What he talked about was why he was backing religion in general (Greenbelt is a Christian arts festival), because it was a bulwark against the single most destructive thing in society: cynicism and apathy.

Really? Got any evidence for that? Or is it just based on “faith”?

The New Scientist has recently published a collection of 24 “Evolution Myths” one of the ones it debunks is that “Accepting evolution undermines morality” and in so doing it cites a recent study which demonstrates that most secular societies have lower rates of murders, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancies, etc. (pdf).

I’m willing to add another for further investigation: secular societies in general have higher turnouts than religious ones. Contrast the US (turnout: 47.5% in 2006) and Iran (turnout: 59.8% in 2005) with the Netherlands (80.4% in 2006) and Denmark (86.6% in 2007). (source: International IDEA)

I’m not claiming that religion is a cause of apathy, but I am certainly arguing that to claim the opposite is crass and without foundation. Some would even go so far as to say that to make such claims is an act of cynicism. Physician, heal thyself.

Another point I could make: religion is most active in London in the East, where the Christian People’s Alliance and TELCO are active, yet turnout there is lower than anywhere else in the city. Turnout in City & East constituency also increased less this year than the London-wide average (6.4% against 8.4%). Again, I’m not claiming religion is a cause of apathy, but where is the proof it is the cure?

Share This

Bozza and the bloke factor

One thing that continues to perturb me is the rapid rewriting of history from the side of the Conservatives. Specifically, they have gone from fielding a candidate who was clearly selected because of his celebrity cache to insisting (now he has won) that his main appeal to the general public was his policy agenda.

Pish, and indeed, posh. It wasn’t that Boris didn’t have policy - I actually quite liked much of his housing policy for instance (well, the bits they’d nicked off the Lib Dems anyway) - but the average member of the public would do well to remember anything more than the fact that he doesn’t like bendy buses. There was a big emphasis on crime and numerous specifics, but the main tactic there was to deny Paddick his USP (and it worked superbly).

I’ve already mentioned how the number of people saying they’d vote Boris for a “laugh” on Twitter outnumbered the more contemplative souls by something like 4-to-1. Twitterers are not exactly the most representative sample however. So if that doesn’t convince you, I would refer you to the Political Brain by Drew Westen (also namechecked by Martin Turner on Lib Dem Voice today I notice). To horrendously summarise this book, it suggests that what people vote for is not policy but who they make the best emotional connection to. Crudely, they vote for the bloke they would most like to have a pint with. That’s why George W. Bush did so well despite having anything resembling intelligence. It’s why people continue to remind the Lib Dems what a desperate mistake they made getting rid of Charles Kennedy, despite the fact that his shortcomings had become quite insurmountably by the time we did. It’s why Ken Livingstone won in 2000 and it’s why Boris beat him last week.

There’s no shame in that fact. But let’s be honest about it, eh chaps?

The Evening Standard Factor

Again, I’ve already briefly touched on this. In my view, the Standard’s coverage was less problematic than the Metro’s lack of coverage and as I suggested earlier, that was clearly a deliberate ploy of the Rothermere Press’s, taking into account the two paper’s differing demographics.

Listening to Andrew Gilligan’s endless bleating about how his was scrupulously balanced and committed to the facts though is hard to take, especially since I spent an hour on the phone with him two weeks ago being accused of being a Livingstone stooge just for attempting to produce an impartial tool for the elections (an accusation that ended up going nowhere). He might be scrupulous with the facts, but he was driven by a very clear agenda. And you can assemble a bunch of uncontestable facts in any order to make a case that a specific individual is a saint or a sinner.

To be fair on the Standard, having read it more than usually over the past couple of months I can attest that it did indeed contain numerous pro-Ken articles to balance out the negative ones. But the paper itself has a very clear demographic and very few people will be swayed by it one way or another. What the Standard does have at its disposal more than any other paper in London, is the capacity to circulate thousands of posters on a daily basis. The posters, clearly visible on pretty much every single street corner in the capital, were unrelentingly negative about Livingstone. They knew it, just as they knew that no amount of balancing articles in the paper itself would make a blind bit of difference.

And Gilligan knows perfectly well that it was his scrupulously researched articles that resulted in those lurid headlines. Again, I don’t particularly begrudge him, or his newspaper, for doing this. Long live our free press, even if it is a worry that London can’t sustain a second paid-for daily. But let’s have a bit of honesty.

How Labour Blew It

Oh let me count the ways. The major factors have already been covered ad nauseum: the cronyism scandals, the familiarity (read: contempt) of Livingstone himself, the walking disaster that is Gordon Brown. But for me there are at least two other factors which backfired on Labour spectacularly.

The first one was to frame the debate as Livingstone vs. Johnson at such an early stage. I commented on my frustration over this earlier in the year and there’s no question it made Paddick’s job harder. The point I’m making here though is different: it also made Livingstone’s job harder.

I can understand the logic behind it: the idea was that by forcing people to focus relentlessly on Johnson, his flaws would be exposed for all to see and he would collapse in a blond heap of crikeyness. The problem with that stratagem is that it assumed that Johnson would be allowed to do that, either by his own party or by a media that was spoiling for a big personality-fueled two-way contest.

What Livingstone and his supporters should have been doing as an alternative is to insist that the field was open; to talk up the chances not just of the Greens and Lib Dems but specifically of One London. Livingstone should have been insisting that all debates include all the main party contenders based on which parties were represented on the Assembly and done all he could to keep Damian Hockney in the race.

Why? Because if there had been a contender on the right with some credibility, it would have dented Johnson’s popularity. If Hockney had stayed in the race, Livingstone could have kept suggesting in debates that he was where all rightwingers’ votes should go. And Hockney, with his opposition to the Congestion Charge, support of Heathrow Airport and scepticism about multiculturalism would have been able to articulate what a lot of Johnson’s core support actually happen to believe.

A side effect of this also would have been to present potential BNP supporters with a more mainstream party to vote for, which may have kept Barnbrook out of the Assembly. This brings me to screw up Number Two: taking Boris too seriously.

To be fair, the Livingstone campaign team seemed to consistently understand the problems with presenting Johnson as a racist, homophobic snob - even if their candidate kept lapsing into this rhetoric from time to time. But they really failed to get their supporters to rein it in. The StopBoris website was a perfect example of this, as was Zoe Williams’ silly article on election day.

There are two problems with this approach. Firstly, it is simply logically implausible to expect people to regard Boris as a buffoon while taking every single word of his deadly seriously. It can’t be done and people already tempted by Boris will simply stare at you as if you don’t have a sense of humour. Johnson is a polemicist and raconteur. His articles are provocative. The right approach is to take his buffoonery head on and to suggest to people that it would be a bad idea to elect a clown as mayor. Whenever Labour stayed on message, they made progress against Johnson. Whenever they went into PC mode, they lost support.

The second problem was that it sent out the message that it is possible for a mainstream political candidate in the UK to be an appalling racist and homophobic bigot and still have a chance of winning the top prizes. Once again, I can’t help but wonder to what extent this helped the BNP who of course were only too happy to associate themselves with Johnson.

You would have thought that Labour would have learned the lesson about the limits of demonising your political opponents 12 years ago. Clearly not.

Share This

Electorate: 5,419,913
Papers counted / turnout: 2,456,990
Turnout: 45.33%

* “Rejected votes” refers to ballot papers where the vote has not been counted because the ballot paper has not been filled out correctly. This may be because the voter has marked more than one preference in one column, because the voter identified themselves on the ballot paper, if the voter’s intention is unclear or if the voter has spoiled his or her paper in any way.
** “Blank votes” refers to ballot papers where no 1st choice and no 2nd choice have been marked, and no vote has been counted. (This data is only available for 2008.)
*** “No 2nd preference” refers to ballot papers where voters have only made 1st choice vote and no 2nd choice vote. The first choice vote has been counted. (This data is only available for 2008.)

If 412,000 second preference votes were rejected in addition to 407,000 in which individuals didn’t express a second preference, this is a pretty sorry indictment of the electoral system and given the closeness of the final result is a very serious matter indeed. But none of these numbers add up. If there were 2,456,990 votes cast in total, of which 2,004,078 had “good” second preference votes, then there is a difference of 452,912 “bad” second preferences to account for. The rejected votes, blank ballot papers, and no second preference categories are defined as sui generis from one another. Add them all up and you have 380,016 too many votes. Add any two of those three categories together (i.e. assume that the no second preference category is a subset of the rejected votes category) and it still doesn’t add up.

Either I’m missing something pretty fundamental here, or something is seriously awry. Any ideas?

Regarding the Assembly results, much better news all round. The numbers do add up (assuming the blank ballot papers are not included under total votes cast) and there are significantly fewer of them than there were in 2004.

Share This

Coleman and co ran on a manifesto they did not agree a single word with. However nice and cuddly Bozza himself might be, they will spend their time trying to drag him in the opposite direction. On the positive side, it is hard to see Coleman being able to restrain himself over the next few years. He’s done a pretty good job at convincing most people who watch London politics that he is a dangerous idiot. With Johnson’s win he may find his antics now get rather more attention on the national stage.

Share This

Has the light at the end of the tunnel I was detecting yesterday turned out to be a freight train moving at speed in the wrong direction? Maybe not, but there is no disguising the fact that the London elections have been awful for the Liberal Democrats.

For the record, and not that I’m complaining about being censored, my original draft was considerably more sweary. Read the full article here.

Share This

Overall, I feel the party has turned a corner in this election. The optimism amongst the people I’ve spoken to is much higher than it was 12 months ago. The drop in share of the vote from 2004 has not been replicated by a drop in seats.

…

It’s been a rough couple of years, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Ultimately that counts for a lot more than bogus BBC statistics.

Share This

I’ve spent the past month tracking mentions of Boris, Ken and Paddick on Twitter. What I witnessed, particularly today, was about 80% of twitterers mentioning Boris expressing utter disbelief at the prospect of Three Jobs Boz getting the Mayoralty, 5% were petulant remarks from True Blues accusing anyone who fails to immediately see how wonderful he is as being “class warriors” and “inverted snobs” and 15% echoing Charlie Brooker’s article a couple of weeks ago, namely “OMFG LOOK AT HIS FUNNEEE HAIR LOL!!!! BORRIS IS A LEGERND!!!!” I’m afraid to say that seeing the 100th one of these messages today, I started to go a bit funny in the head.

The general impression seems to be that turnout in London is high. Iain Dale seems to think it is limited to the Outer London donut, but my experience from telling in an uber urban Islington ward today is that it is high there too. At 6pm we were being told that turnout there was already hitting 50%.

What I found most revealing today was looking at the coverage of the London elections in London’s free newspapers. For those who don’t know, London now has three of the things: the Metro which is distributed on the tube in the morning and London Lite and thelondonpaper which is handed out in the late afternoon/evening. The Metro and London Lite are both Associated Newspapers, who also publish the Mail and the Evening Standard. thelondonpaper is News International who also publish the Sun and the Times.

The Evening Standard has of course been running a vendetta against Ken Livingstone and not surprisingly called on its readers to vote for Bozza in a leader today. But what of the Metro and London Lite? They have very different demographics: while the Standard is the paper for the middle aged, middle class, stockbroker, its sister papers are for the hoi polloi.

thelondonpaper has had extensive coverage of the Mayoral elections over the last three days. Today’s paper consists of the following:

• Front page: headline “IT’S NOT TOO LATE”. front page editorial encouraging people to vote.
• Page 2: pics of the candidates
• Pages 6-7: general coverage
• Pages 8-9: Bozza and Ken’s style analysed, with tips on how to get their respective looks

By contrast, this is the coverage of today’s London Lite:

• Front page: headline “Ken closes in on Boris”
• Pages 6-7: general coverage.

And the Metro? The paper with the widest circulation by a factor of more than two?

• Front page: nothing. nada.
• Page 23: half a page of jokey coverage.
• Er…
• …that’s it?

It’s quite clear that the Associated Press were trying their best to depress turnout. So full marks to thelondonpaper, which has easily had the best and most balanced coverage. The fact that News International are angling for the license to distribute a morning paper on the tube is, I’m sure, a complete coincidence.

Share This

Come on London! Don’t let this happen!

Share This

For reasons that may (or may not) become clear, the Daily Mail made me think of these lyrics today. As it has done through the years, thankfully a mite more critically this time, the paper has done a piece on the fascist du jour Richard “Dick” Barnbrook. The main revelation which I did not know was that he is in the final stages of divorcing a woman he met during his “Derek Jarman gay porn” years. Not terribly impressed with his politics, she says:

“In a way, I wanted to join the police to redress the karmic imbalance in the world caused by my husband’s views.”

Barnbrook has also been in the News of the World this week for two-timing his ballerina fiance with a nurse from Finland. I have to admit I am rather disappointed that NotW failed to use the headlines “a kick in the Balkans” or “Finns ain’t what they used to be”.

Possibly the most disappointing thing about the state of British fascism (apart from, of course, the fact that they are racist, violent thugs who are improbably gaining electoral support at the moment), is their sartorial inelegance. Oswald Mosley may have dressed his blackshirts up like Doctor Who villains, but at least they knew what a fucking iron was.

One thing you can say about Barnbrook is that with his brown suit and already suggestive fringe, at least he makes it easy for people to caricature him.

Frankly though, I prefer these fellers.

Share This

Share This