Saturday, 3 May 2008

London has appeared to have developed an annoying whine

Ok so I don't live in London, the mayoralty is still important, the capital can quite often be the only part of the country tourists see, the Olympics are coming up oh and like the rest of the country I'm having to stump up cash for the place.

So while Boris is so far an unproven force in running the city, he did win an election, fair and square. Yet the Internet is alive with people complaining about the how the result came about. The first group are just plain bitter and nasty, they are the ones infecting the place (especially commenting on sites like the BBC and Comment is Free) with complaints that Boris got in due to all the people in the suburbs who voted for him, They aren't proper Londoners, they don't have the right Postcodes, winge winge. To the best of my knowledge the definition of the bounds of Greater London haven't changed dramatically since 1965 so these have always been the people electing the umbrella layer of local government, even in the days of the GLC. But I don't recall any lobbying  for them to not be part of the Authority before so this must be just sour grapes.

The other set of whimpering is about the voting system and that it caused problems. Some people such as the greens are even saying their supporters were too stupid to vote for them which seams a bit ungracious if you ask me. I think civics lessons are a good idea in general, but I don't think how to vote should trouble the curriculum for too much of the total time for them, given that it is a really simple process. I will be eagerly awaiting the report on the counts that will be produced by ORG but so far no-one is reporting chaos on the scale of the Scottish elections of last year, so I doubt that it really was such an issue.

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