Johnson ‘would destroy London’s unity’ as mayor…NOT!
August 4th, 2007Doreen Lawrence attacks Tory frontrunner, saying black people will not vote for him
Patrick Wintour, political editor
Saturday August 4, 2007Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, yesterday launched a fierce personal attack on Boris Johnson, saying he would destroy multicultural London if elected mayor, and that no informed black person would vote for him.
Ms Lawrence, who does not normally become involved in party politics, said she had been moved to make the criticisms by her anger at Mr Johnson’s attitude to the Macpherson inquiry in 1999 into the Metropolitan police’s failure to bring her son’s killers to justice 14 years ago.
Her intervention comes as David Cameron, the Tory leader, steps up his efforts to woo the black vote in the capital.
Ms Lawrence said: “Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.
“Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.”
Mr Johnson wrote a series of articles at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, claiming some of its recommendations were born of political correctness and that the furore around the murder had created the whiff of a witchhunt against the police. The inquiry team found the police institutionally racist.
Mr Johnson was especially condemnatory of a “weird recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour ‘other than in a public place’.”
“Not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen,” he wrote. “No wonder the police are already whingeing that they cannot make any arrests in London. No wonder the CPS groans with anti-discrimination units, while making a balls-up of so many cases.”
He argued that “the PC brigade, having punched this hole in the Metropolitan police, is swarming through to take over the whole system” and went on to say that he feared “what started as a sensible attempt to find justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence has given way to hysteria”.
In his articles – mainly in the Daily Telegraph – Mr Johnson also made it clear that he believed there had been “grotesque failures in the Lawrence murder case, and they may well have originated in racism”, adding the police officers “may have jumped to the wrong conclusions due to a racialist mindset”.
In another article, presumably for stylistic effect, he has referred to children as “piccaninnies” and described the “watermelon smiles of black people”.
Ms Lawrence said such remarks made it surprising that Mr Cameron was backing Mr Johnson. “[David Cameron] says he is trying to change the Conservative party from its past, and support multiculturalism, and bring in new communities, then supporting Boris Johnson is not a way of doing that.”
[…]
This woman is insane.
Under ‘Red Ken’ Livingston, London has been turned into the very model of dehumanized surveillance grid living, where everyone’s privacy is violated routinely by a system that he personally implemented; the ‘Congestion Charge’. It was Red Ken who extended it despite the explicit objection of the majority of Londoners.
Under people like him, the so called ‘blacks’ will have an increasingly hard time as the biometric net / Quantized Human Pleb Grid is rolled out. They will be the ones routinely stopped and fingerprinted. They are already the ones most represented in the appalling and unprecedented DNA database. It is people like Boris who are for removing these monstrosities; she should be FOR him not AGAINST him.
This woman simply is not thinking:
She added: “He felt that people should be entitled to say what they want. It sounds to me that what he believes is that because something is said and done in private it is acceptable, but clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public.”
See what I mean?
Not once does this deranged person mention a single policy that Boris wants to implement. But this is not about policy. This is about the inmates taking over the asylum.
What has happened to her is unbelievably sad, but it has clearly caused her to become irrational. The media have made her into a sort of saint figure, and they listen to and print her every word uncritically. This is crazy. Her suffering of an unimaginable injustice does not qualify her to set the standards by which we should all live, and I deeply despise people who want to control what we can and cannot say.
Boris Johnson, as a British man® is free to write whatever he wants. This is the freedom that people in Britain have, and just because he has a sense of humor that someone somewhere might find offensive, this does not exclude him from running for office, and it does not mean that he would not make a brilliant Mayor of London. I would rather have a ribald Boris as Mayor of London tearing down the Congestion Charge system, anonymising the Oyster Card system, mandating that busses take cash, reinstating the Routemaster, overturning the smoking ban … returning London to what it is meant to be, than some politically correct, fascist police state facilitator who is turning the entire city into a giant concentration camp.
Increasingly, people are going to have to accept that people ‘say things’. All sorts of things. The internets can bring you these things instantly. This woman would have us living in a paranoid world where everyone is thinking one thing and writing another; where everyone is writing as if they are under surveillance, where their freely expressed thought can come back to ‘haunt them’ in the future, as PC witchunters Google their words for expressions of forbidden thought.
That is not a world where any decent person wants to live and work. It is the world of fascism, and people who say things like she does are the absolute enemies of mankind … and she has every right to say it, as wrong headed as it is. This unelected figurehead has the right to say whatever she wants, and so does Boris. That is freedom of speech in a free country. She should not be toppled from her position as a ‘community leader’ for spouting twaddle, and Boris should not be put off the list of Mayoral candidates for using his own unique brand of expression. Everyone can choose for themselves who they want to control London…that is where the person is elected.
But I digress…
Everyone is going to have to accept that people write what they write, and this has no bearing on the sort of person they really are, or what their policies are and how efficiently they implement them. If we do not accept this, then only the people who have never written are going to be ‘fit to be employed’ or ‘fit for office’. If someone doesn’t write, keeping their innermost ghastly thoughts (if a thought can be ghastly) secret and to themselves, this doesn’t mean that they are ‘nice’, or that they will be able to do the job well. If someone only writes smooth things, does this mean that we can trust them more? Of course not. What we have to talk about are ideas applied to problems and then performance and execution. Writing for fun or employment has nothing to do with either of those things, and these personal attacks on Boris Johnson are just childish, stupid and pointless. Opinion must always be separated from Policy. Informal thought written down is NOT POLICY.
Lets see what Boris wants to do with London / what he is informally thinking shall we?
Transport
A dedicated cyclist, Boris Johnson wants to get rid of “Ken Livingstone’s 18-metre-long socialist frankfurter buses” and speed humps “which necessitate the need for 4x4s”. He has attacked legislation on car booster seats for children as “utterly demented”.
He has bemoaned “the unbelievable and chronic chaos on the tube” and the state of the railways, observing: “The fundamental problem is not that the train companies are monstrously abusing the travelling public, though they are … Gordon Brown and the Treasury are … making them pay so much for the franchise that they simply don’t have enough to invest in services.”
I agree with all of this.
Marriage
“David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are plainly right to extol the benefits of marriage, and, if a £20 tax credit would really begin to bubblegum together our broken society, then that would clearly be a price worth paying … It is outrageous that the benefit system should be so heavily skewed in favour of single parent families,” Johnson wrote recently.
Marriage is good!
Diversity and integration
The Tory MP has argued that society must “inculcate … Britishness, especially into young Muslims”, adding: “We should teach English, and we should teach in English. We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools.
“We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English … we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.”
Last year he said localism could lead to sharia law because “large chunks of the Muslim population” did not feel British. He added: “Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system?”
The Mayor of London cannot forbid people from preaching in Arabic… or Latin for that matter. This is just TALK. Real democracies have checks and balances in place so that no matter what the personal opinions of elected officials are, they cannot violate your rights. Sadly, the Mayor of London can violate your rights willy nilly, and there is nothing that you can do about it. If a bad man, like Red Ken is in charge, then bad things like the Congestion Charge can and will happen. The rights of people in the UK need to be enshrined….but thats another blog post.
Inequality
He admits the low tax rates enjoyed by many in the City are “odd”, but argues: “Without their efforts, there would be no squillions, and a windfall tax might simply kill the goose.” He suggests philanthropy should be encouraged instead.
He has accused Labour of waging a middle-class war against “the bottom 20% of society – the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons … They keep them snared in a super-complicated system of means-tested benefits … They tax them an exorbitant proportion of their incomes.”
Completely correct, and he is completely right about Philanthropy, as are others.
The environment, Housing, Health its all good. This is a man who has some common sense, who is not in thrall to political correctness, which means that he is free thinking. We need free thinkers…heavens above, we need people who can THINK. That is why Boris Johnson should be Mayor of London. ‘Shock Jock’ Nick Ferrari is just thick, and anyone who used to be ‘ShowBiz Reporter at The Sun’ shouldn’t be left in charge of a ten penny piece let alone one of the greatest cities mankind ever created. Ken Livingston has been an unmitigated disaster. Whoever the lib-dems are fielding they are unelectable thanks to their absurd local income tax ‘ideas’.
and finally, a nifty comment from a real person:
Bye ken, and welcome Boris, who is someone who will say what we all feel, and not scared by the do gooder groups, who so many bow down to now!
– Graham, Southend on sea, UK
from This is London
See what I mean?…again?