Posts in the ‘Daily Mail’ 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.

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Littlejohn backs Boris

Monday, 28 April 2008, 22.21 by Mr. Stop Boris

Could support from this **** be an even bigger embarrassment to Boris than the support of the BNP? Littlejohn and the BNP are certainly just as racist and just as misogynistic as each other.

In London, Livingstone is relying on a huge turnout among innercity Muslims.

If previous experience is anything to go by, "community leaders" will simply collect the ballot papers from bewildered Muslims, especially women, and "help" them cast their votes.

I await a statement from Boris that he "abominates" everything Littlejohn stands for and does not want a second preference vote from any Littlejohn reader.

P.S. It’s interesting that even Richard Littlejohn has his doubts:

We’ve all got our reservations but [Boris] deserves a go. If he screws up, we can kick him out in four years’ time.

Hmm. It’s a long time, four years.

Posted in Daily Mail, Diversity, Ethnic minorities, Media | No Comments »

Weak leadership

Saturday, 26 April 2008, 11.25 by Mr. Stop Boris

Have you ever attended an amateur debate, in which people have been given things to argue in support of which they don’t really believe themselves? They’ll give it their best shot, but underneath their rhetoric, it’s plain that they don’t really believe in the argument they’re putting across.

Which brings me to today’s newspaper leader columns.

The Times

The Times spends some time highlighting Ken Livingstone’s achievements in office, then bizarrely talks about him offering "more of the same" (which surely doesn’t sound too bad in the light of his achievements?).

They gloss over Brian Paddick as an acceptable alternative, without really explaining why: "He has at no second offered compelling reasons why he should be in the mayor’s chair", a statement which could equally describe the overwhelmingly negative campaign of Boris Johnson.

Then they alight on Boris.

There is plainly an element of risk in backing Mr Johnson. Newspapers have fretted about endorsing him precisely because journalists know Mr Johnson, a fellow journalist, so well and they know he has a history of letting people down.

That a sentence like that can appear in a leader called Boris Johnson for London is extremely revealing about how little their heart is in this recommendation.

They say that "the thrust" of Boris’s "policy suggestions" (it’s true, they aren’t fleshed-out enough to be called policies!) is sensible, and that he is "alive to Londoners’ … concerns about drugs, stabbings and gangs", which is hardly the same thing as being the right person to do anything about them.

Most breathtakingly, their final paragraph even admits that electing him would be an "experiment", and that "if it fails", "London and the country will have learnt something of immense value". Too right: not to trust the Times’s leader column ever again.

In fact, this whole column is so weak in its support for Boris, readers could be forgiven for thinking that an edict was issued from Murdoch Towers that the editor was to print a leader column backing Boris, then left to come up with the arguments himself, despite not believing Boris capable of the job. But surely that would never happen, would it?

Daily Mail

As the Evening Standard’s sister paper, not to mention the bible of the right, it was always inconceivable that they would back anyone but Boris, and so it proves, but as with the Times their support is in extremely measured terms.

Again, a surprising measure of praise for the incumbent is present, given his nemesis status at Daily Mail group HQ:

Ever since he became Labour’s leader in London he has outfoxed opponents, including those in his own party.

In office, he has proved a rather more substantial figure than his critics predicted. Love it or loathe it, his congestion charge is now being studied by cities all over the world.

He was commendably steady after the terrorist attacks on London. And he has proved more friendly to business than you might expect, given his rabidly hard Left past.

Of course they then dwell on some criticisms in the less substantive areas which their Standard cohorts have beaten Londoners around the head with for the past nine months. For instance, apparently the £25 gas guzzler charge is "class spite", which seems strange when there are cars of every size which don’t have to pay it and actually the more wealthy you are, the easier it will be to trade in your luxury car for a less polluting model.

We also learn that Ken’s politics are divisive, which isn’t reflected in the level of racially aggravated crime, which has fallen hugely in London in recent years, while rising outside it; and besides, it’s hard to think of a more divisive politician than Boris Johnson anyway, with his numerous gaffes over the past few years offending everyone from races to cities to entire countries. I suppose at that rate he could soon unite the entire world, against him!

The Mail are keen to point out that Boris "has some highly competent people behind him". It’s interesting that they’re so confident about this, when he has repeatedly refused to name any of them so we have no evidence of this whatsoever.

He "seems genuinely concerned to do something about London’s broken society". Ahh, the old Mail favourite, the "broken society". But if crime is highest and society at its most "broken" in the most deprived areas, which are broadly located in inner London, and Boris is the man to sort this out, why is Boris so unrecoverably far behind Ken in the polls in these areas? Could it be because the people with the biggest fear of a "broken society" are actually those who read the Mail’s baseless ranting but live in the relative safety of the outer boroughs, so can gamble on Boris’s police cutbacks and removal of crime reduction targets without fearing for their own security?

So let’s put our cards on the table. We believe London and Britain would be best served by a vote for Boris - and not simply because the Mail is instinctively conservative.

Yes, I’m sure you gave a great deal of consideration to backing Red Ken!

Indeed, one of the attractive aspects of Mr Johnson’s campaign is his promise to put London first, even if it means disagreeing with national policies.

And this is certainly not something that could be had elsewhere, perhaps from a Mayor who opposed the Iraq war and the abolition of the 10p income tax rate…

We support Boris because he offers change. … Eight years of Ken Livingstone haven’t solved London’s problems. A new, serious Johnson should be given a chance.

"given a chance"? What do they think this is, some sort of game? There’s no such thing as "a chance" in this job: you have to hit the ground running from day one and work flat out for four solid years, showing competence and abilities which are far beyond the reach of even the newest, most serious Johnson imaginable. And don’t forget, this "new, serious Johnson" is an illusion created for the duration of the election campaign only, through a ban on alcohol and minders paid in inverse proportion to the number of gaffes Boris commits.

So with even the Mail’s best arguments for voting in Boris being so weak and couched in expectation-lowering terms, can anyone be left in any doubt as to how little trust there is in his abilities among newspaper journalists?

Daily Telegraph

If you are in any doubt, let Boris’s own colleagues at the Telegraph remove it.

The journalists and editors at the newspaper where Boris has worked for two decades can’t actually bring themselves to back Boris!

Instead, they spent half their column building up London as the most important place in the world, and the other half ruthlessly attacking Ken Livingstone. The only mention of any success whatever is, in full, "the Oyster card, better buses".

Essentially this leading article adopts the Boris campaign tactic of attacking Ken Livingstone while not drawing too any attention to Boris’s own hopeless manifesto of police cuts and impossible promises, but at least Boris has learnt a few short lines about his (to use the Times’s terminology) "policy suggestions". The Telegraph appear to be so nervous of endorsing this buffoon that they can’t even bring themselves to print his name!

In conclusion

With supporters like this mealy-mouthed bunch of leader-writers, who needs opponents? The Guardian have a more sensible line on things, although their endorsement for Ken is not a great deal more ringing than the others’ for Boris, although they are able to point to Ken’s strong record in various areas, which is certainly more than anyone examining Boris’s hopeless record of gaffes, incompetence, lies and sackings could do. Their verdict on Boris is as follows:

The Conservatives have fought a strategic campaign and benefited from Mr Livingstone’s weaknesses. That is not the same as setting out a solid case for office. Mr Johnson has offered celebrity and noise, but nothing very substantial, or even all that brave, his policies in many instances being modified versions of ones pursued by Mr Livingstone. … he has not shown himself equal to the mayor’s strengths. At the end of the campaign Mr Johnson still looks an accidental candidate who has stumbled into his position and is making the best of it, but might not make very much of being mayor. He promises better buses, less crime and a greener city, but cannot explain how he would bring these about.

That sounds about right to us.

What all this highlights is that here in the Stop Boris camp we are certainly up against it. We have the might of Murdoch and the Mail against us, as well as the Evening Standard and Telegraph, although all their support for Boris is half-hearted at best.

What we mustn’t do is become disheartened by this media onslaught. In a democracy, it is we the people who have the final say on polling day. We must not allow sections of the media with vested interests to bully and coerce us into electing another who has no proven abilities at all and would damage London’s reputation around the world as well as managing its huge budget with the incompetence for which he is so well known among everyone he’s ever worked with.

We need a final push this week, Boris-stoppers. E-mail all your friends to warn them about the mendacious campaign Boris has been fighting, and the huge risk this inept clown would pose to the serious business of running London. Get into arguments and discussions about it with anyone you speak to. Convince them to vote tactically to keep Boris out.

We can do this, with all your help. Good luck, everyone.

Posted in Daily Mail, Guardian, Media, Telegraph, The Times | No Comments »