See
thehornedgod's entry here for better reasons. But here are mine:Fucking Boris Johnson. That is my aim in every sense but the lascivious one.
Yes, Boris Johnson is clever. He's funny. He makes terrible gaffes. He has bizarre and interesting hair. He has a colourful private life. (I am sure the women concerned are perfectly happy to bonk the flaxen-haired plonker but he keeps getting *caught* which gives me grave doubts about his political acumen). He adds to the gaiety of nations by being a bumbling tosspot.
Under that bumbling, funny persona though, is a hard-right ideologue and total arsehole. This is a man who approved of Clause 28 and said that there was an equivalence between three men and a dog marrying and gay marriage.
This is a man who referred not once but twice to Africans as "piccaninnies" and used the phrase "watermelon smiles". Unacceptable at any time, no matter whether you claim you were just taking the piss out of Tony Blair or not.
Then he claimed some kind of fellowship with immigrants and people in the developing world by saying he was the son of immigrants and his great-great-grandmother was a Circassian slave in Turkey. (Unproven. His great-grandfather was a Turkish journalist who became the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire for Pete's sake)
You went to Eton, man! You're not "proudly middle class" unless we're revising the boundaries of middle-classdom in a steeply upwards direction. You're a toff, and you've never given the slightest glimpse of understanding what it means to be perched on a precarious ledge between survival and drowning, without the rope of family money to lift you out of trouble. He's going to cut taxes for the rich leafy western boroughs, let the poor ones sink.
If your editorship of The Spectator was anything to go by, Boris is deepest blue, a Tory tossclump whose priority is tax-cutting and "I'm alright Jack" policies. The Spectator is oftentimes the ungarnished id of the Conservative party, which takes joy from being insulting, sexist, racist and thinking of anyone without fifty grand in the back as a smelly, workshy, uneducated pov, while crying "political correctness gone mad" at anyone who dares to say that's unacceptable behaviour.
Ken Livingstone may be slightly bent, slimy, given to stupid posturing, prone to inviting to London people who I think shouldn't be given any more of a platform than they already have (Hugo Chávez; Muslim clerics who advocate beating their wives) but he has a good grasp of what it means to be mayor in a city like London. He's improved the transport network a bit, crime is down a little bit, and people who drive giant 4x4s are getting it in the rear for their ridiculous behaviour and that is all good.
He's also been the victim of a ridiculous campaign of persecution by the London Evening Standard, whose editor thinks she's some kind of arbiter of political acceptability. No, love, you're the editor of a poxy local rag which is owned by the same newspaper group that thought the Blackshirts were a pretty marvellous idea in the 1930s and have shown little sign of shifting centrewards since. (Fuck Veronica Wadley too, while we're at it)
Anyway, I am voting Green 1 (to stop the BNP scum taking fourth place) and Ken 2, to register a protest against Ken being slightly power-crazed but to put a stop to the long march to Boris. So, yes. Vote against Boris Johnson! Deny him the oxygen of publicity! If you could deny him the oxygen of oxygen, I would be in favour of that too, but since we have these silly things called laws in the UK, I suppose that's not really on.
When Gordon Brown was on his grand visit to the US recently, I found myself missing Blair. This was such a horrifying experience that I had to have some sugary tea and a sitdown in a quiet, darkened room. He was so dull, so focused on minutiae, so desperate for publicity that he appeared on American Idol. American bloody Idol. He made George Bush look like a fluent intelligent public speaker, for pete's sake.
Gordon Brown is such a disappointment as `prime minister. Someone said it was like the wizard of Oz, where the Great and Terrible Oz finally appears and then the curtain is drawn aside to reveal a very ordinary clueless fellow who cannot make a decision to save his life. I mean, he's not even very good at the politics side of it.
When you have a reputation as a Machiavellian genius of backroom manoeuvring then you can't even manage to shiv your opponents in the back: how rubbish is that? When you arrange your first "Look America! Here I am!" visit to the US at the same time as Pope Benny, how completely clueless are you?
The epitome of this cluelessness is the abolition of the 10p tax band. Under this, I am about £250 a year better off. I am a top-rate taxpayer. My mum is almost £700 a year worse off. She is a pensioner with a part-time job. There is no way on god's clean lovely earth that a LABOUR government should make someone like me better off while screwing over any lower-paid workers who don't happen to qualify for tax credits under our tax system.
A tax system so byzantine that it would give Kafka the chills, by the way. As set up by one G Brown, longest-serving chancellor of the exchequer this century.
It's almost enough to make me think of voting conservative, and then I take one look at Boris Johnson and his chum David Cameron, and the world rights itself again. The closest I am going to get to a Tory is when I pay that special trip to dance on Thatcher's grave.
I've been in a bit of a state lately. Out of whack. It's not a large terrible thing, just a sizeable accumulation of shit things happening at home and at work. I've been unable to write an LJ entry or an email or have a conversation with someone who was not M or S or L or T without wanting to curl up in a ball and demand intravenous injections of chocolate.
Nothing is going right just now, so I apologise in advance for my foot in gob syndrome. And since we're doing confessions, I cheat at Scrabulous all the time. I invent words which turn out to be real. I check online dictionaries. I am still rubbish at it
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