an increasing and steadily rising onslaught of lawlessness and abandoned behaviour for a number of years."

Labour will be looking to Mr Livingstone to salvage something from a night that saw them slump to third place in the national vote share.

The election will also decide the 25 members of the London Assembly, which scrutinises the work of the mayor.

Vote counting begins at 0830 BST and is expected to take up to 12 hours.

The process will take place at three venues - Alexandra Palace, Excel and Olympia - and the new mayor will be declared at City Hall on Friday evening.

Labour -- with Brown leading them into elections for the first time since taking office last year -- is set to finish third behind the opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, the BBC said.

The ruling party could face further humiliation in the tightly-fought London mayoral race, which pitched the current mayor, Labour's Ken Livingstone, against the Conservatives' maverick Boris Johnson.

Amid growing speculation Livingstone would be voted out as part of the backlash, Brown said he spoke to him last night and thanked him "for the campaign he has run and the message he has put across."

As the vote count continued -- the London result was not due until after 1600 GMT -- the BBC reported that Johnson was ahead, while betting firm Paddy Power said it was paying out on a Johnson win even before the result was known.

"After the kick in the ballots that Labour has had overnight, we expect Boris to put the final nail in their local elections coffin," said a spokesman for the firm.

Brown has been shaken in recent months by poor opinion polls and by lawmakers' dissent over tax reforms and plans to extend the period of pre-trial detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days.

It seems unlikely that he will face a leadership challenge in the wake of the results, but most commentators expect him to try and relaunch his government with a new policy programme.

While a Johnson victory would be another huge boost for the Conservatives, a Livingstone win could reassure Labour that their dip in form is only temporary.

Outside London there are several progressive candidates standing, for a variety of parties and we wish them all well.

 In London, vote for Ken Livingstone for Mayor; and George Galloway for the GLA (Respect - 11th on the orange ballot paper)

In City and East constituency in London, vote Hanif Abdulmuhit (Respect - number 1 on the yellow ballot paper)

RESPECT
As Salma Yaqoob has written

“The broad constituency in favour of peace, equality and social justice is growing. On many issues it is even a majority in society. Millions of people are against war, against privatising and running down the welfare state, against racism, and for greater equality. There is an opportunity to be a voice for these millions, and to offer an electoral alternative to the parties of war and injustice.

“The challenge for Respect is to be able to work with, and be a voice for, this growing broad progressive constituency. This constituency includes people who remain tied to Labour or other parties such as the Greens. We have to work patiently to build up our vote at a local level. But we also have to be part (and almost certainly a minority part) of a much wider network of alliances.”

At a strategic level, Respect has positioned itself very well in the London elections, as the most left wing part of the politically relevant mainstream, and part of a broadly progressive alliance to ensure the re-election of Ken Livingstone, that includes the Green Party, trade unions, as well as BME and faith groups; while at the same time campaigning that the GLA needs a strong left voice, which could be achieved if Galloway was elected to it.

Despite the original success of Respect in 2004 and 2005, it has grown less well than it should have done. Partly this was attributable not only to the organisational stranglehold of the SWP, but also due to the distrust that the SWP are held by many activists within the broader labour movement.

But also George Galloway had in the past limited appeal to trade unionists, and the Big Brother episode did make many doubt his commitment to serious politics. Paradoxically, though it seemed like a howler to many of us at the time, Celebrity Big Brother did lead to George’s opportunity to take on the Talk Sport radio show that has been a phenomenal success. Time and time again now, when I am talking to trade union or labour movement activists,  they tell me that they listen to Galloway’s show and are deeply impressed by it. Galloway has achieved a big personal audience among the working class, and many are broadly sympathetic to his politics. So paradoxically, over the long term, the Celebrity Big Brother decision has probably had more positive than negative consequences.

For the general public, George Galloway’s elicits both strong positive and negative responses, but broadly his personal and political reputation is higher now than it was in 2005: whether that transfers into votes, we don’t yet know.

The rally has been called by the Londoners for Peace.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's The World at One this afternoon, Livingstone said he did not trust the way YouGov collected their data.

"I have great doubts about opinion polls based on people you can reach over the internet as one third of Londoners are not on the internet," he said.

The mayor's campaign announced this morning that it was launching an official complaint against YouGov's polls on the London election, saying that their methodology was "fundamentally flawed".

A spokeswoman for the Labour candidate said in a statement: "YouGov's polls are misleading the public and we have therefore decided to make a formal complaint."

She said that the market research company was weighting responses from certain age groups in London and did not take into account the "much larger" ethnic-minority population in the capital.

"These and other mistakes mean that they consistently overestimate support for the Conservatives in London compared to established polling techniques," she said.

The mayor's office made a similar challenge to a YouGov poll last week, which put him 10 points behind Johnson. Livingstone complained that the results were "implausible" as the polls had assumed that the proportion of black and Asian voters in London was the same as for the UK as a whole.

The Guardian's last ICM poll on the London mayoral race, published on April 2, had Johnson on 51% to Livingstone's 49%, once second preferences had been allocated under the capital's alternative-vote system.