Ken vs. Boris: It's So On

"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?

Obviously other people do, or else someone wouldn't be putting up the money for him to run.

And you can write off those people as "tories and nimbies" but that doesn't stop them from having a valid opinion, albeit one you don't agree with.

it doesn't stop them having an opinion.

yeah i think it must be a subediting error, she can't possibly have meant what ended up getting printed!

Tracer, thanks for the link, that's what I thought I'd heard about it. Mosque bigger than Wembley Stadium! It's Political Correctness gone mad etc! Wankers.

That Toynbee piece is boring rhetoric BUT she makes a valid point in that this could potentially be a massive embarassing disaster for the Tories.

It's also occurred to me that I have lost all perspective as to how popular Ken actually is. If he still is.

yeah matt it's not really provocative or counterintuitive but i just thought it was very neat the way she sewed it all up with "even if he wins, the torys lose"

plus managed to get "toff" and "sociopath" into the headline.. maybe she really does admire the evening standard after all!

Livingstone has earned respect with the bravery and skill of his congestion charge, his London bus revolution and his imposition of 50% affordable housing on every development.

i did not know about the last part.

Yeah, these are great in principle but don't quite work in practice cos the developers tend to hive off the affordable housing element into a separate building, or with a separate entrance, meaning there's little integration and they don't hold their value. Plus, if you're buying in Zone 1, you still have to be on a decent salary (c30k) to qualify. Nice idea though.

facebook: 4 pages of boris groups only one anti. 4 pages of ken groups only two pro.

i didn't know about the affordable housing thing either. but the £30k thin's even more bewildering - so you need a minimum salary of that to qualify? huh??

acebook: 4 pages of boris groups only one anti. 4 pages of ken groups only two pro.

further proof if proof were needed that facebook is full of daily mail (probably just the Metro TBH) reading middle class wankers

Yep, cos even if you're only buying 25 per cent mortgage/75 per cent rent the property is still worth 220k+ (for a one-bed zone 1 flat) so they want to be sure you earn enough to be able to pay that monthly charge without getting repossessed.

If you're out of zone 1 or have a big deposit, that's less of a problem.

if boris gets in i'm blaming Have I Got News For You?

but how many of the pro-Johnson groups on Facebook are 'ironic' or at least based on appreciation of him as comedy character rather than politician or journalist. there must be a big bunch of people out there (mainly tories and nimbys i suppose) who claim to think he's great but wouldn't vote for him.

metronet go into administration at 5.

Is that going to be good for Ken because he refused to spend £££££££ taxpayers' money to bail them out or bad because the tube engineering works are going to be even more delayed now?

there's no guarantee that ken won't have to go to the treasury, hat in hand, and ask for £2 billion to plug the gap

regardless, it's conceivably very good for ken because he opposed PPP from the get-go - now he can turn around and say "look where this kind of thing gets you" with the advantage of actually being honest and correct about it

apparently a third party has delivered $$$s

there is now a "red ken can't be trusted" / "good old boris" conversation happening a few feet away from me.

If there's gonna be a marked increase in "lol Boris Johnson is a legend" talk as a result of this I think I might actually murder someone