Last month I jokingly drew comparisons between Ealing’s food re-cycling scheme and the Charlton Heston sci-fi flick Soylent Green.
BBC TV coverage yesterday seems to indicate that there is nothing sinister happening at Biogen although they might want to think about their name, sounds like something from another bad sci-fi movie.
Click through for pictures of ECT collecting food and lush crops and electricity being generated from it.
I have just received a copy of Ken Livingstone’s thank you e-mail to his supporters; I signed up to receive communications from our ex-mayor in order to better keep an eye on his campaign. To the end he tries to link the BNP to the Boris campaign in spite of the fact that the BNP appeal directly to Labour voters. He says:
It is noteworthy that a number of parties to the right of the Tories notably the BNP polled much higher in the Assembly list than in the Mayoral vote, suggesting that some of their voters voted tactically for Boris Johnson.
Finally, here are some words that I will personally strive to make sure he eats:
There is no doubt that the new Mayoralty will inaugurate decline and division.
Bitter and vile to the end.
The Mayor today outlined his plans to outlaw alcohol on public transport in London – everything except the trains.
This is great news. My elderly neighbour called it “wonderful”. Some people have criticised it on libertarian grounds, for instance Guido Fawkes, and predictably Bob Crowe of RMT thinks it is all too hard.
People forget that London Underground banned smoking on the Tube about 20 years before the smoking ban and it was entirely uncontroversial. When I first came to work in London in 1984 I remember the cigarette butts lying in rows in the grooves of the wooden floors of tube trains. First they banned smoking on the trains and then after the Kings Cross fire disaster in all LU premises.
The smoking ban itself passed hardly the slightest incident of disobedience last year. By the end of June public transport will be dry and everyone will have forgotten there was ever a time when you would drink on public transport.
Ray Lewis supported Boris at both his initial policing launch and at his last push event.
Good to see the Mayor hitting the ground running.
Lewis’ CV is pretty inspirational and he is a very engaging speaker. He says:
We see no shortage of young black males in the courtrooms, so my vision is to seek to prepare as many as possible for the boardrooms.
Good start.
This is probably my last Comment is free piece for the Guardian for a while.
Today the BBC is reporting that Lyle Tulloch, 15, from Peckham, was fatally stabbed in a stairwell at Newall House, Borough, on Saturday.
Regrettably that makes Lyle Tulloch the 12th teenager to be murdered in London this year.
Thankfully it has been over a month since our last teen murder on 27th March.
Our new mayor rightly highlighted this issue during his campaign. Now he has to be seen to act swiftly to make a difference.
1 January: Henry Bolombi, 18, stabbed
5 January: Faridon Alizada, 18, stabbed
21 January: Boduka Mudianga, 18, stabbed
26 January: Fuad Buraleh, 19, beaten
19 February: Sunday Essiet, 15, stabbed
29 February: Ofiyke Nmezu, 16, beaten
2 March: Teng Le, 17, stabbed
13 March: Michael Jones, 18, beaten
15 March: Nicholas Clarke, 19, shot
27 March: Devoe Roach, 17, stabbed
27 March: Amro Elbadawi, 14, stabbed
3 May: Lyle Tulloch, 15, stabbed
I have been looking back at some of the figures for the last three mayoral elections. The numbers are quite staggering and belie the headline news that Boris beat Livingstone by some 6% of the vote as predicted by YouGov.
At a time when the popularity of the Labour government is at a 40-year low Livingstone managed to increase the number of people that voted for him with a first preference by 30%. This is an awesome achievement. The Tories need to note carefully how he achieved this in the face of not only a poor national Labour performance but also with a decimated grass roots organisation. I will come back to this as it illustrates how easily our democracy can be stolen by a politician who is ruthless enough.
Boris’ achievement is far bigger and makes me wonder if Norris couldn’t have pulled something slightly less spectacular off four years ago. Boris increased the Tory vote by a whopping 92%. More people voted for Boris in 2008 then voted for Norris in 2000 and 2004 added together.
The mayoral result did not come out until near enough midnight and some of the constituency results weren’t confirmed until almost 1am. Considering the count started at about 8.30am this is a pretty poor performance on the part of London Elects – which is effectively a combination of GLA staff and various borough election people.
I was at one of the the three counts at Olympia in the afternoon, the photo above shows the Ealing and Hillingdon part of the count. Officially I was a counting agent but in practice there was not much to do except stand around and chat to people. Angie Bray was on good form and looking forward to going on holiday after working hard to get out the vote in her future Central Ealing and Acton constituency. She has stood down from the assembly and her West Central seat has been won by senior Westminster councillor Kit Malthouse. By the time I got to the count at 2.30pm Richard Barnes was already pretty confident of his seat and that Boris would win the mayoralty.
At Olympia they were counting six constituencies. By 4pm they had only got about half the voting papers through the scanners. All the computers were working fine but a combination of a high turnout and problems keeping the scanners online meant that there were just not enough scanners to do the job. Next time London Elects need to make sure that they do the job properly. As soon as Johnson was confirmed as the candidate for the Tories it wasn’t a big leap of imagination to think that turnout might go up. Doh! It was a bit humiliating to have London’s result fully 24 hours after many local election results and to miss even the 10pm news the next day. Someone voting early on Thursday and going to bed at a reasonable time on Friday would not have known the result of their action for two days. Ridiculous.
It was a good night for the Tories on the London Assembly. Although they lost a seat, Bob Blackman’s in Brent & Harrow, they gained three London-wide seats so the number of Tory AMs went up by two to eleven. It was previously accepted wisdom amongst the Tories that they would never get any London-wide seats – strangely the loss of Brent & Harrow was part of the reason why they became available. The first two places go to very able Tory mayoral hopefuls Andrew Boff and Victoria Borwick. The third place goes to Bexley councillor Gareth Bacon who is also their cabinet member for environment. No doubt all three will be somewhat surprised to have new jobs.
With only four of the Tory old guard returning to the assembly the new Mayor will have a largely new team assembly members to support and challenge him.
Labour gained a seat but the LibDems were the big losers, losing two seats. The other losers were the One London (ex-UKIP) pair who have left the assembly.
The full assembly results are here.
The bad news from last night is that the odious Richard Barnbrook got an assembly seat for the BNP. The BNP nudged over the 5% hurdle, polling 5.33% of the London-wide vote.
It is a shame that more of the disaffected voters who voted for them didn’t vote for UKIP – at least a UKIP member would have been given a hearing and would be able to represent the views of those that feel that the major parties aren’t for them. The BNP will be ignored with their weird mixture of views which combine pretty much naked racism and socialism. I am not a UKIP supporter – I am probably at the other end of the right spectrum but would ten times rather give UKIP house room than the BNP.
Phil Taylor 