Posts in the ‘Recycling’ category

Why we must stop Boris at the polls today

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 1.26 by Mr. Stop Boris

The Tory Troll earlier posted a summing-up at the end of a 50-post campaign against Boris, which has been one of the best-researched and most strident on the web.

Here at the Stop Boris campaign, we have also been blogging for some time now, as a way of spreading the word about why we need to vote against Boris Johnson today.

Our campaign started in July last year, when it was first announced that Boris Johnson was going to put himself forward for the Conservative Mayoral candidacy. While most people dismissed him as a joke, it was clear to us that in modern politics, in a personality-driven campaign, there was a very real threat that Boris could be elected.

The Stop Boris group on Facebook was set up, and its Posted Items and Wall remained the focus of the campaign until March this year, when the idea of stepping things up with campaign posters first dawned.

Somewhere to host the posters was needed, and before we knew it we’d had the StopBoris.org domain and a nice chunk of web space donated to us, so it seemed rude not to set up a web site too.

Mrs. Stop Boris suggested she should create an accompanying application for Facebook users, which she did with aplomb, and tonight sees its user base on the verge of hitting 1,000.

A static web site proved, within just a few days of launch, inadequate for tracking a fast-moving campaign, rich in developments and arguments against Boris, so that’s where the Stop Boris blog came in, and it’s on researching and writing for this I’ve spent nearly every free moment for the past six weeks.

So I’m now able to look back over the 183 posts prior to this one that I’ve written on this blog, and bring you a summary of the compelling case against electing the woefully unsuitable Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, divided into 15 headings which seemed vaguely appropriate at the time…

Some links to posts are in bold/larger type, indicating some sort of relative importance in their subject area. I don’t pretend it’s been done in a scientific way, though.

The people who know Boris know he’s completely inappropriate to be Mayor

Of course, only those who aren’t desperate to get him elected are admitting it publicly. Even plenty of people who are in or support his own party are worried about the damage he’ll do to the Conservative brand if he becomes the most powerful Tory politician in Britain.

He holds offensive views that make him unsuitable to lead a diverse city

For years he filled his writing with outrageous statements, many of which he has refused to apologise for. Even when he has said sorry for things, it’s been a grudging apology riddled with caveats. Issues include homophobia and pandering to racists. No wonder the BNP have called on their voters to give him their second preferences.

His flagship policy is a complete and utter mess

The main policy associated with Boris for many months was his plan to replace bendy-buses with a "new Routemaster". It’s been discredited on so many grounds it’s extraordinary he’s still persisting with it.

He is by far the weakest candidate on tackling crime; his Mayoralty will see more deaths

He’s the only main candidate with no pledged target on cutting crime (he just whips up fear about it without being able to tackle it), and his Freudian slip shows this is because he knows his planned budget cuts will mean they can’t cut crime at all.

And while crime may well rise under Boris, so will pedestrian deaths on the roads as he reverse the progress that has been made in making London more pedestrian-friendly over the past few years.

He is atrocious on the environment

There’s a general consensus among environmentalists that Boris, a climate change denier and anti-Kyoto campaigner, would be a disaster on green issues the world over.

His entire campaign has been fake and micromanaged by Lynton Crosby, and he has never focused on the issues

He just knows a few focus-group tested lines but has no substance behind any of the sentences he’s learnt and certainly has no concrete policies to back them up. When asked about his own policies he instead turns everything into a tenuously linked and generally unfounded attack against Ken Livingstone.

Most of his policies are the stuff of cloud cuckoo land

He promises a no-strike deal with the RMT union. The RMT say they would never, ever, ever sign such a deal. It’s almost certain that they will go on strike if he tries to impose one, in fact. And that’s just one of his policies: the majority of the others are also fanciful. Or just rubbish.

He can’t be taken seriously

He’s built his entire career on being a buffoon, an idiot, a fool, a clown. He simply can’t be taken seriously. Imagine him trying to address the city after a terrorist attack? "How many are dead? Oh, cripes!"

He simply isn’t up to the job

He has a track record of incompetence, gaffes, sackings and not being able to take anything seriously or dedicate himself to anything for a prolonged period of time. And he’s barely managed to find anyone who’s willing to join his administration so who knows who’d end up doing any of the real work?

He only entered into this contest for a bit of self-publicity – he never actually wanted the job, but now he’s in too deep…

People have been underestimating his chances

Many anti-Boris people think he’s just a joke and there’s no serious chance of him getting the job. These people are complacent and might not get out and vote. They need to be alerted to the danger urgently and dragged to the polling stations! :)

He claims to support ‘zero tolerance’ but has broken the law a number of times himself

Evidently he thinks the law only applies to the little people, not VIPs like himself.

His campaign is riddled with outright dishonesty

His campaign team have been paying people to comment on blogs such as ours and The Tory Troll’s, pretending to be normal members of the public. Fortunately we exposed them and they then left us largely in peace.

Aside from that, the team have also been spreading various lies and half-truths to scare people into voting for Boris, who has let a number of lies slip himself.

His media cronies have run half his campaign for him

Certain nasty parts of the media have made no attempt at balanced coverage of this election, instead doing everything they can to discredit the current Mayor and promote Boris, despite there being no case for doing so. Just about all the newspaper leaders endorsing Boris failed to give a single positive reason to vote for him.

The Evening Standard’s own journalistic team even tore Boris’s manifesto to shreds while managing to pick only modest holes in Ken’s, yet their billboards and pages have teemed with anti-Ken, pro-Boris propaganda for months.

He doesn’t care about ordinary Londoners

He has no real roots here and is completely out of touch with the concerns and lives of everyday Londoners.

Campaign videos

Sometimes 25 pictures a second are worth 25,000 words a second, or something.

Campaign posters

They still hold true, seven weeks on from creating them.

How to stop Boris

So, all that said, here’s how to vote most effectively to stop Boris.

Good luck, Boris-stoppers.

This election is going to be extremely close. We need to get Boris-stoppers and Boris-sceptics to the polling stations in their millions.

Do whatever you can to encourage people to vote today and we can stop Boris.

A grassroots campaign taking on the might of the Standard and the Sun. Are you up for the fight? Let’s do it.

Posted in Blog, Blogs, Buses, Campaign, Channel 4, Conservatives, Crime, Cycling, Daily Mail, Diversity, Driving, Environment, Ethnic minorities, Evening Standard, Facebook, Gaffophobia, Getting an easy ride, Homosexuality, Housing, Incompetence, Lies, London Lite, Lynton Crosby, Manipulation, Media, Other candidates, Party Election Broadcasts, Personal life, Policies, Posters, Radio, Recycling, Satire, Stop Boris, Team, Telegraph, The Times, Transport, Underground, Voting, Web site, YouTube | 5 Comments »

Boris’s next enviro-pledge: encourage more waste and energy use

Thursday, 27 March 2008, 22.31 by Mr. Stop Boris

Boris has really surpassed himself with the naïvité of today’s policy announcement: give people vouchers in return for their recycling.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? On the surface of it, perhaps it does. But if you stop and think about it for longer than he evidently has, guess what? It turns out to be an illogical idea with a negative environmental impact.

The mantra of environmental experts when it comes to waste has long been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The point of this list is that they are in priority order. You should reduce your consumption of the planet’s resources as a top priority: if you never consume a resource, no environmental harm is done. You should reuse an item if at all possible - by refilling that water bottle you bought with tap water, you don’t need to buy another one, so although the initial purchase had an impact, that impact won’t be repeated as often.

Only after these two have been done as much as possible should you move on to actually disposing of something, by recycling it. Recycling takes energy, machinery, perhaps some extra materials, and of course big trucks driving around picking it all up. While it’s obviously preferable to landfill or incineration, it’s not a way to save the planet in and of itself, any more than eating two low-calorie ‘Diet’ chocolate bars is healthier than eating one. (Disappointing, I know.)

Boris’s plan is to weigh people’s recycling, and the heavier it is, the more vouchers they get given. This is rewarding people for breaking the first two rules as much as possible - the more you consume and then the less of it you reuse before recycling it, the more vouchers you will get! This is green politics for idiots - perhaps unsurprising when a prize idiot without the first clue about the environment is spearheading it.

I could go on longer about this but I won’t - instead I’ll point out another problem with this so-called policy.

The Mayor of London doesn’t actually have any powers over recycling. To call this a policy is therefore a bit rich - it’s more of an aspiration.

Boris reckons he’d get the London Boroughs on side, but that seems unlikely in most cases. Most boroughs have already chosen their path to encouraging recycling, and in many cases they’ve done so in ways that are fundamentally difficult to reconcile with this idea.

For instance, in response to media scare stories about charging people for waste collection by weight, several councils have made a point of publicising the fact that none of their bins or recycling receptacles contain microchips to enable this to happen, so their residents can sleep easy. Boris’s plan would therefore require a wholesale replacement of all those bins and boxes, to allow the weighed boxes to be traced back to the households in order to issue the vouchers.

Will the cash-strapped councils be expected to pay for all these new bins and any new technology? Or is Boris stumping up the money? Either way, it’ll be taxpayers’ money, which he’s usually pretty keen on saving. Oh and what are all these replacement plastic bins made from? Oh yes, oil. Good green policy, this.

If this policy is intended to save on waste going to landfill, as he claims, then the only way to do this is to do something based on the weight of waste going to landfill, but of course that would be more difficult to do as an incentive rather than a punishment.

Boris has long been an outspoken critic of anything with a whiff of punishment for polluting behaviour - e.g. describing the Low Emission Zone as “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe” - so he only wants to adopt incentives, not punishments. But then, one person’s incentive is another’s punishment - if the vouchers are all being funded out of tax, and some people get more of them than others, aren’t the ones receiving fewer vouchers effectively being punished?

So in summary, this policy is illogical, back-to-front and near-impossible to implement. No wonder Boris doesn’t want to discuss the issues.

Posted in Environment, Policies, Recycling | 4 Comments »