Posts Tagged ‘Green-Party’

If you have a chance to vote in the election for the London mayor today, please, please stop Boris Johnson being elected. He may play the loveable buffoon, but the reality is that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a hard-right Thatcherite, who:

• despises anyone not of his class
• was pro-Iraq war
• was against the Kyoto treaty
• is against the minimum wage
• was fired as a journalist from The Times for making up quotes
• will not back Ken Livingstone’s pledge to make 50 per cent of all new homes cheap enough for ordinary workers

He has expressed racist, sexist and homophobic opinions over the years, including such gems as:

Right, let’s go and look at some more piccaninnies.

Boris Johnson speaking to UN workers and their black driver in Uganda.

He liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.

Boris Johnson on Bush

Whenever (he) appears on TV … I find a cheer rising irresistibly in my throat.

Boris Johnson on Bush

Gay marriage can only ever be a ludicrous parody of the real thing.

Boris Johnson on homosexuality

the most dangerous thing [on roads]

Boris Johnson on pedestrians

I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me, Nihal

Boris Johnson speaking about race with Nihal Arthanayake, BBC Asian Network

In short, Boris Johnson is not fit to run/represent a city, and would be an absolute bloody nightmare for London.

Today’s Guardian has various Londoners, some of them slebs, imagining what it would be if Boris Johnson became mayor.

How to keep out Boris … whatever your politics

If you passionately want to keep Boris out

1st Choice Ken
2nd Choice Anyone except Boris

If you don’t like Ken, but want to keep Boris out at all costs

1st Choice Not Ken or Boris
2nd Choice Ken

If you’re still not sure who to vote for, the Vote Match site will tell you which candidate most closely matches your views. This is what it came up with for me:

I’ll be voting for Siân Berry (Green) as my first choice, and Ken as my second choice. As Ms Berry says,

I’m after every first preference vote I can get in this election, and pointing out wherever I can that there’s no risk of letting in Boris Johnson by putting me first and Ken Livingstone second. If you already support the Greens, or if you are fed up with Ken, but anxious not to turn our city over to the Tories, this is probably the ideal combination of votes.

I’m not a big fan of Ken any more and it pains me to vote for a New Labour candidate, but it’s the only way to stop Boris Johnson. (Interestingly, the Federation of Small Businesses has said that the Green Party manifesto is best for small businesses.)

As Chicken yoghurt says,

If Boris Johnson does get voted in on Thursday, a law should be passed immediately prohibiting Londoners from making jokes about George W Bush. Only fair, I think.

The next Lib Dem or Labour person I catch putting a campaign leaflet through my letterbox is going to be limping away with their remaining local election material protruding from their backside.

I have a ‘No junk mail please’ sticker on my letterbox (which actually works a treat when it comes to takeaway food and double glazing flyers), but for some reason the political parties don’t think it applies to them. Over the last month, barely a day has gone by when I haven’t had something in the post or delivered by hand from Labour or the Lib Dems, telling me why I should vote for them, how much they’re doing for East Dulwich etc. (amazing how interested they are in my views in the weeks leading up to an election). I’ve never known an election like it.

It’s not just campaign printed material either; I been phoned three times, and had a Labour councillor turn up at the door. I rather enjoyed that one — I almost felt sorry for him by the time I’d finished with him.

For a split second I considered giving him my standard response to anyone from Nu Labour — ‘Fuck off’ — but then I thought a) it would be fun to let him know exactly why I will never vote Labour again, and b) the more time he spends talking to me, the less time he has for trying to convert genuine floating voters.

It started with him asking me if I knew who I’d be voting for on 4th May, and I replied Green. ‘Well we’re not sure if they’ll be fielding any candidates yet,’ he responded. This was a bare-faced lie; at the last local election, the Green Party came second after Labour in this ward (the top three candidates are elected, and the Green candidates came 4th and 5th), so of course they would be fielding candidates.

Next, the councillor asked me if I would consider voting Labour, at which point I explained that I used to vote Labour, but will never do so again. I then spent several minutes going through some of the reasons for this: the destruction of our basic civil rights under the guise of prevention of terrorism, the National Identity database, the government’s inaction on climate change, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, PPP/PFI schemes, the war in Iraq, our dodgy MP Tessa Jowell and her dodgy husband, and of course Tony Blair.

‘But these are local elections,’ replied the Labour councillor rather forlornly.

My resonse was that a) these issues are far more important than any local ones, b) he was standing under the banner of the Labour Party - if he didn’t want to be associated with their policies, he should stand as an independent, and c) if Labour do well in the local elections, Tony Blair will take it as a vindication of his policies and become smugger than ever.

The councillor looked rather deflated by the time he left me.

His ‘but it’s a local election’ line was rather undermined by the latest Labour election leaflet to come through the door. In it, they make a big deal about the Lib Dems’ national policy of wanting to give prisoners the right to vote. Not just prisoners mind, but ‘prisoners like Ian Huntley’. Jesus fucking wept, was the leaflet written by sub editor at the Sun? Or is it just some sort of Brasseye parody I’m not aware of?

(Well, as a matter of fact, I do think prisoners should have the right to vote in elections. What are Labour afraid of? That the ‘Let All Criminals Out of Prison’ party will win a landslide victory? The vast majority of people in prison are not child killers, and are serving relatively short sentences. Surely we should be doing everything we can to make prisoners realise that they do have a role to play in the wider community. People who feel disenfranchised and alienated by society, who feel that nobody cares or listens to them, are bound to find it easier to commit crimes against that society. Give them the vote, give them some responsibility, make them feel like, to coin a Nu Labour favourite, stakeholders. It can’t do any harm, and who knows, it might do a tiny bit of good.)

Anyway…

I suppose I ought to follow up my previous posts with a comment on the election result.

Sadly the Lib Dems didn’t manage to unseat the Labour MP here, so Dulwich residents are going to be suffering from another four years of Irritable Jowell Syndrome. Her majority did go down by about 4,000, mostly in favour of the Lib Dems, but it still wasn’t close enough for me to feel guilty about voting Green. Around here, the Green candidate received 6.5 per cent of votes, and increase of 1.5%.

This election did nothing to restore my faith in this country’s so-called democracy; despite winning no more than 35 per cent of votes, Labour was still able to secure a comfortable majority of 67. Only 20 per cent of eligible voters voted Labour — the lowest figure in modern times — yet they’re allowed to run the country (in fact more people chose not to vote than actually voted for this government). Not to mention the 39 police investigations into allegations of postal ballot fraud. Clearly less keen on democracy at home than abroad… do as we say, not as we do.

The media must take a lot of the blame for the situation though. They consitently failed to raise many important issues, and tended to pose the most light-weight questions to the politicians. Paxman v Blair was pathetic (and Paxman’s Galloway interview made him look like a sad parody of himself worthy of Chris Morris). John Pilger’s written a good piece on this for the New Statesman:

The media coverage of this past election was a pastiche. Our right to know what our rulers are doing to people the world over is being lost in the new propaganda consensus.

And of course no sooner are Nu Labour back in power than they’re up to their old tricks. First Mandelson, now Blunkett…. Why do they call it a resignation? If a minister has done something that warrants resigning over, why should they be allowed back into government a few months later? That’s not resigning, that’s keeping your head down until the storm blows over and the media move on to another story. In other words, a bit of a holiday. Not even an unpaid holiday in Blunkett’s case — Blair allowed him to keep his grace-and-favour London residence and ministerial Jag.

In fact, since being forced to resign, Blunket has reportedly made £70,000 from extra-parliamentary work. This includes ignoring anti-sleaze guidelines and taking a job with Indepen Consulting Ltd, receiving between £15-20,000 from them. The company helps its clients develop a “relationship” with government; clients include Anglian Water, South West Trains, Thames Water, MM02 and T Mobile. Looks like I’m going to have to get my Blunkett Voodoo Doll out again.

In case anyone’s interested, I ended up voting Green. Just hope to God Tessa Jowell doesn’t beat the Lib Dems by one vote….

Isn’t it amazing how MPs suddenly get interested in their constituents’ views in the weeks before an election? I’ve had several letters, a paper and a questionnaire from my MP Tessa Jowell (archetypal Blairite with allegedly very dodgy husband) in the last month. If only she’d been as keen to hear my thoughts and actually reply to the numerous faxes and emails I’ve sent her over her last term.

Sadly for Tessa, her recent efforts have been in vain — she gets my vote straight after I’ve stuck rusty needles into my eyes. That said, with only a few hours to go before polling stations open, I still haven’t decided who to vote for…. At the last election, Jowell received 21,000 votes, giving her a majority of over 12,000. The Tories and Lib Dems received about 8,600 and 5,800 votes respectively, with the Greens in fourth place with nearly 2,000. So where do I make my mark?

• Option 1: Lib Dem
  I’m guessing that the Lib Dems will eat into that majority to a certain degree, but will it be enough to make Jowell sweat? If they stand the remotest chance of unseating her, then I should probably vote for the Lib Dems — of the main three parties, they’re certainly closest to my views. However, I can’t really see them gaining another 15,000 votes, in which case, at best, my vote would only send a ‘message’ about the issues I feel are important — in which case I should go for…
• Option 2: Green
  The Greens’ policies are probably closest to my own, and sadly climate change, transport and other environmental issues have hardly been mentioned by the main parties in the run up to the election. The Greens have also taken a stronger anti-war stance than the Lib Dems. So if my I’m just going to be making a protest vote, then I should probably vote Green.
• Option 3: Spoil My Ballot
  At the end of the day I have major reservations about the UK’s version of ‘democracy’, in which a very small proportion of the electorate actually decide who governs the country, with the majority of votes being discarded. Also the party whip system is totally undemocratic, often allowing party leaders to force MPs vote against the wishes or best interests of their constituents. So rather than endorse a system I have no faith in, maybe I’ll draw my own box and mark it ‘I vote for PR‘. I could just not vote, but I feel spoiling the ballot paper makes it clearer that I’m not just apathetic.

Perhaps I should have just registered to vote by post, and let someone else decide for me.