MoronWatch

Our Moron Mayor

We’re coming up to the London mayoral election, where the second most powerful British politician is elected; the standard of debate is excellent, as it should be in such an important contest, and the media are doing their job of challenging the candidates on the many critical issues faced by London.

Not. Hopefully you were quick to spot my sarcasm. As is usually the case in important UK political decisions, the race is being trivialised and reduced to two personalities. London’s ever-moronic paper, the Evening Standard, has failed to hold Mayor Boris to account, as has most of the national press, and the entire race has been reduced to discussing smear stories against Livingstone, which are used to dispel any talk about issues and policies.

So let’s cut out the crap: it doesn’t matter if you like or dislike Ken or Boris. It doesn’t matter that Ken keeps newts and can therefore be labelled “slimy”. What matters is that one of the most powerful political positions is up for grabs, but morons are discussing Boris’s hair.

The reality is, only Ken Livingstone can defeat Boris Johnson; and here’s a selection of reasons why you should vote for him with either your first or second preference vote.

Congestion Charge

Ken was Mayor from 2000 and 2008, so there’s no need to speculate; his commitment to good public transport, and to reducing road traffic and air pollution, was nothing short of impeccable. He introduced the congestion charge scheme despite screams from the car industry and the media; he was loudly told the scheme would fail; but it didn’t. It reduced the number of cars, sped up traffic in London and reduced air pollution. He then extended the scheme to the west, again to screams from wealthy car-owning residents of Kensington and Chelsea; but the extension was again a success, and won over local people. Before the 2008 election, he announced plans to charge drivers of high-polluting vehicles (which I and many others would say have no place in a crowded city) £25 a day if they wanted to drive into the centre. This would have further cut congestion by cutting the number of super-large cars, and improved air quality by removing the worst polluters.

Boris, in order to win votes from Kensington and Chelsea drivers (one of the UK’s wealthiest demographics), promised to scrap the Western Extension Zone. This he did, to the benefit of very few and the detriment of many. Boris also scrapped plans to charge high-polluting vehicles £25 – much to the delight of Porsche, who had been suing Livingstone, and whom Boris paid an immediate £400,000 of our money in settlement. After instituting a 25% rise in congestion charge, Boris then froze the cost, benefiting car drivers and leading to an increase in congestion and air pollution. London is now regularly in breach of EU air pollution guidelines, with a resultant rise in breathing disorders and cost to the NHS. It’s worth noting that Boris’s response to worsening air pollution was to attempt a cover-up.

Public Transport

The situation inherited by Ken in 2000 was disastrous, particularly for bus users. Ken put around 5,000 more buses on the road, and enforced bus lane usage for the first time, leading to faster bus journeys. The congestion charge also enabled buses to run faster. On busy main roads, Ken introduced bendy buses which could rapidly move large numbers of people with minimal stopping time. The anti-Ken Evening Standard began a campaign, falsely labelling the buses as dangerous to cyclists; this was a straight lie. Not a single death occurred due to the introduction of bendy buses. Ken also introduced the Oyster card, speeding up and simplifying journeys, and making ticketing less labour-intensive.

In response to the farcical campaign against bendies, Boris promised to scrap them and commission a new Routemaster bus. The new bus wasn’t necessary, and turned out to be hugely expensive at £8m each; only a handful of the new buses have been introduced (“coincidentally” just in time for the mayoral election) but for the same price, 96 hybrid buses could have been rolled out instead. The new bus turns out to be nothing but a multi-million pound election campaign ad for Boris, funded by us, and although it’s admittedly pretty, has done nothing to improve London’s transport.

And let’s not forget: while holding down the cost of congestion charge, Boris introduced huge fare rises – up to 83% in some cases.

Cycling

Boris has introduced two initiatives: the Barclays-sponsored cycle rental scheme, and cycle super-highways. The former is a nice idea that already works well in Paris, Barcelona and elsewhere. I joined it the moment it appeared, and it worked well, for a few weeks. Then, demand picked up and the scheme’s mismanagement and under-funding meant that it became increasingly difficult to use. The cycles tend to distribute themselves unevenly – for example, in the mornings, they migrate from the outer stations such as Euston and Waterloo to the centre of London. If the scheme is to remain usable, cycles must be collected from full docks and put in empty ones. This redistribution system appears to have completely failed; it’s rare to be able to complete an end-to-end journey – either no bike is available at the start, or no free dock can be found at the end. It’s a simple management issue, but as so often noted, Boris doesn’t do management. I quit the scheme after the first year.

Boris’s other cycling “achievement” was the introduction of the “cycle superhighways”. Great name – useless scheme. For a mere £100m or so, Londoners got shiny new blue paint on the roads to mark out the highways. Unfortunately, that’s about all they got. The blue lanes aren’t protected by any kerbs or physical obstacles to motor vehicles, and cars are allowed to drive in them if they want. Inevitably, deaths have occurred on the super-highways; the scheme joins the new bus as an example of an expensive but worthless high-profile scheme whose ultimate aim seems to be the promotion of Mayor Boris.

London Pride

The introduction of the position of Mayor gave London its first chance to develop a city-wide identity since Thatcher scrapped the GLC in the 1980s, and Ken took full advantage. I remember three areas that stood out, and heralded a return of pride in our city.

The first was London’s response to the Iraq War. Our Prime Minister Tony Blair had dragged the UK into an illegal war, against the wishes of the British people. A few months after the start of the war, in late-2003, Bush came to London on a state visit. A huge rally was held in Trafalgar Square to protest the presence of a war criminal in Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile, a few miles further east, Ken Livingstone hosted an anti-war event to show the disgust of Londoners against Bush, Blair and their acts of mass murder. He had also spoken brilliantly at London’s immense anti-war march in February 2003. It was a moment to be proud of London at a time when many were ashamed to be British. It goes without saying that Mayor Boris has not repeated such an event, and has left London devoid of a sense of community or leadership.

The second was the redesign of Trafalgar Square itself. London’s places of beauty had slowly been torn apart by the car lobby, and Trafalgar Square itself became a dirty, polluted roundabout. Ken’s redesign saw a large part of the square pedestrianised, and reclaimed from cars by pedestrians. Artworks were displayed and a sweeping staircase led from the square up to the National Gallery. The new Trafalgar Square is a testament to Ken’s love of London, and his hard work as mayor. Conversely, Boris seems to work little and care even less.

The third was the magnificent RISE festival, a free music festival with an anti-racism theme, that attracted top music acts, and brought together Londoners from all communities in a day of celebration. This became London’s second festival, after the Notting Hill Carnival, and an important community hub. Boris, elected at a time when racial tensions were rising and far-right groups gaining in strength, virtually scrapped the festival. It was rescued by trade unions, but is now a far smaller event with a much lower profile.

Housing

London councils are being forced by the government to relocate poor families – not just the unemployed but many who work – to towns far from London. London is being socially cleansed; property prices are spiralling in a frenzy of speculation, and the poor are squeezed out. This is detrimental not just to our culture, but to the economy too; a city filled with bankers and media executives still needs lower-skilled workers. Boris has said, and done, nothing. He has failed in his duty to defend our city against the right-wing onslaught from central government.

Ken, as mayor, flew the flag for affordable housing and the maintenance of diverse communities. Indeed, he happily admitted that his prime reason for backing the London Olympics bid was to get East London redeveloped, and get large amounts of affordable new housing built.

Policing

The great bendy bus myth was one of two big lies used by the pro-Boris media to help him defeat Ken. The second was far more serious: the misreporting of a “knife crime epidemic” that didn’t actually happen. This resulted in an increased fear of crime and increasingly heavy policing. Random stop and search by police increased dramatically, and was especially used against young black and Asian men. The mayor has a duty to ensure London is being properly policed and listen to community concerns – but Boris has been the absent mayor. Community groups increasingly warned the mayor of an increase in anti-police feeling, and a breakdown in police-community relations. There were clear warnings of riots. And when they arrived in August 2011, few Londoners were surprised. Boris’s response? He turned up a few days later for a photo opportunity with local people who were sweeping the streets clean. He appeared to have little understanding of the issues; he didn’t go to Tottenham, the source of the riots. In short, he failed to lead.

We have an Alternative Vote system – so you can vote for Green, Liberal Democrat or whoever else you like. But Livingstone is the only one who can beat Boris, and deserves your second vote, if not your first. It really doesn’t matter if whether you think Ken is “slimy” or not – London is one of the world’s great cities, and deserves a leader who – pardon my language – gives a fuck about it.

In this latest podcast, we’re talking about female sexuality and the people who attack it. Slutphobia and slut-shaming have been fashionable throughout history, and are still going strong today. But women are fighting back and taking back the S-word for themselves. I interview Chelsea Black, a sex blogger and Sarah Berry, a sex journalist, and visit the Erotica show in London, where I talk to women about their porn viewing habits.

If you’re an iTunes user, you can subscribe to Moron-Free Radio here: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/moron-free-radio/id492113818

Podcast (moron-free-radio): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:10 — 40.4MB) | Embed

Tommy Robinson: Fascist and Laughing-Stock

Fascism was highly fashionable throughout Europe and North America in the 1930s, and Britain too was affected. Antisemitism and a desire to keep the “lower orders” in check were widespread beliefs among the British aristocracy, the media, the police, the Conservative Party and large sections of the population. My Jewish grandfather and his family, living in the ghetto in the East End of London, faced discrimination and the threat of violence on a frequent basis. The far-right was strong and confident, and the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley, commanded a membership of up to 50,000, and the support of the ever-moronic Daily Mail.

On Sunday 4th October, 1936, Mosley decided to flex the BUF’s muscles by marching his “blackshirt” street thugs through the East End, the most Jewish area of England. The local Jewish population, including my grandfather, came into their streets to stop the blackshirts marching. They battled the fascists, and the London police who joined the blackshirts in fighting the Jews. But that’s not the full picture: the Jews alone couldn’t have stopped the blackshirts (and their police friends) from marching. The Jews were joined by other immigrants – largely Irish – along with socialists, communists, trade unionists and ordinary Londoners. Local women leaned out of their windows and dropped pots and pans on the blackshirts. The fascists were beaten off London’s streets.

The Battle of Cable Street was a turning point in British history. The BUF never recovered from their physical beating and humiliation. The British people had given their verdict on fascism – unlike in much of mainland Europe or the USA, British fascism was in retreat by the start of the Second World War in 1939. Mosley attempted a come-back in the 1950s and 60s, this time choosing black immigrants instead of Jews as his target, but he was largely irrelevant by then. His fascist mantle was picked up in the 1970s by a new group, the National Front, which targeted blacks, Jews and the latest arrivals: Asians (meaning primarily Indians and Pakistanis). The growth of the NF coincided with the Skinhead cultural movement among young working class whites, and the skinheads were (often unfairly) labelled as fascists and racists.

When I reached my teens, the NF was at its peak, and my black friends would run on sight of a skinhead. But then, in the early-80s, support for the NF collapsed. But why? It wasn’t through official state action: the British police were incredibly racist, and often took the side of the NF in street confrontations. The Thatcher government was riddled with racists who had little understanding of the situation on the streets, and showed no interest in clamping down on street racism.

The answer was culture; or specifically working class culture as expressed through music. In the 60s, while middle class Brits were joining the hippie movement, the young, white working class had discovered Soul music, imported from the US. In the 1970s, the young black British population, with close links to the West Indies, was listening to reggae, the huge new trend from Jamaica. Young white people in the cities, who already had a taste for black music, were discovering reggae, which required going to black concerts and mixing with black people. In the late-1970s, the two-tone movement appeared, blending white skinhead and punk music with reggae and ska from the West Indies. The two-tone movement (including groups like The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter) saw concerts bringing enemy gangs together in the same venues. Rastas and skinheads shared music, danced together and smoked weed together. The National Front lost its constituency of angry, white, racist young men. This didn’t happen because government wanted it to – it happened largely without the knowledge of Britain’s rulers. It happened because of some X-factor in the British population; a natural ability to accept, integrate and mix with immigrant cultures that seems lacking elsewhere in Europe or in the United States.

If two-tone was the first, crude blend of white and black music, it was just the beginning. By the 1990s, mixed couples and mixed music scenes were becoming more frequent. Mixed-race children were becoming a common sight. The Jamaican Dub sound was adopted by musical pioneers in Bristol, who created a new set of genres such as Trip Hop. Jungle music, a London creation, took Jamaican ragga and European dance music and blended them. From this emerged Drum and Bass, and in the late-90s, UK Garage. UK Hip Hop began as a copy of the American version, but was quickly adapted to British styles, from which emerged a truly British poetry form, Grime. Asian sounds joined the mix of Jamaican and European influences. The blender ran ever faster, creating new musical styles that were ever more intertwined, and ever more British.

Outside the cities, most people were oblivious to this. As always, British urban youth were decades ahead of the establishment and the middle class mainstream in integrating their cultures together. The only time the urban scene ever made mainstream news was if a gun was waved at a Garage concert or a stabbing occurred at a Hip Hop rave.

By 2000, it seemed the far-right could never re-establish itself in such a mixed society, so at peace with itself, but 9/11 changed that. The new kid on the fascist block, the British National Party (BNP) quickly rewrote its literature, replacing the word Asian with the word Muslim. Anti-Muslim ideas began to gain traction, especially after 52 people died in the London bombings of 2005. Then the English Defence League (EDL) was born; while the BNP had tried to create a respectable, suited version of fascism, the EDL went back to NF ways, building a street army of angry young white men. The EDL grew fast, but then in the past year or so seemed to have peaked. The EDL’s apparent association with far-right Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik doesn’t seem to have helped them.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen regular tweets about the EDL and its idiot supporters, and especially its moronic leader, Tommy Robinson. EDL supporters on Twitter output a regular drip-feed of hateful misinformation about Muslims, which has been hard to tackle. Until yesterday, that is. Tommy Robinson had tweeted one of his standard pieces of anti-Muslim nonsense. Seeing a picture of a “mosque” on the Twitter home page (it was, in fact, the Taj Mahal), Robinson sent the following tweet:

Welcome to twitter homepage has a picture of a mosque What a joke #creepingsharia

The idea being, of course, to convince the British public that Islam is encroaching on every aspect of our daily lives. There have been many such tweets from Robinson and his supporters. But this time, some Twitter users decided to respond, and take the piss out of (to use a British expression) the #CreepingSharia hashtag. By yesterday afternoon, the trickle of tweets was growing into a flood, and by evening it was a tsunami. The British people, in their many thousands, had finally been given their chance to react, in a truly British fashion, to the cancer of the EDL. The response wasn’t anger, threats or hatred. It was a flood of laughter. The EDL was turned within a few hours into a national and international laughing-stock. It was more than a chance to let off steam – it was a turning point. It was a chance for the majority to demonstrate to British Muslims that the EDL is a small, unrepresentative and unliked group of people. The atmosphere on Twitter yesterday can be described as a carnival. I don’t think my grandfather, or other veterans of the Battle of Cable Street, would mind me comparing the two events. Yesterday, 16th April 2012, the British people hounded and humiliated the EDL just as they had the BUF on 4th October 1936.

Here’s a small selection of #creepingsharia tweets (sorry if they’re wrongly attributed – many were retweeted many times):

@DestinyofL: ‘Star Wars’ makes a ‘hero’ of a youth who is radicalised by a bearded old man who lives in the desert wearing robes #creepingsharia

@amna_kaleem: The weather in Britain is always Sunni or Shi’ite. #CreepingSharia

@lacatchat: If you look really carefully, a packet of iced gems looks like lots & lots of little Mosques. #creepingsharia

@stanyalplatford: All the fantastic and clever #creepingsharia tweets utterly nailed @EDLTrobinson . What a fucking prick.

@BristolAF: Fell asleep on the sofa again last night. My lovely Muslim housemate tried not to wake me when she got back from work. #creepingsharia

@ZiaQureshi11: I once had a go at my housemate for cooking bacon in my frying pan and not cleaning it properly #creepingsharia

@KarmaUnc: Marvelous to see the Twittersphere overwhelmingly handing @EDLTrobinson his #creepingsharia arse back to him on a plate today #EDL

‏@ammaarrahim: RT if the #creepingsharia trend made your day today… certainly made mine :)

It was a reminder to me that, whatever the downside of living on this cold, wet island among a people who enjoy moaning about most things on most days, there’s a huge reason to be proud of this country. As race hate strengthens in Hungary, The Netherlands and the USA, the British can again be an example to the rest of the western world. While patriotism grows in popularity elsewhere, the British don’t do patriotism. We don’t fly flags on our homes or on public buildings. It’s our contempt for those who label themselves British or English Patriots that is quintessentially British or English.

As for my great love, British urban music, this has continued to evolve over the past decade. For those of you who can’t be here in London to experience our mixture first-hand, here’s a taste of what young white, black and brown Londoners are dancing to, together, in 2012. It contains flavours of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and the USA, but it’s uniquely British, and it unites young people from all backgrounds. The far-right doesn’t stand a chance.

Tut tut tut tut tut...

As I’ve reported previously, the high-end, high-quality journalism of the Guardian has an achilles heel: sexuality. Whenever this mysterious subject raises its head, the Guardian seems to feel that it must respond with a mix of straight-laced puritanism and British schoolboy-type giggling.

I’ve reported about the attacks on London strip clubs, and the people who work in them, by a bizarre mix of anti-sex “feminist” groups, including Object, and religious fundamentalists. My recent podcast featured interviews with strippers who are fighting against these attacks. If such an attack on unionised workers took place in any other industry, the Guardian would take a serious journalistic approach. But these unionised workers take their clothes off for a living; and Guardian editorial policy in such matters requires a mix of “Ooh Matron!” and “Tut tut, your nipples must be covered at all times!”

So imagine my (lack of) surprise when the recent publication of a report by two  British academics into the British lap-dancing industry was met with the usual lack of seriousness in a comment piece by Victoria Coren entitled We must hone our lap-dancing skills. It’s about strippers, and strippers aren’t real people (at least, none of the Guardian’s Oxbridge-educated journalists know any), so we can all have a laugh at these working class women who undress for a living.

The writers of the original report, Dr Kate Hardy and Dr Teela Sanders of Leeds University, have responded with a letter to the Guardian, which they shared with MoronWatch:

Dear Sir,

 Victoria Coren’s ‘wry’ look at our research on labour conditions and mainstreaming of the lap dancing industry is lazy, Chinese whispers journalism in which the author has simply lifted an already poorly reported story from another news source.

Satire aside (I’m sure Coren is au fait with Aristotle’s theory of humour), the piece not only denigrates the women who work in lap dancing clubs as deserving subjects for sneering and ridicule, but also denigrates sociological and academic knowledge production itself.

We did not meet in a lap dancing club and ‘shriek’ (just to throw in a little more misogyny). Funding for the project was awarded to Dr Sanders from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a highly esteemed and regarded funding body, in a close competition with many applications judged by a lengthy process of peer review.

We are not worried about the quality of lap dancing for consumers, but the safety, well-being and quality of the working lives of the women who work in the clubs. Our research actually charts the rise in exploitation that women have faced in lap dancing clubs since the beginning of the crisis, which employers have enabled through a process of deskilling and therefore opening up of the labour market. Victoria Coren would know this if she had done anything resembling her homework.

Dr Kate Hardy (Lecturer in Work and Employment) and Dr Teela Sanders (Reader in Sociology)

Whether the Guardian will either publish the letter or allow the researchers a full right to respond is currently unknown, although based on recent history, I’m not hugely optimistic.

Everyone, in London and beyond, will remember the horrendous knife-crime epidemic of early-2008. The story was spread far and wide – indeed, friends of mine from France and the United States mentioned it in conversation at the time. The opposition Conservative party and most of the British media picked up the story, and used it to show us just how dangerous life had become in Britain’s capital. It should have been a scary time for me, my friends and family here in London… but it wasn’t.

Why? Because the “knife crime epidemic” of 2008 was a lie. A scare story concocted by the (then in opposition) Conservative party, most of the British press, and in particular, London’s Evening Standard. The timing of the story was no coincidence; it came in the run-up to London’s mayoral election, in which the Conservative challenger, Boris Johnson, was to defeat Labour’s Ken Livingstone – London’s mayor from 2000 to 2008. Livingstone had a long record in London politics, having won the top job way back in the 1980s, and he was (and still is) hated by the conservative media, especially the Standard.

London is an incredibly safe city for its size – one of the world’s safest – but being a city of eight million people, it’s easy to find a violent crime to report any day of the week, if the press so chooses. Beginning in early-2008 the Standard suddenly began to pay more attention to violent crimes, and especially stabbings. There is roughly one murder every two days in London (New York sees around five times the number of murders), so the Standard quickly managed to create the impression that London was in the grip of a sudden surge in knife crimes, even though there was no surge. In fact, as you can see below, the knife crime rate in London has been fairly flat, and had been higher in 2004/5 than in 2008. Certainly, there is nothing that could be called an epidemic.

Source: Wikipedia Crime in London page

The knife-crime-epidemic-that-never-was contributed heavily to Boris Johnson’s victory in the May 2008 election, and has been resurrected regularly by the press ever since. It was also used by the increasingly authoritarian Labour government of the time to introduce draconian sentences for carrying a knife.

If there was an epidemic in London, it came after the mayoral election; and it wasn’t a knife crime epidemic, but a plague of police stop-and-searches, using the imaginary knife crime epidemic as an excuse, along with the never-ending “terrorist threat”. This new policy was carried out aggressively by the Metropolitan Police, with the strong backing of Mayor Boris, and disproportionately targeted young black and Asian men. This in turn created a surge in anger and resentment against the Metropolitan Police. When a young mixed-race man, Mark Duggan, was shot by police officers (who then lied that he had been carrying a gun), the anger boiled over and led to the Tottenham riots of 2011, which spread around the UK.

A “knife crime epidemic” invented by the Conservative Party and right-wing press in 2008, in order to get Boris Johnson elected mayor, had eventually led to harassment of hundreds of thousands of young men, and helped trigger last year’s riots. Boris has never admitted this dangerous lie, which has proved divisive and damaging to London. While the Standard yet again runs daily smear stories against Ken Livingstone for being “slimy”, nobody is holding Boris Johnson to account for unleashing brutal policing on London.