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From that Compass rebuttal, because it's worth quoting:
Before going on to the few detailed points the article does try to dispute we may note that the Evening Standard does not attempt to deny the great bulk of the material in the Compass dossier. Among other things that means admitting:
1. Boris Johnson supported the Iraq war
2. Boris Johnson supported both the election of George W Bush in 2000 and his re-election in 2004.
3. Boris Johnson opposed the Kyoto treaty on climate change and supported George Bush’s opposition to it
4. Boris Johnson strongly supports nuclear power
5. Boris Johnson, on more than one occasion, talked about black people as ‘picaninnies’, he has referred to Africans as having ‘watermelon smiles’, and claimed that the original inhabitants of Uganda were capable of only ‘instant carbohydrate gratification’.
6. Boris Johnson said that in South Africa under Nelson Mandela there was established the ‘majority tyranny of black rule’
7. Boris Johnson was prepared to discuss with Darius Guppy, who was later convicted of fraud, having a journalist Stuart Collier beaten up
8. Boris Johnson opposed the introduction of the national minimum wage
9. Boris Johnson opposed full pension rights for part time workers
10. Boris Johnson is against the Social Chapter of the EU and against its provision on paternity leave.
11. Boris Johnson is opposed to the congestion charge
12. Boris Johnson supports both fox and stag hunting
13. Boris Johnson opposed the repeal of Section 28 and Labour’s ‘appalling agenda’ of the teaching of homosexuality in schools’.
The other thing to bear in mind is that even if Johnson is the best possible version of him that has been painted - that is to say, a bumbling, apolitical clown - he is still looking to be the Tory candidate, and he will be running on a platform that is designed to appeal to voters who are dissatisfied with Ken Livingstone because their perception is that he is too left-wing, too liberal, too soft on crime, too much a champion of London's multi-culturalism. Because Ken has dared to tax the rich of Kensington and Chelsea, because he is not sufficiently Islamophobic, because he meets with and supports Hugo Chavez, because he does things like issue an official apology for London's role in the slave trade whilst the Labour government will not. To a large extent this perspective is accurate - Ken Livingstone, while far from perfect and clearly an egotist in the way so many mayors of major capital cities in the UK and US are, is genuinely to the left of the government, and genuinely more representative of the good things about London than a pessimist might hope for (compare, say, New York's last couple of mayors). His willingness to fly in the face of the ugliest kinds of mainstream media and public opinion represents what makes London a haven for so many people fleeing the backward ignorance of small towns and Middle England.
Whereas Boris? Boris is seen as the prefered alternative by all those fuckers who live outside of London and write letters to the Evening Standard or the shitty free papers they read as they commute in and out, in which they lambast Ken for crying about slavery and demand the repeal of the Human Rights Act, an even more racialised stop and search policy and "zero tolerance" (whatever that means). The idea of him (or anyone supported by the people who see Livingstone as thoroughly PC-gone-mad) becoming mayor terrifies me - it would feel like some last pillar crumbling. |
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