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From: blp Category: Art Date: 14 May 2008 Time: 07:02 AM Review: First of all, from what I can gather, yes, the oft quoted 'picaninnies with watermelon smiles' remark was purely supposed to satirise Blair's racism. I never agreed with it being used repeatedly by all those Guardian journalists and fear that for them to have done so bespeaks either a lack of scruple, denial or stupidity. But... Not going to take a wrecking ball to the place? He's scrapping Ken's plans for new high-rises, the only viable solution to London's increasingly chronic housing problems, on the grounds that Londoners don't want high-rises, they want 'houses with gardens'. This is pure retrograde populist unworkable bullshit and totally destructive. You think Johnson 'wants to do something for London'? That's how Ken looked to me. He's spent the last thirty odd years trying to do something for London, to much right wing obstruction. I don't think he's a saint, but I think he's serious. Johnson's a dilettante and an opportunist and he's won on personality not policy - despite his personality, to my mind, being utterly charmless and idiotic. This is the basis of my comparison with Bush. Both men seem to have won on speak yer mind dimwit appeal. Maybe both Johnson and Ken want to do something for London; the question is, what? In Johnson's case, everything he's said, and there's been precious little of substance, suggests he wants to preserve a middle class fantasy of the place that simply isn't viable for sorting out any of its real and manifest problems. The scrapping or otherwise of the 10p tax rate doesn't have anything to do with Ken. To vote him out because you dislike a policy or piece of mismanagement of Brown's or Darlings seems decidedly unfair and illogical - especially given that the iniquities of the current tax system in which, famously, millionaire executives pay less tax proportional to their incomes than their own cleaners, is fundamentally Tory in nature, so to put a Tory in if you don't like it also makes little sense. It also seems particularly unfair that Ken should have to carry the can for anything New Labour does given the problems he himself has had with them in the past. Don't like corruption? Well, this was my point about Darius Guppy, Johnson's famous convicted fraudster friend, with whom he held a taped phone conversation about their mutual desire to beat up an investigative journalist. A vote for Johnson can hardly be seen as a vote against corruption. Fucking cunts? Yes, fucking cunts. Johnson's constituency and platform is the spluttering 'we've just about had enough of all this mucking about with our basic right to fuck things up' brigade; selfish suburbanites who don't see why the mayor should work to really improve housing or transport or spearhead multicultural initiatives, who don't understand why they shouldn't be allowed to pollute London with their hideous silver and black sci-fi military four-wheel drive vehicles and voted for Johnson out of the basic right wing solipsist view that someone who would do less in general would do better by them. To vote for Johnson was civic leader was to vote against the civic.