Posts in the ‘Manipulation’ 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 »

Rewriting history in Epping Forest

Sunday, 6 April 2008, 13.03 by Mr. Stop Boris

I’ve just received a very interesting tip-off about Boris’s Epping Forest canvassing gaffe.

The source of this story, it seems, was an article on the Epping Forest Guardian newspaper web site:

[Boris] may well be ahead in the latest opinion polls in the mayoral race - but we can tell him that he is targeting the wrong electors!

He has written to the Epping Forest Guardian - which covers the entire local authority district, and no part of any London borough - seeking voter support.

In a letter emailed to Epping Forest Guardian editor David Jackman, for inclusion on our letters pages, Mr Johnson wrote: "Last week the contest to become Mayor of London Mayor began. A contest that will make a big difference to your lives in Epping Forest." […]

When contacted by the Guardian, Mr Johnson’s campaign office issued a statement saying it was aware that "many" residents of Epping Forest were not eligible to vote - yet the facts are that NO residents of Epping Forest district are entitled to vote in the London mayor elections.

All good stuff of course – a nice illustration of Boris’s incompetence and how poor his grasp of even the most basic information about London really is.

However, the story has since taken a rather sinister turn. This is a link to the article – and this is what the page now says:

The selected article was not found.

Who has got to them, and how did they persuade them to erase an embarrassing piece of history in this way?

And in the light of today’s Boris campaign material masquerading as front-page news in the Sunday Telegraph, just how many favours can Boris call in via his powerful media cronies?

Fortunately, Google’s cache has retained a copy of the original article.

And when that eventually disappears (when Google notices that the article has been removed), all will not be lost: we’ve saved our own copy too. We’re too good to you, Boris-stoppers, we really are.

Posted in Getting an easy ride, Incompetence, Local papers, Manipulation, Media | No Comments »