Saturday, May 03, 2008

UK Local Elections

Would you buy a second-hand car (or policy) from either of these characters?

I've been trying to get interested in the results, but simply can't. I vote in the Finnish local elections these days thanks to the EU, so I no longer have a dog in this fight. There is some visceral, tribal instinct in me that gets riled when Labour takes a kicking and the Tories do well, but even that is not very riled. It has to be the standard they've-been-in-too-long-and-started-to-get-complacent type of kicking I'm sure. I don't really believe that any sane Londoner would vote for Boris-effing-Johnson unless it was an effort to punish someone else. It would be funny if it wasn't for the standard, effortless Eton-Oxford glide to power with his fellow Eton-Oxford man David Cameron at his side, which suggests that things haven't changed as much in British power structures as we might like to think. It similar to if Hilary were to win in the U.S., whether she is nice or not, or a good leader or not, will be eclipsed by the Presidency going backwards and forwards between two families making a total mockery of the idea of a meritocracy. When Eton and Oxford land you in position of great power even when you can't really string a coherent sentence together (just watch any of his speeches - his acceptance speech was a mess enough, in this one he starts by falling over and it doesn't get much better) it doesn't say much for British meritocracy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

you need to come back and try working here mate. if anything, the glide-to-power has become more entrenched, not less. On an upside, I went out for a walk saturday and found all the bendy buses had gone from the streets of london, there were uniformed guards on the tube and buses to stop oiks oiking, cycle lanes had sprung up where there had been none and the picaninnies had all gone back to where they came from.

Anonymous said...

oh yes, and i saw three men and a great dane getting married.

Anonymous said...

The Guardian thinks meritocracy is dead in this morning's paper...
http://education.guardian.co.uk/publicschools/story/0,,2279015,00.html

Toby - Northern Light Blog said...

Very interesting link Boris, thank you! I presume you are just "a" Boris, not "the" Boris? If I presume wrongly, then stop googling yourself and get on with your work! You have a large city to run! ;-)