QUOTE(Sarah lady @ Mar 31 2008, 11:48 PM)
bad science website
I think this is Sarah's first ever inference to
anything at all by Spiked online. Amd lo and behold, she calls it that.
All this time I'd wondered
I'd go along with the doctor myself.
I guess this will
'fly about a mile over' as well.
QUOTE
Mick Hume
London calling — and we all ought to listen
The celebrity mayor show, featuring Ken, Boris and Brian talking about bendy-buses, provides a capital snapshot of where politics is heading.
Heard the one about the Stalinist miserabilist, the public-school class clown and the gay ex-police chief? Sorry, you’re right, it’s no laughing matter. The May election to be the next mayor of London may understandably seem of little interest to anybody outside the city. Come to that, it is perfectly understandable that few Londoners have shown much interest in it to date. But the mayoral campaign is worthy of close attention if only because it provides a capital snapshot of where politics is heading in Britain.
''Stalinist miserabilist?'' Bill Bragg is not going to agree with that. He called Ken progressive.
They may well be the bad science website, (If Sarah reckons so, I have to take that seriously), but I have always prefered their political analysis. Stuff like this:
QUOTE
Spiked writers are sometimes accused of criticising everything by readers who ask ‘haven’t you got any good news for us?’ Well, London rather sums up the situation. The good news is that we live in a society that by any objective measurement is far ahead of anything that went before it. People who live in our prosperous, civilised, multi-ethnic capital city tend to be wealthier, healthier, more tolerant and better informed than ever. The bad news, however, is that we also live under a vapid political culture seriously lacking in the leadership and vision necessary to take society forward – a problem encapsulated in the thick smog overshadowing the London poll.
I have long been assured by my old friends on the Labour left that, contrary to my belief that traditional left v right politics are dead, the London mayoral contest would boil down to a straight fight between ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor, and ‘True Blue’ Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP (with Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate and former senior Metropolitan Police officer, holding their coats). So, what is the big issue of principle dividing these giants of Socialism and Toryism as they battle for the soul of one of the world’s great cities at the start of the twenty-first century? Er, the future of bendy buses. Which, perhaps appropriately for politics today, appear able to turn to the left and the right at the same time.
In fact, the London race has become something very different. It looks like a parade of the emerging trends in post-left/right political life – and it does not make a particularly appealing mayor’s show.
The article goes on to raise four main points:
No party politics - in which it is argued that the top three candidates want to distance themselves from their party political labels. And says: ''The old politics of left and right have not been replaced by anything new of substance. Rather, politics is suspended in limbo, with no grand visions and few principles.''
Any-shade-so-long-as-it’s-green politics which suggests that they are all giving it
a load of green bollocks for all it's worth.
QUOTE
In the absence of any clear political principles of their own, they are all falling back on environmentalism as an ersatz manifesto and source of authority. There is much grand talk of saving the planet – with typical modesty Livingstone even claims that, were he to lose and Johnson to win, it would ‘undermine politicians across the world’ in their battle against climate change.
Identity politics - which suggests there is much pork bareling going on. Livingstone cosying up to muslim groups like the MCB and MAB. And we have seen concerted campaigns by Livingstone supporters to paint Boris as a racist. He meanwhile is focusing in the outer boroughs.
QUOTE
Whether such identity groups truly exist as solid voting blocs is open to question. What seems more certain, however, is that this niche approach will create more divisions than unity, and further encourage the sordid system of what Americans call ‘pork barrel politics’ (no offence intended to Muslim or Jewish sensibilities) where self-styled community spokespersons vie for favours and patronage.
Remember Munira Mirza's
Diversity is divisive Sarah lady??
The final is the paragraph headed:
Court politics which is quite long so I won't quote it all, but it says this:
QUOTE
Like British politics from Downing Street downwards, the whole thing has the feel more of medieval court politics than of a public fight between popular movements. Small cliques of insiders grouped around egotistical figureheads are manoeuvring for advantage in the media, stabbing one another in the back and poisoning their enemies’ wine (or whisky in Ken’s case). Meanwhile, life for the mass of us serfs and peasants outside goes on largely unmoved by these intra-elite plots and attempted coups.
So I might be an ''idiot'' and Spiked the ''bad science website'' - but at least it doesn't promote ethical (bleeding) T shirts
