Posts in the ‘YouTube’ category

London Election Cinema results

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 9.15 by Mr. Stop Boris

Just remembered we promised to put the winning video from the poll on LondonVids.com up as our top post today. As an excuse to get our own video in here, as well as a more serious message than either ours or the winner’s, I’m going to post the videos which came first, second and third. They’ve all been posted before but they’re worth a look before you cast your vote today.

Winner: Boris Johnson’s Reputation

Second: Ken Livingstone for London

Third: MYR of LDN (that’s our one!)

Please go and vote against Boris today. We can stop him if we get turnout up high enough.

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.

Return of the d***head

Sunday, 27 April 2008, 16.14 by Mr. Stop Boris

Someone responded to our appeal, so we’re now hosting the borderline-pornographic "Boris Johnson, D***head" video which YouTube deleted on StopBoris.org, at the bottom of the campaign songs and videos page.

Another song/video

Saturday, 26 April 2008, 0.54 by Mr. Stop Boris

A few days ago I received a couple of MP3s from the man behind the Boris Johnson Reputation song.

The first was that song, so you can download it here (4.17MB) if you want to listen to it on your MP3 player or whatever.

The second was a previously unreleased song, based on The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love. He said we could use it if we wanted to, so, well, it would have been rude not to, wouldn’t it? So this is what kept me up late last night:

You can also get the song as an MP3 here (3.30MB).

Both songs and their videos have been added to the bottom of our campaign song page, too.

No more YouTube Boris rudeness

Thursday, 24 April 2008, 21.14 by Mr. Stop Boris

Apart from clips of him rudely interrupting people, obviously.

I’ve just been alerted to the fact that after amassing over 1,000 views in four days, YouTube have mysteriously replaced the "Boris the d***head" video by the following message:

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

Not sure which term(s) of use it had violated. Perhaps more interesting would be to know which humourless person reported it, and how they’ll be voting next week!

Update: we’ve been sent the video so it’s now available on StopBoris.org.

ITV London’s Mayoral debate

Thursday, 24 April 2008, 8.32 by Mr. Stop Boris

To some extent, I agree with Dave Hill’s coverage of Tuesday night’s debate, which did indeed take place in a bit of a "bear pit atmosphere".

I think a lot of the criticism for the ineffectiveness of the debate has to be levelled at the completely unbriefed host, though. In BBC debates, the host has tended to know what the truth is of things like the bendy bus costing fiasco and what Boris has really written and signed off as editor in the past, but Alastair Stewart – who I’ve little time for anyway since he usually comes across as some sort of Daily Mail columnist reject – never seemed to know what the reality of the situation was when contentious allegations were flying about.

One error in Dave’s account is that the audience member who questioned Boris about his publication in the Spectator of comments about blacks having lower IQs did not say Boris wrote them himself, only that he had recently apologised for them, which is at least as true as anything else published in the Evening Standard.

Boris’s reaction to this being mentioned by the audience member was shocking. He went into full-on indignation mode, looking apoplectic and saying the audience member was making it up, then veering towards personally insulting by spitting out, as if discovering vermin in his kitchen or dog excrement under his shoe, "I don’t know how you came to be in this studio"!

Other points of note include the fact that he has no firm targets on crime reduction at all. When pressed on this the best he could do was to suggest that he wanted to see muggings "substantially reduced" and that he would "like to see a 100% reduction in crime on the buses"! I’d like to see world peace: perhaps I should stand for Mayor and put that in my manifesto too.

Pressed further about why he wouldn’t state a target on crime, he came out with:

There is absolutely no point in having a target unless you’re going to give the police the means and resources to do it.

Just think about the logic of that statement for a moment. The only way that can possibly work as a justification for Boris not having any crime reduction targets is if he has no intention "to give the police the means and resources to [achieve] it"! I mean, we all know he’s said on numerous occasions that he wants to find ‘real savings’, i.e. cuts, in the police budget, but this is an exceptional admission which shows he is the weakest candidate of all on crime, despite his much-trumpeted claims about it being his key focus.

He also pledged to sell off some council houses, by the way. That’s always worked well as a way to solve housing crises… Oh, wait, I mean as a way to initiate housing crises. Silly me.

And of course good old Rude, Interrupting Boris was present throughout the show, shouting over others and never shutting up when asked to. At one point the host had to point out to him that he was chairing the debate. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t always easy to tell.

The highlights of the debate are on YouTube, with a guide to skipping through the file to find the bits you want in the ‘video info’ bit on the right.

London Election Cinema contest

Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 18.51 by Mr. Stop Boris

I’ve just discovered that our campaign song/video has found its way into a competition.

If anyone wants to vote for it, or indeed for one of the others (we’re not precious), please do!

P.S. This appears to be a Labour bloggers’ competition so for clarity – particularly given something I’ll be posting later this evening about how best to use votes to stop Boris – I should just mention that we didn’t put forward our video for this competition ourselves and are not a ‘Labour blog’.

Back this?

Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 0.00 by Mr. Stop Boris

Goodness me, YouTube’s being swamped lately, isn’t it? The Tory Troll points out the below rather surreal take on life under Mayor Boris.

The return of gaffophobia!

Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 22.12 by Mr. Stop Boris

Ah, gaffophobia, how we’ve missed you. What was for a brief time our own home-grown Googlewhack seemed to have been swept somewhat under the carpet in a piece of meta-calculation by Boris’s minders, reasoning that once it had reached a full-page article on page 3 of a national newspaper, his non-appearance had started to become the negative story they were trying to avoid by keeping him away from things in the first place!

So soon enough they started putting him forward for TV debates and hustings and all the things he’d previously been pulling out of. Indeed there have been so many TV appearances it’s been hard to keep up with them all! (There’s another in 25 minutes on ITV1 London, by the way.)

But this weekend Boris’s minders were reminded why they’d been pulling him out of things in the first place. At the Stonewall hustings he was humiliated and ridiculed over his offensive remarks comparing gay marriage to bestiality.

So after that, what happened today? Only a short time before the event, Boris finally confirmed he wouldn’t be taking part in a hustings at the University of London Union.

This brings us full circle: the Time Out hustings were held at ULU a few weeks ago, and it was Boris’s no-show for that event that propelled the gaffophobia of his minders into the public consciousness.

It seems he has a fear of students, which is bizarre given how many of them have set up Boris-loving groups over on Facebook. Presumably he’s only scared of politically engaged students, since it’s the apathetic ones who think the election is a laugh that he’s counting on the votes of. Let’s hope they think it’s so much of a laugh that they don’t bother going out to vote.

Wes Streeting, President-elect of the National Union of Students, speaking in a personal capacity said:

"It’s a shame Boris Johnson’s minders won’t let him face a student audience. We were looking forward to challenging his reactionary views on everything from tackling racism and advancing LGBT equality to climate change and war."

Boris Johnson chickens out of student hustings – what is he scared of?, KenLivingstone.com

I realise that is taken from his main rival’s web site, but in the interest of balance I just checked Boris’s web site and can find no mention at all of his chickening out of this debate – not even a lame excuse like we were offered for him missing the Time Out one.

In the mean time, by a happy coincidence, a couple of people have contacted us to point out a new video on YouTube highlighting Boris’s fear of scrutiny. Enjoy!

Boris criticises Brian’s record – because, er, um…

Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 9.33 by Mr. Stop Boris

Just come across this audio clip masquerading as a video clip over on YouTube:

It’s worth a listen as it shows Boris blustering into an argument in which he hasn’t the first clue what he’s talking about and eventually having to completely back down and withdraw his original point. (Does anyone know what the clip is from, by the way?)

You would kind of think that you might do a bit of basic homework on your two main opponents in an election where the three of you will be parading around debating things with each other, but clearly Boris’s dog ate his homework on this one. We can look forward to Boris’s metaphorical dog also eating, for instance, billions of pounds of our money as he mismanages the Crossrail project after he fails to do any work around that either if he’s elected next week.

Newsnight Mayoral debate, children’s edition

Monday, 21 April 2008, 13.29 by Mr. Stop Boris

Warning: may make you fall off your chair laughing.

Via The Tory Troll.

All at sea in the Stop Boris campaign song

Sunday, 20 April 2008, 0.43 by Mr. Stop Boris

borisposeidonforblog Who’s the slightly scary chap on the right?

Find out in the video accompanying the new Stop Boris campaign song

More on today’s Stonewall hustings

Sunday, 20 April 2008, 0.25 by Mr. Stop Boris

I’ve had a listen to the recording Dave Hill posted and it makes interesting listening, if you’ve an hour and a half to spare!

Oh, alternatively, he’s since updated his post and it now contains some excellent videos of the highlights that he’s posted on YouTube. The third video there is particularly relevant to what I’ve written below.

I was a bit worried that they were giving Boris a bit of an easy ride considering what an integral part of the bitterly fought campaign against gay rights he played with his Section 28-supporting, gay marriage-bashing, widely read columns in the national media.

Fortunately, they did actually move on to his past proclamations on homosexuality and gay marriage, and they certainly didn’t let him gloss over it, but he really didn’t answer them satisfactorily at all.

For a start, an audience member asked (triggering the discussion) why his views on gay matters had changed since he wrote his columns – and he actually rejected the “hypothesis” of the question, saying his views had not changed!

He also refused to apologise for any of his past writings, when asked if he would like to do so by the chair.

So remember, everyone: Boris’s view hasn’t changed since he wrote the things quoted here. A vote for Boris is a vote for homophobic outpourings like those.

Might as well embed Dave’s video, actually:

The Tory Troll was also at the hustings, and was surprised by the lack of effort put in by Team Boris.

There’s a (slightly) less offensive video too!

Friday, 18 April 2008, 19.19 by Mr. Stop Boris

It seems that the YouTube user who posted that previous video has been very busy. He’s also posted a genital-free video for a rewritten version of a Kate Nash song, which admittedly does still contain ‘Parental Advisory’-worthy lyrics. It’s a great piece of work though. Enjoy (under parental supervision…)!

Not for the easily offended

Friday, 18 April 2008, 18.58 by Mr. Stop Boris

Or indeed the not-so-easily offended, but who might still be offended by animations featuring prolonged and sustained charicatures of Boris as a set of male genitalia.

This video (which does include some excellent clips and great Boris quotes, not all of which I had heard before) has appeared on YouTube today and was brought to my attention by The Tory Troll. Thanks – I think.

Update: This video was deleted from YouTube on Thursday, but we’ve since been sent the video so it’s now available on StopBoris.org instead.