dom.blog

I’m annoyed with the Tories. It’s coming in waves at the moment: some days I even slightly look forward to the next government coming along just to put Labour out of its misery, and besides, it might put Ken in a better position to regain London in 2012 off the back of a fading Cameron honeymoon. (Cloud, silver lining, desperate hope, me? Never!) But at the same time they are just so singularly irritating. At least back when they were the nasty party you knew that voting Tory meant a vote for publicly flogging ruffians, the NHS reduced to a singular travelling carnival (limited seasonal availability – please book in advance) and the privatisation of all breathable air into fifty seven gaseous franchises to be owned and operated by companies specifically chosen for their ability to hire older, half-dead Tories as chairmen of the board. (Chairmen, yes.)

(OK OK, I’ll be straight with you – I don’t really have a tattoo, and the title was just a ruse to get you to read at least part of a political post, which no one ever does. Sorry. You can storm off in a huff now… but wouldn’t you like to stick around to see what happens next?)

But in this bold new age of the Cameron, the Conservative and Happy-Smiley-Cuddly Party have ditched all that in favour of utter blandness, in order to reassure you that when they win the next election they will be ever so careful with the country and not mess it up even a little bit. And, sure, that’s progress of a sort. But I sincerely hope that no-one really thinks they have the faintest idea of doing anything big, bold and good. Boris is right: the Tory administration in London will prove a test-bed for the next government, and that means a government of low-level incompetence – infuriating to anyone who watches it closely enough, but not splashy and exciting enough for the papers to notice. Take the latest from City Hall: star appointment Tim Parker resigns on the basis that Boris has finally realised – months after being elected – that becoming Mayor of London and promptly handing over TfL to someone else is a bit like a pilot wandering down the aisle of a plane asking if anyone else fancies a go at flying the thing.

(If I had got a tattoo, what would it have been of? Hopefully something geeky and obscure, like </head> on the back of my neck. Although I think it’s been done, and it wouldn’t validate anyway. Bah.)

I honestly have not met a single person who thinks they know what Cameron’s government would actually do. I know they’ve carefully identified tax cuts which will deliver the maximum benefit to the very poorest in society, like inheritance tax and stamp duty. I know they’re going to do away with Labour’s out-dated top-down target-based hyphen-loving culture for public services and instead introduce things like (to quote directly) “a national focus on the health outcomes we want the NHS to deliver”. But most importantly of all, I know they’re determined to tackle Britain’s ‘broken society’, even though Boris Johnson thinks the very idea is piffle. Oh, really? I’ll sit down and shut up then, because even though the risk of my being repeatedly stabbed by a gang of vicious drunken yobs is about as high as the likelihood that anyone is still reading this you can never be too careful, especially given that a guy in an orange top gave me an odd stare on the way home today, and he might just be the harbinger of fatal doom. So, anyway, what you got Dave?

(Why not get a tattoo which looks like the surface of a pavement? Potential stabbers would just look right through you, and you could continue in your merry invisible way as long as you stayed away from any countryside. And let’s face it: crime just doesn’t happen there.)

With a probable recession looming, increased levels of government borrowing and tight budgets all round, the Tories have decided that they would go ahead and mend our ‘broken society’ with tax breaks for married couples. Yes, seriously. As an ‘early priority’ and a ‘key policy’ no less. The mind just boggles.

I don’t even understand how the damn thing is supposed to help. OK, so let’s for (barmy) argument’s sake say that when a man and a woman go for a jolly outing to the registry office and return as severely-indebted man and wife they are blessed by Almighty God with the golden touch required to raise happy, well-adjusted (middle-class) children. That’s, ur, if they have children at all: but maybe there will be a special deployment of nudge + wink economics at this point to help the process along. Right, so redistributing money to these shining married beacons of happy, well-adjusted (middle-class) humanity away from single and unmarried parents – who, let us be reminded, are much crappier at being parents in the first place – will therefore help society because, ur, those in need of the most help will be left poorer in favour of extra cash to those already doing hunky dory? What?!

Oh, blimey. It’s just mad enough that Gordon Brown might copy it. What a depressing thought.

(Out in the real world, Tasha got fantastic GCSE results and Lucy came over to visit: we saw Mamma Mia in the cinema and Let There Be Love at the Tricycle. )

As this post publishes the polls in the London mayoral elections will have just closed, so if the tone is a bit defeatist at least this is coming out safely after every last vote has been cast! Hopefully tomorrow evening will have a surprise to celebrate about, but who can say…? Thanks to everyone who tried to stop him!

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Facebook recently threw open the floodgates for the ‘political views’ listing, which had hitherto been restricted to a bland spectrum from liberalism to conservatism, but can now be anything a user’s heart desires to display to the world on his or her profile. I settled on ‘optimistic liberal’ in the end, not wanting to launch into a fully fledged speech with about the same number of characters to use as a single text message. Andrew – a kindred spirit from Peterhouse – kindly asked me to elaborate, allowing me to set out my stall brimming with optimistic spirit about how far humanity has come, and how far we might be able to go, despite all the challenges, all the setbacks, and all the ugly realities. And in general, I fully believe it.

But there are moments.

On Wednesday I spent the early part of my evening stood outside King’s Cross tube station, handing out election fliers for Ken Livingstone to anyone who might mistake it for a freebie paper. The occasional nutter was pleasantly mild, and I was rather fond of the elderly avuncular Tory – and I’m making an assumption he was a Tory out of a very strong sense of instinct – who merrily put his arm around me and declared that he was awfully sorry but had already declared for another man. As a reward for my brief moments of sacrifice, I was given a free ticket to the Time Out mayoral hustings by the two Ken organisers, who were, incidentally, the kind of blokes you know are decent, hard-working and thoroughly good people within a fraction of a second.

Boris was skipping the hustings, so it was left to Ken, Brian and Siân (for the Greens) to produce a panel essentially united around progressive politics. So not terribly good argument, but uplifting all the same. If these are the people running, you can’t go wrong, right? Well wrong, of course, because of the looming figure of Boris. But y’know, it’s not even bloody Boris which dents my optimism. Nor even the swarm of loud-mouthed supporters who hung around outside in matching Back Boris shirts chanting various pieces of nonsense. No, because it’s a democracy and they represent a legitimate viewpoint, so let them have their piece. The depressing thing is knowing that Lynton Crosby is hanging around backstage, managing it all, out of sight and out of mind to most of us.

But even this pales into insignificance when I come home to read of the BNP’s candidate forced to withdraw after writing that rape is “simply sex” and “cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal”. This man was second in line in London: if the BNP won two Assembly seats, he’d have been there, drawing a salary from us as a spokesman for London. I think I can be forgiven for letting that dent my optimism just a little bit – though, on the other hand, it heartens the spirit to see the Boris folk singing from the same hymn-sheet as us when it comes to the BNP.

Having said that, I cannot ignore the people who are “not racist” and “not sexist” and “appalled” and “shocked” and “sickened” and all the rest of it, yet spout regressive beliefs as if it were a natural reflex. Lynton Crosby plays the politics of fear and division to put people into power: for every hardening of people’s attitudes towards ‘others’, he should feel ashamed, though of course he never will. Columnists from Richard Littlejohn to Peter Hitchens attack the BNP, yet all the time make it more and more likely that people will turn to them. And to you, JF, to you who casually sneer at the ‘feminist left’ and blog in what I can’t quite decide is mock or real ignorance: be honest with yourself, for you could so easily have been the one to write – without thinking, but with a casually different contextual spin – “I’ve never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth”.

I’ll calm down now Sincere apologies to my sister who sensibly wrote that “I way prefer bullet points of what you’ve done then long theoretical debates or Ken propaganda!”

Sorry Abbi, but I’m going to have to pre-empt your feature on the London Mayoral elections. Then again, maybe it may help to influence you!

The London Mayor is a funny institution, but it’s also tremendously accountable. You’re voting for a single individual, not a broad coalition of MPs, and they are thus empowered to put forward policies which are more original, more daring, then a party ever could be. It hardly has to be said that Ken Livingstone played an important role in shaping the post: as an independent in his first term, he defined the office as being more than a puppet spokesman for party, and given the state of party politics in Britain today I think anyone should be grateful for that! But the flip-side is that if we as voters get it wrong, we get it very wrong, because we’ve put one person in charge of vast swathes of London’s services, so they better be able to handle it.

This election will come down, ultimately, to Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson. According to a recent Evening Standard opinion poll – and yes, the Evening Standard have hardly been the most impartial of observers – Boris is currently soaring ahead with 49% of first-preference votes. If he got 50%, he would win outright. Less than 50% and it comes down to second-preference votes being added to the final two candidates.

As funny as he undoubtedly is, Boris is at heart a right-wing Conservative. This is a huge problem given that the most important area of control for the Mayor is transport. However you feel about right-wing Conservatives, I believe they are at their worst when it comes to transport.

But what’s Ken Livingstone’s record on transport? Well, as much as Londoners enjoy complaining about it, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that it hasn’t improved. The Oyster card. 90p buses, and many more of them. Free bus travel for children. A seventh carriage on the Jubilee line. Siverlink taken back into public control with London Overground, which will result in new trains over the next few years. Crossrail given the go-ahead to be built. For god’s sake, the other day TfL even nationalised Croydon Tramlink – the type of headline you really don’t get very often.

Compare this to the £1.50 paper-tickets of buses in Birmingham (sorry) and elsewhere. Compare this to the privatised train companies in London, who have taken years and years to accept Oyster and are still dragging their feet on it. These are reflections of what happens when you let the Conservatives run transport: sold off to the highest bidder, split up and run for profit in natural monopolies which you can’t do anything about. These are Boris Johnson’s core instincts. Would he keep trying to persuade the government to give the Southern franchise to TfL in the next stage of London’s integrated transport? No, of course not – he’d be too busy faffing about with spending hundreds of millions of pounds replacing bendy buses and posing as tough on crime. He hasn’t a clue.

So essentially, I am hopeful that people who value London’s unique transport – and the improvements going into it – turn up to support Ken Livingstone, the man with the track record of change for the better. And I also hope that those who aren’t willing to vote for Ken as their first choice – possibly to support the Lib Dems, for example, who have an excellent candidate – consider at least putting Ken Livingstone as their second choice, to help fight off a Boris victory.