Monthly Archives: Apr 2012

Domestic (UK), Politics

Boris, Ken, or someone else?

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Non-Londoners can skip this post, I won’t be offended.

The time has come for those of us who live in The Great Wen to decide who we want to be Mayor of this great metropolis for the next four years. Although there are seven candidates, unfortunately I think our choice probably boils down to, do we dislike Ken more than Boris or vice versa?

Here, in alphabetical order are the seven candidates and the parties they represent:

Candidates
Name Party
Siobhan BENITA Independant
Carlos CORTIGLIA British National Party
Boris JOHNSON The Conservative Party Candidate
Jenny JONES Green Party
Ken LIVINGSTONE The Labour Party Candidate
Brian PADDICK London Liberal Democrats
Lawrence James WEBB Fresh Choice for London (UKIP)

Clicking on the candidate’s name will take you to their website, except for the B.N.P. candidate, who does not seem to have a dedicated website, so clicking on his name takes you to his Wikipedia entry.

Lets take a quick look at the minor candidates first.

Both the BNP and UKIP seem to think that the Mayor of London has more powers than he actually has. The BNP wants their Mayor to build a better NHS and pledges that they will not allow an amnesty for illegal immigrants. I might be wrong, but building (or currently destroying) the NHS is probably down to the Secretary of State for Health and granting an amnesty for illegal immigrants (not that there has ever been one suggested by either of the main parties) would probably come under the Home Secretaries remit. The UKIP Mayoral candidate, judging by his policies appears to think that the Mayor can unilaterally withdraw London from the EU. Both of them also seem to think that the Mayor can ban non-UK citizens from working in London.
If they don’t know what they Mayor can and can’t do then I think we can move on.

Siobhan Benita, the Independent candidate, is more interesting. I can agree with a lot of her ideas, especially on education, housing and infrastructure. Interestingly she is the only candidate to advocate building a third runway at Heathrow. If she was standing as the Labour or Liberal Democrat candidate (her ideas would fit reasonably well with both parties) I might consider giving her my vote, but as an Independent, she will find it difficult to garner the support she needs.

Jenny Jones, the Green Party candidate, is the only candidate with a well thought out and practical plan to turn London into a cycling city, along the lines of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, and for that alone you should consider voting for her. While cycling in London isn’t a dangerous as it is often perceived to be, it is not safe either, as she says:

It may well be fine if you are confident, experienced and physically fit, but we want roads where everyone feels safe whether you are 7 years old or 70.

Some of the other policies I am a bit more ambivalent about, though she is good on transport and recycling, slightly less so on what to do with non-recyclable waste.

Brian Paddick, probably doesn’t see himself as a minor candidate, but he is. He is not going to win, but the second preference votes of people who vote for him might, in fact probably will, decide who does.
He builds is candidacy on the following facts. For the first time the Mayor will be directly responsible for the Metropolitan Police, and he was a police officer for over 30 years. I will admit that during his time as Borough Commander he came up with some interesting and moderately radical (too radical for the Daily Mail) ideas on policing. The “big idea” on policing seems to be this:

If elected Mayor and London’s “Police and Crime Commissioner” I would make it my top priority to bring the police and public together, so that criminals don’t stand a chance.

Reading his manifesto it seems to me that he isn’t actually running for Mayor the position he wants is Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. I want to elect a Mayor not a police chief. He is also a Liberal Democrat and I haven’t forgiven them yet.

Boris or Ken?

Here we have our choice then Boris or Ken, Punch or Judy, Scylla or Charybdis?
The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he wasn’t (quite) as big a disaster for London as I feared he might be. He comes across as a cuddly buffoon, but is actually a very calculating politician.
There are two Londons, the divide is not between Inner London and the Outer London suburbs as some suppose, and Boris Johnson tries to pretend, the divide is between the City of London and Greater London.
The London that he has been Mayor for is not Greater London, he has been Mayor for the City of London.
Billy Bragg links to a story in the Sunday Telegraph and points out:

Two headlines from the Sunday Telegraph today – ‘Boris Johnson: We need more tax cuts’ and ‘Rich get richer’. Could the two be in some way connected?

The one thing that people will probably remember him for, the TFL Cycle Hire scheme a.k.a “Boris Bikes” wasn’t even his idea. Jenny Jones (the Green candidate) came up with it and Ken Livingstone adopted it during his last period as Mayor. It just happened to be introduced during his term in office, but he gives himself the credit for it. Similarly with introducing Oyster Cards on the rail system in London. The donkey work was done before his election in 2008, all he had to do was dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
What have his achievements been, well, he got rid of ‘bendy buses’ to keep the cab drivers happy and replaced them with white elephants, sorry Modern Routemasters, that is if they ever get enough built.
His reaction to last summer’s riots was late, ineffective and patronising, to put it mildly.
I won’t be voting for Mr Johnson.

That leaves Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, Leader of the GLC before its abolition by Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980’s and known to most Londoners as ‘Ken’.

In years gone by I would have said “Vote for Ken, he is the only candidate who actually understands London.” This time I am not so sure. I could be that I think he has been around too long – he is 67 this year – I think that Labour would have been better with Oona King as their candidate, but they plumped for the devil they knew instead. A few other things are also bothering me. There is a vague whiff of Anti-Semitism around some of his statements. There is also a feeling that he has been opaque about his financial affairs. Having said all that, his policies, cutting public transport fares and the reintroduction (in London) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and support for childcare, seem to me to be the best package on offer and look affordable.
Along with every other candidate he pledges to reduce crime and make housing more affordable. I can’t recall ever having heard a politician pledge to allow crime to increase, so I think we will ignore that one. Making housing more affordable is more easily said than done and while I am sure they are all sincere in their wish to get housing cost down, again I think that should be taken with a pinch of salt.

My vote, without any great enthusiasm will be cast for Ken Livingston. As the Mayoral election is a sort of Alternative Vote, I was toying with the idea of giving my first preference to either Siobhan Benita or Jenny Jones, with my second preference to Ken Livingstone, but I think I might as well just vote for him and leave the second preference blank. There is no point in putting a minor candidate as your second choice, because they will all be out by the time the second choice votes are counted. If you want to support a minor candidate put them as your first choice and the vote for Livingstone as your second preference.

As for the London Assembly my advice is this vote Labour for the Constituency Member (elected on First Past the Post) and vote Green for the London wide additional member – we need some greens on the assembly to make sure that the other parties keep to their pledges on the environment.

So to summarise this is how I recommend that you vote

  • Mayor – Ken Livingston – reluctantly
  • Constituency Member – Labour
  • London Wide – Green
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How the internet sucks your time away.

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This morning I got up full of good intentions about what I was going to accomplish. The first priority was obviously to make breakfast and read the Guardian, from cover to cover, except for the sections that I don’t read. I had about 60% of this task completed when Mrsjohnm55 asked if I knew how to add some one to an email group. I know how to do it with my work email, but we use Lotus Notes at work, and because it is Lotus Notes, the method will be completely different to any other programme ever written. Being male I was reluctant to admit that I wasn’t sure how to do it in Windows Mail, because I have never needed mail groups for my private email. I came upstairs and opened up my email to work out how to do it. It turned out to be as simple as dragging and dropping contacts into the group. However..

One of my hobbies is Family History, and I subscribe to ancestry.co.uk to help with the research. One of the things they do is email you if someone else is researching one of your ancestors, and there in my in-box was an email telling me that some one had found something on one of my 3x great-grandmothers. I had tried to get a better handle on who she was for a while so I clicked the link. I checked out the information, it wasn’t a significant addition to what I already knew, it gave me an actual date of birth as opposed to the month and the year that I already had. Actually it might be the date of baptism, it wasn’t that clear.

This got me thinking about one of my other 3x great-grand mothers. Checking out her death certificate, I decided to find exactly where she had died. I couldn’t find the address on Google Maps. On a whim I typed into Google “Map of Kelso 1870”. This took me to the National Library of Scotland’s digital map archive. I found the address that she had died at. As I sort of guessed the street had been renamed sometime in the past century and a half.

Maps fascinate me, especially old maps. I don’t know how long I spent exploring the last three centuries of Scottish Borders via the maps I found in their archive, but it was a significant amount of time. If you like old maps have an explore of the site. It is first class and free. Just expect to lose an hour or two of your time.

I thought I might as well check Twitter (@john_m55) and that looks like an interesting article @so-and-so is tweeting about, I’ll check that out. That link in the article looks worth following as well. Should I look at my RSS feed to see if there is anything interesting there, of course there is, I wouldn’t be following these people if they didn’t say interesting things. Another half-hour gone. Might as well check Facebook before I shut down, nothing too much going on, except my sister tells me she has a friend who is cycling across the United States and is blogging about it, so naturally (cycling and cycle touring in particular is another of my passions) I had to check out his blog Bicycle Across America, more time gone.
And now I am blogging about it.

Environment

Time to turn out the (street) lights

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I have blogged about light pollution and the needed for dark skies before. Miriam O’ Reilly writes about the subject in today’s Guardian.

It’s just after midnight. There’s no moon, and hardly any cloud. A few street lights burn in the village below, but on the hill where I’m standing they have no impact on the brilliance of the night sky. Brilliant, because I’m looking into a canopy of stars too numerous to count.

She lives in a village on the edge of Snowdonia, the reality for most of us is different.

The latest annual star count survey by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and the Campaign for Dark Skies (CfDS) showed 53% of those taking part on a clear night earlier this year could see 10 stars or fewer within the major constellation of Orion. Only 9% could see between 21 and 30 stars within the constellation, and just 2% had really dark skies above them and so were able to see 31 or more stars. Our skies are so “saturated” with glaring light, according to campaigners, that many of us are unnecessarily denied access to the wonders of the night sky.

In South London, where I live it is worse than that.
We needed to do something about this. We need to see the stars otherwise we lose something, partly our sense of wonder, partly our connection with the universe and the idea that we are a small part of it, but mostly the sheer joy of being out on a clear moonless night and looking up at the stars.

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Pendulum Waves

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It has been a long time since I last posted, partly due to work pressure, but mainly because there has been a lot of other stuff going on that has taken up my time. Anyway, to get myself back into the groove, here is a video that I found fascinating.


This is how it works:

The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.

The full details can be found here