London Mayor: Those Candidates In Full

Couple of days ago the good people of City Hall sent through a document detailing the manifestos of the candidates for London Mayor. An online copy can be found here, although it is not as good as the paper one. Mainly because it lacks all the utterly moronic photos.

The booklet starts with the BNP manifesto. Maybe the organisers wanted to get the appallingly ignorant out of the way first. It is unpleasant stuff, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But then again, would you expect anything else from the moronic BNP?

The candidate's message starts with:

"Remember London the way it used to be? Clean, friendly and safe."

No, frankly, I don't. When has London ever been clean, friendly and safe? It has simply never been like that. Throughout the history of London there have been problems. The Blitz, Jack the Ripper, The Great Fire of London, The Great Plague, to name but a few. To be a pig ignorant racist is one thing. To base your pig ignorant racism on a utopian vision of London that has never existed is something else.

Then the manifesto bangs on for a while longer, with the usual toss about putting non-immigrants first, before it introduces us to three people like *you* who are going to vote for the BNP. Of course, given one is a housewife, one a builder and one is a student they are nothing like me. And their opinions on why they vote BNP are the usual shite that you might expect from people who read The Daily Mail and take it as gospel truth. My favourite is the builder, Ken:

“I vote BNP because I’m proud of my country and our heritage. We should celebrate things like St. George’s Day and other Christian festivals like St Patrick’s Day instead of other festivals such as Ramadan and Eid.”

Someone should tell Ken that he doesn't *have* to celebrate Ramadan and Eid. It is totally optional...

Then we have a woman from the Left List. Her photo is striking - she looks like a librarian, someone who lisps and smells faintly of must and gone-off cheese. Her manifesto seems to have been lifted straight from the old BBC sitcom Citizen Smith. Of course, there is much to laugh at with her naive sub-Communism, but my favourite is her policies on war:

"Bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, no attacks on civil liberties. Spend the money used for war on welfare."

Does she actually realise that she is running for London Mayor rather than Prime Minister? As far as I am aware, the London Mayor doesn't decide where British troops are deployed. Still, since Lindsey has roughly the same likelihood of becoming London Mayor as me, I'm guessing that she won't have to live with the disappointment of realising this herself.

Boris is next up. He notes:

"I am serious about making London safer, protecting our green spaces and giving the taxpayer value for money – and I have the ideas to do it."

Of course, Boris might have ideas, but he can't have that many, as a quarter of his space in the booklet is taken up with a massive photo of him. And he shouldn't show a photo of himself. It just accentuates the fact that he can't comb his hair. Ok, I can't either, but I'm not running for London Mayor.

Still, his policies are saner than the BNP's of the Left List's. Only just, though, in some cases:

"Implement serious strategies on knife and gun crime and arm the police with handheld weapon scanners"

Now, I don't know what a "handheld weapon scanner" is, but it sounds fucking cool. Seriously, it sounds so futuristic that Boris probably nicked the idea from the Jetsons or something. But if he can find this sort of technology to fight crime in London, I think he should be able to find other faintly ludicrous technology as well. Maybe he could go the whole hog and put Robocop on the streets of London.

The Green Party are running with a woman called Sian. There's lots of green on her pages in the booklets, perhaps unsurprisngly. Her policies lurch between the vaguely sensible and the jaw droppingly awful. My favourite is her policy on wages:

"Insist all employers pay a London Living Wage of at least £7.20 per hour."

It is a lot of fun to imagine Sian going to big corporate companies and telling them to pay the living wage. You can picture her really insisting. And then it is even more fun to picture Sian's face cracking up into tears when said companies tell her, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck herself.

Next up is Brian Paddick for the Liberal Democrats - a man who appears to have had his charisma surgically removed. Two things stand out his dreadfully dull manifesto. First of all, he writes:

“If I can’t cut crime and make our streets safer I’ll quit.”

Well, that's a fat lot of fucking use, isn't it? Paddick could fuck up the crime stats in this city, and then fuck off. But then again, there is very little chance of Paddick ever getting the chance to resign in disgrace. After all, he is standing for the perpetual third party. Which makes this statement very, very funny:

"London is my city."

No, Paddick, it isn't. And it won't be after 1st May either.

Onto UKIP. Their candidate looks a lot like someone who was sacked from John Major's cabinet for being too extreme. Hell, he's standing for UKIP, so he probably is someone who sacked from John Major's cabinet for being too extreme. However, his manifesto could not be more bland. Take this as an example:

"Law and Order – Punish the guilty and protect the innocent"

That's his Law and Order key policy. For most people it would be a mindless truism, for Gerard Battem, it is policy.

So onto the Christian Choice. It begins with a quote from Jesus:

"The leader is the one who serves."

Jesus died 2000 years ago, but is heading up this tit's manifesto.

Underneath there is a picture of the candidate with his family. They look a bit like the Robinsons from Neighbours. And the manifesto reads like a character from Neighbours seeking power - full of unrealistic, staggeringly naive thoughts. Only this reveals the true character of the man running:

"Stop the mega-mosque at West Ham near 2012 Olympics proposed by a controversial Islamic sect"

There we have it. The Christians can have as many places of worship as they like. The dirty infidels can't. Alan Craig should piss of to Alabama. Where he might stand a chance of getting elected. Hopefully he'll be utterly shunned here in London.

The English Democrats's candidate looks like a fat reject from Pop Idol. I'd go into the details of his manifesto, but it isn't worth it. The gormless fucker has already left the contest.

Finally, the King of the Newts, Red Ken himself. He writes:

"Over the next four years London needs to go further. It needs a competent Mayor with a proven record of commitment to our city – able to stand up for London, ready to tackle the still bigger challenges ahead."

Absolutely. Absolutely. But the past eight years have convinced me that you are not that mayor, Ken.

So there we have it. Boris wins my vote, because he's the only person who has a chance of unseating the piss midget. But if this sack of shit is the very best that London has to offer, then I despair. And the booklet really makes the case for not having directly elected mayors. If this is the best London can come up with, then imagine the dross that Redditch, Dudley or Crewe might come up with.