Ken vs. Boris: It's So On

poor children :(

red ken doesn't control the tubes though, does he?

ken c, those things are true of the MTA in new york, but remember that the subways are on about the same frequency - or less - than london buses. and also that the NYC bus system is a joke.

red ken has also told virtually every PFI venture that's gone tits up that they can go hang if they expect a bailout from local government

i mean, as zany as boris is, could even he out-zany this deal that red ken made?? (ans: yes, but it would benefit a handful of his friends rather than a quarter million londoners on income support)

that is the right kind of zane

apart from the cosying up to the muslim right wing

jog my memory?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4165691.stm

peter watts linked a beef ken had with ed 'the islamist' husain on the today prog recently where ken got his ass handed to him.

Qaradawi is hardly a right-wing Muslim

Oh god, I think I wanna have your babies...

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44000000/jpg/_44000588_boris203_bbc.jpg

I don't really understand all these "anyone but Ken!" haterz. Though I suppose the things that people complain about (the congestion charge) are exactly the sort of things I think make him a great mayor. These things may not be popular, but they make London a better place for the people that LIVE here.

<i>Qaradawi is hardly a right-wing Muslim</i>

True enough, antisemitism is very left these days.

God, I sound like Nick Cohen.

not always

xpost

he's pretty right-wing, tracer. the ken of the '80s was, if memory serves, quite sanctimonious about LBG issues etc...

xpost

whereas boris is a fun-loving leftie

this thread is actually worse than boris being mayor would be.

blueski for mayro

actually oh god no

ok, enlighten me on Qaradawi's right-wingness, i'm totally willing to be wrong here. but i remember poring over transcripts when that story broke in 2004 and finding nothing very remarkable about Qaradawi's views (the homophobia is unfortunate but unremarkable if you consider that the guy's a Muslim cleric; i mean, try asking the Archbishop of Canterbury how he's livin these days on that issue; still, Ken addressed the homophobia head-on)

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/07/blurring-the-li.html

gives some sense of the husain vs livingstone thing. i need to google "ed husain mi5 mossad" now to see how it's gone down.

oh well, if the guy's a muslim cleric then i guess he gets a free pass.

come on Galloway...

galloway vs ken vs boris vs... littlejohn

"you coudn't make it up"

enrique i'm not giving Qaradawi a free pass; i'm giving Ken one.

and i will continue to do so! forever! until he says something like "that Qaradawi guy has some good ideas about Jews."

that's what quitney hears ken say every time he opens his mouth.

being a mod, you'd know all about being a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD.

jokes bruv.

that's what i thought when i said "actually oh god no"

But leaving aside anti-semitism, what is Ken doing hanging out with somebody who believes women should be beaten (lightly and not around the face) and homosexuals executed (perhaps dropped from high windows or burnt, he's not quite sure how)? It is a bit strange.

exactly.

"hanging out" - you make it sound like they're drinking tequila sunrises down at dale's clam shack

"what is churchill doing hanging out with somebody like josef stalin??"

ed husain for mayor

actually, ken is the only one to have made a vocal guest appearance on a blur song

ken didn't have to literally embrace him and say he was 'truly, truly welcome'.

stalin had something to offer churchill. why does ken need to meet this guy?

free tequila.

galloway vs. ken vs. boris vs. littlejohn vs. barnes vs. lawton vs. alibhai-brown vs. greer

vs. a.a.gill

vs. dom passantino

"You coudn't make it up"

being a mod, you'd know all about being a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD.

as a Gentile born many years after the Holocaust i take real offense to this.

i'm also really offended that someone (let's call them ken c) would hate the idea of me as Mayor Of London.

This might as well go here - someone I used to work with just forwarded me this, smells like BNP to me:

We need to act now before its to late.

Don't know if you have heard about this but Ken Livingstone is apparently planning to use tax payer's money to build an enormous mosque costing an estimated £100M in the docklands.

Wouldn't it be better to spend the money on a new hospital or improved transport facilities? Anything but such a scheme as this:
The mosque will be BIGGER THAN ST PAUL'S!!!

The plan is for the mosque to be so big so that people flying in from all over the world for the 2012 Olympics will see it as the biggest landmark in London, bigger than St Pauls, Westminster Abbey or Wembley Stadium.

The vote so far is 56 % in favour. It looks like the Muslim community in the UK is casting its vote in droves, and as usual the British are burying their heads in the sand....

It is an undemocratic use of British Tax payer¹s money, especially when our Churches that are 100's of years old get no government funding to keep their structures standing, and we are supposedly a Christian Nation.

To vote to "Scrap the 'Mega-Mosque" please sign the official Government petition in the link below.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ScrapMegaMosque/#detail
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ScrapMegaMosque/#detail

After voting, forward this to as many people as you can.

Thank you.

in re my earlier comment about ken telling metronet to go f*ck themselves if they think they're getting a penny from the government to bail them out of their £2billion hole, that's only half right as today's news makes clear - metronet's tube deal is a PPP, not a PFI, and the structure of the deal means the public IS on the hook for the yawning debt metronet have racked up.

"Livingstone steps in as Metronet faces financial collapse"
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2128201,00.html

it still looks as though ken is going to try and figure out a way for the govt. NOT to pay for this, though, which is great

toynbee's column today about boris is a masterwork of rhetoric, and i think it's grebt

Wow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2127917,00.html

Much though I love Boris as a personality, I agree with pretty much most of the things she says about him.

Can't we invent some figurehead role for Boris to fulfill? Like, make him Lord Mayor of London, while Ken gets on with the real work of running the city?

it sunk in last night what will happen when Johnson takes part in live TV debates for this (as Ken did). carcrash television that should kill his chances dead but probably won't somehow.

colonel poo, here's a link that addresses that email:

http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/news.php?slug=Mayor-Attacks-Mosque-Email-Campaign&article_id=634

the key quote:

The Mayor repeated his past statement that "there is no proposal to use any public money at all for such a mosque; there is no link between plans for a mosque and the Olympics; and, as widely reported, there are actually no plans for a mosque on the scale claimed in the email."

Andrew Gilligan: "Boris has come to save our great city from Ken's ghastly empire of bureaucrats, bendy buses and earnest Cuban festivals."

what's he got against the enormous, ubiquitous Cuban community of 'our fair city'?

the one thing in that toynbee column that threw me was her description of the Evening Standard as "London's only proper newspaper"

?? what does she mean?

i guess she means the only one people have to pay for

I thought it was only proper evening paper?

"Can't we invent some figurehead role for Boris to fulfill? Like, make him Lord Mayor of London, while Ken gets on with the real work of running the city?"

apart from tories and nimbys, does anyone but you want boris anywhere near london/anything?

my french housemate who's not eligible to vote has received a voting card, maybe you could just use hers merdeyeux

xp, i got an election leaflet at eleven pm, a few years ago, while watching The Exorcist. I nearly died.

The election was probably there for the taking with a stronger candidate but i can't see Boris getting beaten by Ken. The Labour campaign has been half-hearted, at best. At worst, it's looked like they've actually wanted Boris to win - possibly with a view to him challenging Cameron for leadership somewhere down the line.

this is the first i've seen the borisbus and its broken down just in the middle of the road #moneywellspent
http://distilleryimage10.instagram.com/75722684b55c11e188131231381b5c25_7.jpg

it turns back to being a bendy bus afterall
http://distilleryimage0.instagram.com/62a243c2b56611e1abb01231382049c1_7.jpg