I think my head just asploded. I’m usually the first person to step up and defend the intelligence of the British people (despite a lot of examples to the contrary) and more so Londoners as the population of one of the greatest cities in the world. But seriously people.
What.
The.
Fuck.
You’d rather have Boris Johnson, a man who compares gay marriage to bestiality, to Ken Livingston, who has been doing the job extremely well for the last eight years. Ken, who has a proven track record on things like housing, maintaining public spaces, encouraging green policies, getting traffic off the road (congestion charge, a scheme cities all over the world are adopting because it’s been so successful)… And you’ve gone for Boris Johnson. Boris FUCKING Johnson.
The man knows nothing about London government, has said he thinks that the financial centre of Britain, the City, needs to be further deregulated (despite the massive amounts of deregulating having helped contribute to the economic crap fest we’re currently experiencing), a man whose solution to easing passenger congestion in London would be to build another airport outside of London (an area outside of the mayor’s jurisdiction). And apparently affordable housing, a burning issue for people given how expensive London is to live in, doesn’t figure on your radar at all.
Why else is Boris Crap?
[ul]
[li] opposition to the Kyoto protocol on climate change (which every single developed country in the world apart from Bush’s USA has now signed up to, indicating that he is more right-wing than any developed country outside America)[/li][li] opposition to the Minimum Wage[/li][li] support for rail privatisation[/li][li] opposition to the congestion charge[/li][li] opposition to paternity leave[/li][li] the belief that South Africa under Nelson Mandela represents “the majority tyranny of black rule”[/li][/ul]
I mean seriously, I could understand people not wanting to vote for a Labour candidate at the moment (and this was reflected resoundingly in the local elections) but there were plenty of other candidates you could have gone for other than BORIS FUCKING JOHNSON!!!
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be exploring relocation opportunities outside of London.
Ah, but he’s funny, isn’t he? Good old Boris, the loveable buffoon.
Except he isn’t. He’s a narrow-minded racist snob, who understands nothing about this city and the people who live it, and I find it actually humiliating that he’s our elected representative, especially during a time (2012 Olympics) when he’ll be representing us to the world.
[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus]
[li] opposition to the Kyoto protocol on climate change (which every single developed country in the world apart from Bush’s USA has now signed up to, indicating that he is more right-wing than any developed country outside America)[/li][/QUOTE]
Even a Hammer finds a nut once in awhile. I don’t see America signing up for the next lemming-emulation competition either, I guess we should since everyone else is. The rest of his opinions as per your list I don’t agree with, though.
First off: I’m not a Londoner. If I were I probably would have voted for Ken.
But the invective in the the left wing press was scaremongering at its best, as if Boris and his Tory chums would be chasing Muslims through the streets on horseback (an image cheerfully stolen from a Comment Is free poster). John Harris in the Guardian today believes that London’s status as a world city is now under threat.
It is articles like this hyperbolic hatchet job by Zoe Williams on polling day that play straight into Boris’s hands.
Patronizing and denigrating voters like the OP oh-so-cleverly does by questioning their mental acuity is precisely why many liberal left leaning people like me and you Illuminatiprimus are disliked, and perhaps why so many Londoners decided to give Ken a bloody nose.
A message to Left wingers everywhere: condescension isn’t attractive.
Which other candidates? We had a very poor selection. Most of them are very much single issue (Abolish the congestion charge, Green party) unprofessional (Brian Paddick lost it with an interviewer), unthinkable (BNP) or unpopular (UKIP, LL, CPA).
Left with Ken and Boris, considering Ken’s spent the last few months fighting corruption stories in the papers reminiscent of the GLC and having local councils publish council tax levels spilt into “Local services” and “Ken tax” the month before the elections, its not a shock Boris got it.
If you want to get really upset, why aren’t you more concerned that the BNP just got their first seat in the London Assembly?
Ok, who else other than Boris Johnson was the alternative candidate to Ken Livingstone.
After all, Ken is running a group enjoying cronyism, runs a bloated London Assembly and supports a party who decided to up the tax on the lowest paid people in the country.
Not to mention being anti-semitic and enjoying the company of people who say that suicide bombing and the destruction of sovereign nations is a good thing,
Frankly, I’m looking forward to having Boris in charge. It will be a good test to see if the Conservatives are ready to take charge in 2 years time or if they have not learned any of their lessons. In which case we are stuck with Mr Bean for another 4 years.
OOC: Illuminatiprimus, did you support Ken Livingstone or Frank Dobson in the first election?
I remember when Ken first won and your current diatribe was being spouted by the Labour Party. Who promptly bought him back when he proved them wrong.
Ken was a good mayor for the first four years, but the last four have not been so successful and given his associations it was time for him to go.
Don’t worry about it too much, Boris has already asked if Ken would be interested in working with him.
Of course, I guess you would have preferred if everyone had voted Brian Paddick instead.
I promise you, for all his faults, I’d still rather have 1,000 Borises over 1 GWB. Buffoonery aside, he’s intelligent, and a bleeding-heart librul compared to your fuckin’ idiot.
As a non-Londoner I am both enjoying mild schadenfreude and wide-eyed curiosity. I have, however, lived in his Henley constituency and it wasn’t exactly the jackbooted prison camp Londoners might fear.
That said, the capital’s mayoral office seems to have fewer checks and balances on it, as Ken’s incumbency has shown. I wonder how much time will be spent reversing Ken’s policies (will he chuck out the Congestion Charge?), or how much will be spent on adding brand new lunacies such as privatising the Tube.
Over here, in most places, “liberal” means big-government, high taxes, wreckless spending, and such — pretty much the opposite of what you might expect. Ask not what The State can do for you; ask what you can do for The State.
Are you alluding to the comment he made to a journalist, which was gleefully misinterpreted by the gutter press because it was actually an attack on the same gutter press, rather than a comment on the journalist’s being Jewish?
Well, London’s always going to be a hell hole either way, ;), but it seems to me that Mr. Livigston put aside some of his more extreme liberal views to become a very effective administrator for his city, plus he brought le Tour to London last year.
I thought the congestion charge was misguided at first, but from my visit last summer, it seemed like it worked very well, and I wish that something similar had been applied in New York as well. I mean, most everyone can afford $8 to go into the city during the day if they really have to, but it also prevents people from trying to commute by car.
Well, that’s the stereotype, but at this point that describes conservatives far more than liberals, except for the taxes. (Lower taxes and increase the budget? How can I lose?!)
Yes, these voters are such idiots. If only they would realize how dumb they are, and sit back and let the real experts manage their government for them.
The arrogance of this left-wing entitlement belief is absolutely astounding. Every vote is sacred, except when the voters are too foolish to realize the Left is in their best interests.
Shut the fuck up, you trog. Opposition to your pet projects is not a de facto sign of idiocy; reasonable people may reject the Kyoto protocols and minimum wage without being stupid. I’m not a Londoner, of course, but I’ll shed no tears to see Ken gone. But I recognize that he was well-intentioned, and a reasonable person whose goals I simply didn’t share. I don’t need to think him an idiot, or hold myself out as superior… just as someone who disagrees.
Apparently, the Left – at least the OP’s chunk of it – cannot fathom anything other than slavishly lockstep adherence to its dogma. Which is a shame, because he’s in a minority… but a vocal one, one that leaves a much more lasting impression than his reasonable brethern do. And one that gives the similarly situated idiots on the Right (think Ann Coulter et al) ammunition for their equally baseless generalizations about the opposition.
He won because he’s a celebrity and because he ‘might be a laugh’ IMO. I wonder how Paul Merton and Ian Hislop feel about their part in BOJO’s victory?
Anyway, seeing as how I don’t live in London, I’m going to love following all his gaffs from a safe distance.
I’m a Londoner. I don’t think Ken did a fantastic job - in fact I would be happy to point out problems under his term. Likewise I don’t think Boris is a enormously scary racist; I suspect that the terms he uses are a facet of his upbringing rather than any real wish to offend. I don’t know whether or not he harbours racist views, I just don’t feel it’s that obvious, and i’m surprised at the many people who tend to assume both that he’s an incompetent, scatterbrained moron, and a devious, cunning racist who means every word he says.
That said, I didn’t vote for the guy. And were he not as famous as he is, I suspect he would not have won. OTOH, I suppose i’d prefer to see whether he’ll fuck up the Mayoral job rather than seeing if he’ll fuck up the PM job, as he has been hinted at running for in the past.
Both sides have had the gutter press in action, only this time the Tories were better at it instead of Labour. Admittedly this time round, the London Evening Standard was as subtle as a sledgehammer, but they were fairly accurate in what they printed and got more attention in the mayoral election than most other newspapers.
However, if you were to believe everything written about Boris and Ken by them, then neither of them should be even in the running for Mayor.
As for the comment, here is the transcript of the conversation between Ken Livingstone and Oliver Finegold, the reporter.
He finally apologised for the statements nearly two years later after several rounds through the courts.
Just so you know it isn’t Bush’s United States of American it’s just the United States of America. Keep in mind that during the Clinton administration the United States still didn’t want anything to do with the Kyoto Accords.
