The British like naughty. Labour seems so dour and serious in comparison.
So Boris is really quite popular, because so many morons think a bit of naughty will do London some good - and it'll be two fingers to that grumpy old git Ken with his bolshy ways, his congestion charge, and his ferrets.
That's about the level of discourse we can look forward to.
and his ferrets
?
Don't tell me he went all Rudy Mussolini on London. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
But the point is that being a former police commander doesn't make Paddick automatically the strongest candidate on crime, especially in the eyes of the press. And, on this note, the promised authoritarian bend of Ken Livingstone: he didn't just say that crime has improved in London because he's puched for having more police on patrol, but that he referred to Rudolph Guiliani as a model a couple of times. Here he had a debate with Paddick on crime figures. Ken had promised that following the Guiliani model and bringing more police on the street would eventually reduce crime by 50% - we're clearly not there yet. The issue is that the Metropolitan Police's own statistics show a 20%-25% decrease in crime figures but Paddick pointed out the British Crime Survey (apparently based on a few thousand interviews with residents) which doesn't show a decline in the incidence of crime.
I don't think Livingstone is an idiot - he's at least tried to put together some kind of transport plan for London, which is more than Boris will do. And he wasn't popular with Blair and Brown for his very public dislike of the PPP schemes which he was forced to use - one of which wasted at least £3bn of public money for very little result.
But he has drited towards authoritarianism, which isn't going to win him any votes.
Like Nu Labour, if he loses it's going to be because of popularity, not because of his actual record - which isn't an unmitigated success, but is probably as good as anyone can expect from the current crop of UK politicians.
I have nostalgic reasons for liking him. When he was head of the GLC during Thatcher's hell-in-a-handbasket years, he tried to cut the cost of using tubes and busses down to positively European levels - at least until Thatcher abolished the GLC from under him.
So I think his intentions are good, but he does have an egomaniac side which doesn't make him very likeable, and often leaves him less effective than he could be.
Not that I'd expect Livingstone to be anything other than an idiot on policing, this being the guy who has apparently turned London, with the help of Parliament, into Airstrip One minus the "steamers". Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
