Category: Mayor Johnson

Amiri Howe, the gobby bloke with comedy glasses who was haranguing the London Mayor today turns out to be Darcus Howe’s son, see more of the family history here. The Ealing and Acton Gazette lapped it up fast enough here and no doubt Howe fils will be all over the London news bulletins.

It costs young people £30,000 to go to university now. Did you pay to go to university Boris? Did you go to university? It’s £30,000 to send a youth to prison. D’you pay to go uni? You’ve got money to send youths to prison, but you ain’t got money to send youths to university.

The media loves a character. Shame he is talking moral equivalencing rubbish. The rioters are criminal thugs. The government is attempting to balance the books and is doing the right thing.

Father and son need to explain why it is only one small group who feel the need to destroy. Rather than making Black Power salutes Howe fils needs to explain why Afro-Caribbean youngsters have been in the vanguard of the looting, arson and vicious assaults we have seen across London in the last week. Failing that a bit of silence from these two would be appreciated, by me anyway.

I have just left the Boris travelling show on Ealing Green. It was great that he came to see for himself one of the main centres of the damage on Monday. Everyone was glad to see him except one very loud, young black man in comedy glasses. No doubt he will be the focus of any footage shown on TV. A student from the adjacent Drama Studio London trying to get himself noticed I expect.

Sorry about the appalling picture. You can just about make out the Boris mop about 1/5th of the way from the left. No doubt other will do much better than me.

As there are two reports of the Boris session online already, here and here, I thought that it would be useful to take a different tack.

First off, Boris was a bit cheeky at the start and over-ran his three minute opening remarks slot. He gave a funny account of his journey to Greenford by tube and bus, full of elaborate praise for our neighbourhood. He then summarised some of what he has achieved as Mayor and what he hopes to achieve in the future. His line about “putting the village back into the city” resonated with me. He was talking about how he wanted London to have a village atmosphere.

This is not wishful thinking. Anyone who has visited New York in recent years will tell you how it has changed and how much friendlier people are compared to 15 and 20 years ago. Today London seems less civil than New York and civility should be a goal for civic leaders I think. Trees and parks are components of this just as much as police and public transport.

Boris still manages to charm after almost three years in office and his cheerful good humour will be very hard for Ken Livingstone to beat in May 2012. Expect Boris to enjoy four more years.

Secondly, it was quite clear that a number of groups were using the event to lobby the Mayor and gain influence, perhaps beyond their real numbers. I was struck by the ten or so good looking, clean cut young people with London Citizens placards. After the meeting I challenged them about who they were and where they came from. They were American interns! I have long been suspicious that London Citizens are not what they purport to be. They claim to be a “community alliance” but I rather think they are a small group of soft-left activists with good links to the churches and unions. They are good at getting people to wear T-shirts but I really don’t think that they are very honest.

The only two Labour councillors who bothered to turn up to last night’s Boris event in Greenford were the leader who was on the panel and their transport spokesman, Bassam Mahfouz. Out of a group of 40 that is pretty awful. Eight of the Tory group were there along with five ex-councillors. I will do a proper report later but meanwhile I have been looking at some of the tweets.

It seems that Cllrs Bell and Mahfouz didn’t confer. Mahfouz seems to think that the event was of no consequence whilst the leader seems to think he manfully held the Mayor to account. They can’t both be right.

Mahfouz needs to learn to be a little less catty. David Millican’s son Nathan asked a question about RMT’s strikes on the underground. It was no more planted than any of the other questions. Nathan is very tall and very red headed and was sitting at the end of a row about one third of the way from the front so it is unsurprising that he caught the chairman’s eye.

Nathan did have the advantage of being introduced to the chairman Richard Barnes and Cllr Mahfouz himself by his father at the start of the meeting. All normal social behaviour I think. Nathan did have an advantage but his question was his own. It’s nice to be nice councillor.