In what can only be described as a disgraceful example of intellectual snobbery Steve Richards of the Independent would like people to believe that not voting for Ken makes them stupid:
"Amidst the frenzy, it is easy to forget that neither Brown nor Cameron is standing in the capital. Whatever happens today in London and elsewhere, Brown will be Prime Minister tomorrow and Cameron the leader of the opposition. Voters will fail the test if they make their judgements on the basis of national politics alone.
Instead, sensible voters must stand back and attempt to make those connections. Evidently, this is a challenging task. If it were easier to recognise a link between the noisy din of high politics and the lives of voters, there would be more interest in political issues. There might even be as much interest, say, as there is in the fortunes of the England football team.
The failure of voters to make connections is the only reason why Ken Livingstone might lose today. As I have written before, many elections present difficult choices. Today’s contest in London is not one of them. Livingstone has been an extraordinarily successful Mayor under difficult circumstances. Presumably some voters have complacently forgotten what the city was like before he got the job, queuing for tickets to go on a hopeless underground service, waiting for buses that never came, no hope of a new Crossrail linking parts of this unwieldy capital…
…Apparently some voters living in the suburbs of London are incapable of such recognition. Polls suggest that in the outer parts of the capital, voters will turn out in large numbers to support Boris Johnson. Presumably those striding to the polling stations seething with misjudged fury at Livingstone, and hailing Johnson as a decent chap, have decided that it is a coincidence that their teenage kids are now able to get around the city relatively smoothly on the buses. Perhaps those over 60 who travel for nothing believe that their free access is a gift from God. The voters in the outer suburbs have most reasons to feel grateful to Livingstone. He has made the centre more accessible.
Those who do not see this fail to meet the test, so sheltered in their disconnected, atomised lives that they assume things happen around them without reason, no buses one year, lots the next, cheaper houses one year and none the next…
…But today it is the voters, not the political leaders, who face a series of tests. I wonder how many of them will pass."
What utter rubbish. Still, given the article is in the Independent it’s not like Steve’s reaching anyone who isn’t already in agreement with him.
Posted by Richard (Original) on May 1st, 2008 at 6:59 pm:
I’m not in agreement with him, and I’m a Labour Party member! Shades of Mo Udall’s ‘The people have spoken…the bastards!’ or Bertold Brecht’s ‘Why not dissolve the people/And elect another?’ His bien pensant arrogance (also seen when he writes about the EU) is utterly contemptible. If you want to win the voters over, saying ‘if you don’t vote the way we like, you’re stupid’ is utterly counterproductive, as well as offensive. The failure of voters to make connections indeed! If Livingstone loses, it couldn’t possibly be because voters made the connection between Ken and Qaradawi could it?
It really is a pity that I ripped the article up in a fit of blind fury, because, otherwise, I could at least have had the satisfaction of wiping my a*se with it.