If you don’t live in London you may not be aware of the impending Mayoral elections; if you do live in London you might not be aware of the impending Mayoral elections. The current spirit in politics appears to be to discourage voter participation, that’s because the people who have a high voter turnout are presently in charge.  In that bitter spirit we at Mint Magazine have decided to run our own campaign, read on if you bothered to register to vote.

Boris Johnson – The Conservative Party

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. I can basically just stop there, right? Look at his fucking name.

Just think about the moment when his parents came up with that moniker, probably struggling to pronounce all those ‘f’s through their inbred upper-class overbites as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Dear little de Pfeffel. A life of cosseted, cloistered private schooling awaits.

This is the thing: not only is Boris from the same closeted Bullingdon club universe as Cameron and Osborne, but he somehow gets away with shoving it in our faces—never wasting an opportunity to splutter something in Latin or draw some ridiculous analogy between contemporary politics and ancient history, just to make sure everyone knows he studied Classics.

There’s been plenty of anti-posh boy rhetoric directed at the cabinet recently—though if it hadn’t been coming from uterus-bothering psycho Nadine Dorries one suspects it might have been a bit more credible—but not enough towards the guy who casually described £250-grand (the annual salary for his Torygraph column) as ‘chickenfeed’, and who can barely speak for the giant fucking silver spoon in his mouth. At least Cameron has the PR knowledge to realise his background doesn’t endear him to most of the electorate, whereas Boris wears it with the all the ignorant self-satisfaction of a prize cow. Forget knowing the price of milk, Boris probably still gets his from his mum’s tit.

What about this makes Boris in any way qualified to look after the interests of all Londoners? Answer: Fuck. All. The fact is, the man hasn’t got a clue what life is like for the majority of the city’s population. Which, if you’re being very generous, you could say isn’t necessarily a crime; after all, we can’t expect our politicians to have experiential knowledge of every single social class or ethnic group that they govern. But Boris doesn’t care that he can’t relate to his electorate. You only need to read what he has to say about Liverpudlians (a ‘deeply unattractive psyche’) or black people (‘pickaninnies with watermelon smiles’—I mean, are you having a fucking laugh?) to realise that he holds those of different (read: less well-off) backgrounds to him in contempt. Instead, he cares about ostentatious, astronomically expensive pie-in-the-sky projects like his floating Thames estuary airport and his cable-car. Oh and the new Routemasters. A snip at £1.4M each, which works out as £22,850 per seat. Yeah cheers for that.

And what’s he actually given us? Crossrail? The Olympics? Even the bikes? All in place before he was elected. Not that that’s going to stop him taking the glory for them. If you can say one thing about his mayoral record it’s that, policy-wise, he hasn’t done anything overly offensive (if you discount poor record on social housing—a massive 56 affordable homes built in the last 6 months of a housing crisis; nice—a poor environmental record despite all his rooftop vegetable gardens bullshit, his continued and vocal support for lack of tax or regulation on the City, and the transport fare rises). The worrying thing about the last four years is that he seems to have managed to avoid doing anything controversial enough to alienate the people with little enough self-respect to vote for him last time.

But of course, he is offensive. He’s a bumbling fucking oaf. A bumbling fucking oaf who represents YOU as the figurehead of London throughout the country and the rest of the world. When you go into that little cubicle with your voting slip, picture him tripping up the steps to the podium to give his first speech as new mayor in 2008, or waving the Olympic flag like a gormless buffoon at the handover ceremony in Beijing. Seriously people, THAT guy?

Tim Rogerson

Ken Livingstone – Labour Party

You Can’t Fool Me, Kenneth

Kenneth ‘Ken’ Livingstone is, as what is obvious to many, a balding, socialist, philandering faux-cockney with the decaying face of a neglected scarecrow. But I, as a critic, think less generously of him.

Ken is a bit of a Jew-hating hypocrite. Now, there’s a place for anti-semitism but Livingstone’s recent assertion that “votes for the left are inversely proportional to wealth levels, and… as the Jewish community is rich… simply [won't] vote for [him]” is the political equivilent of dangling a party-size bag of anti-semitic sweets out of a car window and just waiting for nearby right-wingers to gleefully jump aboard. Well, you’re not going to fool me that easily, Ken.

Then there’s the effing bloody Olympics. Look, I know there’s no excuse for overshooting the budget on a gargantuan scale, jeopardising civil liberties even further to ineffectively combat terrorism, making ridiculous plans for building a tower shaped like a melted helter-skelter and allowing the closure of the Astoria for a railway that won’t even be completed in time, but to hold Boris accountable for those mishaps would be to miss the point entirely. It was Livingstone who set the dates for this inevitable mess in the first place.

Between you and me, he’s a bit of a lefty. Ugh, bloody lefties. Coming over here, being fair to people… I mean look at his pledges, all “cut fares” this and “help families” that. It’s all 99%-pandering, loony-liberal codswallop. Seriously, the guy fails his Eleven Plus exam and thinks he’s Oliver Twist.

If he wants to help “Londoners in every part of the capital and from every background and political opinion” then why not scrap the congestion charge? Pollution? I doubt those who complain about going to work and coming home with blackened nostrils would be so moany if they had the smell of their own leather seats to enjoy to and from the office. But they don’t – because they can’t afford it. I can, and so I’m automatically a target for the hysterical left-wing conspirators banging on about ‘global warming’ and ‘air quality’ and other such nonsense. I mean come on, give it a rest.

Will Dix

Brian Paddick – The Liberal Democrats

I’m A Celebrity superstar (yes I’d forgotten too) Brian Paddick is pointlessly after your votes for Mayor of London yet again. 

The main thing that makes him stand out from Boris and Ken is that he’s a ‘normal guy’, but that is also his downfall. He’s not a professional politician (though in the mayoral debate he forgot to mention that, proof enough) and he lacks the authority and power of his rivals. Although he was some kind of Jim Gordon in the Met, he is definitely no Harvey Dent when it comes to politics.

His policies are, on the whole, lacking and don’t really instil confidence. He makes a lot of promises about policing, obviously, which doesn’t exactly have the same importance to voters as council tax rates and fare cuts. His crackdown on rogue landlords is probably the biggest draw for his demographic, but not enough fuss has been made about it, so no-one really knows or cares what his killer policies actually are.

The Lib Dems stabbed us all in the back at the general election, making optimistic promises they never had any chance of delivering and ultimately fucking us over by siding with the Tories, smothering the NHS with a privately bought pillow and massively inflating the tuition fees they promised to cut. So why should you ever vote for a Lib Dem again if you’re not going to get what they promise? Well, you shouldn’t, you may as well just vote Labour or Tory in the first place because at least you know what you’re getting. To be fair to him, Brian isn’t as much of a smarmy, slimy prick as Nick Clegg – he actually seems like a really nice guy – but do you really want to be responsible for putting him in office and corrupting that? There’s also no way in hell he would be able to get away with ‘ultimate banter’ like this if he was Mayor: “My last staff officer got promoted and went to royalty protection. In his leaving card I wrote, ‘Same job, different Queen’”.

Sure you might hate Labour and the Tories, but really the only way you’re going to make a difference voting Lib Dem is in the London Assembly anyway. Ken & Boris are the only options you have, so you just have to decide who you hate least. Saying that, ultimately it doesn’t matter if you do vote for Brian because as long as you do vote, and you don’t vote BNP, who really cares.

Richard Coatsworth

The ‘other’ candidates.

Other by name, other by nature. Extremists, zealouts, dreamers and no-hopers.  Were you really considering one of these?

A Green, UKIP, a former Civil Servant masquerading as an independent and a person who may or may not one day take a HGV licencing office hostage. Voting for one of these is almost as pointless as voting for the Liberal Democrat. No, this is second choice territory, where the protest vote reigns supreme and the candidates are drenched in public personas defined by terms such as ‘racist’ and ‘hippie’. What have any of them got going for them? Nothing. What have any of them got to lose? Nothing. The Greens want to turn the whole of London into one giant bike lane, whilst UKIP want to build a giant fence around London to prevent any more people with silly accents from stealing all the non-existent jobs.

It transpires that UKIP have gone almost as batshit as the BNP this time around and a massive part of their drive hinges on their support for cab drivers and cab users. Truly a policy of, by and for the people. Lawrence Webb’s only workable policy is to allow black cabs to use the Olympic VIP lanes. He seems to have assumed that Londoners give a shit if those who can afford to ride in cabs avoid the gridlock they are going to be stuck in for six weeks. The rest of UKIP’s manifesto is populated by things they can’t do and things they know full well they can’t do. I’d describe it as a manifesto of lies but they use the term ‘vision’, apparently Lawrence Webb is a derranged acid user. If you’re going to vote for UKIP you might as well deepthroat a shotgun.

What can I say about the Greens? They mean so well and they have done so much to influence general environmentalist attitudes in London as a whole, but realistically they are never going to win the mayoralty. What, it’s because of that exact attitude that things will never change? Grow up. The Lib-Dems have been bleeding that line out for decades and look what happened when some people bothered to vote for them.

I’m mostly just confused by the woman riding the independent ticket, she formerly ran as an English Democrat, which has links with far right European groups but is itself fairly moderate. More importantly, I thought civil servants had their political testicals ripped from their loins and were forced to sign a Switzerland approved allegiance to sitting on the fence and perpetuating pointless bureaucracy for the rest of their lives? Apparently not, opinions seem to have immigrated into her once unbiased soul.

I don’t need to give you a reason to not vote for the BNP do I? You can, after all, read.

Marcus Harris

This entry was tagged as elections, London, mayor, POLITICS.