How Boris rode his buses into a ditch
As the man who first exposed the financial inexactitude behind Boris Johnson’s “new Routemaster” proposals I’ve got to say I’m amazed that six week later he’s still getting his abacus in a twist about the cost of the scheme.
Actually, other people are in a muddle about it too, but Boris’s latest comments are making matters even worse for him. The story so far:
Episode One: Boris tells Vanessa Feltz it would cost £8 million to put conductors on the existing bendy bus routes. The following day, Ken Livingstone claims it would cost £80 million, though his website swiftly reduces that to £70 million. They can’t both be right.
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Ken’s ad should have looked like this
Who said the London Mayor election was boring? I’ve seen more material YouTube material than I can post every day. Anyway. Some Ken supporter has made this video, which I think is actually quite good, even if Ken wouldn’t run it himself.
Embarassing endorsements?
A few weeks ago, Tory Mayoral candidate Boris Johnson was endorsed by the fascist British National Party. His response was swift, short, and sweet:
I utterly and unreservedly condemn the BNP and have no desire whatsoever to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter
This week, Labour and Liberal Democrats were placed in pretty much the same situation by the Muslim Association of Britain. Candidates should likewise reject with alacrity, the endorsement of this extreme right-wing organisation.
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Politics and the transfer market
With recent reports suggesting that the government might introduce the Alternative Vote (AV) system for elections to the House of Commons, the issue of how preferences transfer between parties is becoming a hot political topic.
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The far left, far right and working class votes
So much for that old labour movement slogan about unity being strength; Marxists of one description or another are contesting seats in the London elections on no fewer than five separate tickets.
The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped up borough council that is the Greater Rubberstamp Assembly hardly represents Britain’s most puissant political body, is it? What does it matter that not a single socialist candidate has even a remote chance of success?
Well, it does matter, and this is why. The British National Party is looking good to secure at least one and possibly even two seats. That will confer on it greater legitimacy and a better platform than it has ever previously enjoyed.
The truth is that the BNP has built itself – in the outer eastern suburbs of London, anyway – primarily by articulating real working class grievances. Socialists that still espouse class politics need to ask themselves why the far right is succeeding where the far left has so completely failed.
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Smearing Ken Livingstone
Over at LibDemvoice Peter David has said why he will hold his nose and vote for Livingstone as a second choice, on the back of Boris’s disastrous appearance on Newsnight.
Let me state from the outset I’ve been more a critic of KL than an ardent supporter. But some of these criticisms don’t stand up.
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Immigration is also a feminist issue
Every single candidate for the London mayoral elections in May – even Tory Boris Johnson – supports an amnesty which would allow illegal immigrants living in the UK for four years or more to follow a “path to citizenship”, The Independent reported yesterday.
Last month Mr Livingstone called for a “fresh start”, with a one-off amnesty for migrants without “regular status”, in spite of his party’s stance. “Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK,” he said. “To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them.”
This is really good news.
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Mayoral candidates launch election broadcasts
The election broadcasts for all candidates were launched last night.
Ken and Brian have their videos on YouTube while Sian Berry’s website has no such interactivity – a huge shame. And I can’t be bothered to promote Boris. So here they are:
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Which way is progress?
What does that term “progressive” mean? It’s a bit of a composite, one that strives to encompass social liberalism and economic leftism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, feminism and so on – an umbrella term, perhaps, for things that most conservatives dislike. It stands too for resistance to unaccountable and over-concentrated wealth and power, demanding that these things should be shared out and devolved for the benefit of the largest possible numbers of people.
If we accept that as a reasonable rough definition, who is the most progressive candidate for London mayor? The answer is not straightforward. Livingstone, of course, claims the progressive high ground and is calling for Green, Lib Dem and far Left sympathisers to join him there. He does so with some justice. In his GLC past he took the lead in campaigning against racism and for gay rights in the teeth of seething opposition. With public transport he championed and imposed cheap fares “on the rates”, driving his enemies madder still by becoming popular for doing it. Today, the green lobby lauds him as a trail blazer in tackling climate change and seeking to restrain car use.
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I got Ken Livingstone
Unlock Democracy have lauched a new site – VoteMatch – which tells you the candidate best suited to policies you agree or disagree with. It’s a great tool, so do use it. Apparently Ken Livingstone should be my first choice and Sian Berry my second. Find out if you’ll be surprised too and let us know in the comments.
BNP backs Boris, Paddick piles in
Here’s one endorsement he can probably live without.
The British National party has called on its supporters to give their second-preference votes in the London mayoral election to the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson.In a statement posted on its website today, the far-right party advised people to award its own mayoral candidate, Richard Barnbrook, their first-choice vote, and “the Tory clown Johnson” their second because he was the lesser of two evils.
Libdem candidate Brian Paddick has just released a statement saying:
Clearly the BNP have recognised Boris’s talent for causing offence and creating division. This should be a wake-up call for all decent people who could vote in the Mayoral elections to register their vote. The more votes there are for mainstream parties, the less chance there will be to give racists and extremists a seat.
We need a Mayor who does not make offensive remarks, who does not take sides and who will put all his efforts into uniting all Londoners whatever their background.
Update: A Guardian/ICM poll puts Ken and Boris neck-to-neck.
When Greens go Brown…
What’s in it for them, eh? That must have crossed your mind on reading this chirpy piece from Green London mayoral candidate Siân Berry in the New Statesman hitching her wagon to the Labour party. continue reading… »
Brian Paddicks hires the ‘blogfather’
I was alerted to this blog-post in the morning, saying that Brian Paddick had hired Jerome Armstrong to head up his intenet strategy. Now this is very interesting to a political/technology geek such as yours truly because:
- Armstrong runs MyDD, one of the most influential Democrat blogs;
- He co-wrote the book Crashing the Gate along with Markos of Daily Kos – the book on forging a new progressive alliance in the US;
- He advised Howard Dean for his 2004 presidential race, using the web to great effect.
Now, Mark Pack has confirmed it.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner…
… that I’d rather not support Ken Livingstone for Mayor? Somehow I just can’t muster any massive enthusiasm for Livingstone, nor do I feel the chilling terror of his major opponent (Tory buffoon Boris Johnson) that the Mayor’s re-election campaign appears to be trying to instil in the electorate. To hear the statements coming from some of Livingstone’s supporters you’d think that this was a race between Che Guevara and some kind of combination of Adolf Hitler and Satan, and I just can’t see what is effectively a council election on steroids in such apocalyptic terms. I also, try as I might, just can’t bring myself to like the oleaginous Livingstone, who is still trying to morph himself from his previous status as a grinning celebrity chat show guest, to having some kind of political gravitas. Ironically of course, Johnson is a product of the same media clowning circuit that Livingstone is. Bojo versus Bozo – what an appetising choice for the people of London. continue reading… »
Vote Green and Ken?
[Note: LC's been had some server issues yesterday. I blame the weather]
The Green Party’s Sian Berry and Ken Livingstone have made a pact to sort-of endorse each other. More than anything, the move says Ken is seriously worried about his re-election chances.
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Labour’s schoolgirl crush on the super-rich
Peter Mandelson famously proclaimed in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. One decade later, the government’s mood is not just chilled out but positively euphoric. That’s the clear message in a speech that business and enterprise secretary John Hutton – pictured – will deliver tomorrow, anyhow:
Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country
… he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.
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Defining the crime of aggression
Iraq has become the elephant in the room in some discussions of international relations amongst a certain section of liberal-left opinion. David Miliband opened his recent speech about democracy by saying that it had ‘clouded the debate’ about how to promote this, but the main lesson he seemed to draw from it is that future ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions.’
The speech was actually more thoughtful than this extract suggests, but by failing to make it clear the exact circumstances in which the British government would use military force, the Foreign Secretary tied himself to a policy which by every measurable standard has been a complete disaster.
The invasion of Iraq was illegal.
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The reassertion of our social democracy
If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become de-ideologised.
No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.
Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.
That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of ‘golden mean’ to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.
Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.
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Can Gordon Brown make a comeback?
[This article is a prelude to the Fabian Society's 'Fabian Review' new year editorial, published on January 3rd. It was previewed in Sunday's Observer.]
Whose has been the greatest political fightback of all time? The championship bout of our times would be between John ‘Soapbox’ Major, who won an unwinnable election in 1992, and Bill ‘Comeback Kid’ Clinton, reduced to lame duck status by Newt Gingrich’s revolution just two years into his Presidency.
While Harold Macmillan’s ability to turn the Suez debacle into a Tory landslide has many contemporary parallels, the all-time champion of champions has to be Harry Truman, able to brandish the famous headlines ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ after his surprise Presidential victory sixty years ago.
After Gordon Brown’s Autumn horribilis, it may be little Christmas consolation to think that others have dug themselves out of considerably larger holes than he finds himself in. Labour has been buffeted by events ever since a hubristic party conference.
The result is that the Conservatives are now favourites to win the next general election. That, of course, is the threat to Brown. The fightback strategy he needs depends on realizing how he could yet turn it into his opportunity too.
As I argue in an editorial in the Fabian Review new year issue. Like Harry Truman, embracing the status of the underdog could be the key to political recovery.
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Clegg and the Digital Revolution
At the Social Market Foundation on Wednesday, Liberal Democrat Leadership Candidate Nick Clegg began a speech by outlining the technological context of 21st Century politics. It is a good approximation of my own view. He said:
… the innovations and technological advances that are already shaping and defining the 21st century – Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube – are about something very different: they are about creating the tools that will enable people to deliver services to each other.
The old model was about constructing the institutional hardware of the paternalistic state. The new model is about developing the democratic software of the empowered society. The old model was controlled by a professional elite. The new model is operated by ordinary people.
…
This is the great paradox of our times: in our private and professional lives, we have never been more empowered.But in our relationship with the state, we have never been so powerless. And make no mistake; it is the poorest and the most vulnerable amongst us who lose out the most.
Mr Clegg’s campaign website has the full text (in which he goes onto propose that LEAs and PCTs be directly elected), and I’ve quoted the introduction at more length at my own place, if you’re interested.
Clegg is often viewed as being on the right of his party, but this introduction looks like a left-wing analysis to me. As I tried to articulate in Graachi’s post (which discussed What Blogging Can and Can’t Achieve), the attraction of blogging and the wider digital revolution, is in its potential to redress the power imbalance, leaking power from the elites to the masses. Does Clegg’s talk of “delivering services to each other” spring from the Right’s affection for the free market and the choices of individuals, or from the Left’s long held belief that we can achieve more through collective action, than we can alone? Given the free and social nature of blogging, YouTube and the political campaigns we see online, I’m inclined towards the latter view.
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» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
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» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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