Ken v. Paul

There are few in the UK who are not familiar with Ken Livingstone for all the wrong reasons. The newly relegated ex-Mayor of London has never found it hard to express himself candidly and, indeed, in a throughly un-PC way – an irony in itself given that he practically invented political correctness.

Ken has a penchant for offending whole swathes of humanity with one ill-conceived word: quite a feat, perhaps, but not really the done thing in the dipomatically charged political spotlight. At one point in his meandering political career Ken was called “the most odious man in politics” by The Sun, whilst he himself has variously described the US Ambassador as a “chiseling little crook” and a “car salesman”, hugged pro-Jihad Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, advocated dialogue with Sinn Fein, called Dubya Bush “corrupt” and caused (now characteristic) media furore after speculating the “concentration camp guard” background of a Jewish Evening Standard reporter. He’s a mouthy Robin Hood and many admire himfor it.

I recently came across a cutting detailing some of the Right Honourable Paul Keating’s colouful epithets. He makes Ken’s outbursts look like James Blunt lyrics. Absurdly un-PC, Keating knows how to enliven parliament in his own inimitable Aussie way. Here we go:

Stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, pig, sleazebag, scumbag, scum, sucker, perfumed gigolo, harlot, boxhead, alley cat, barnyard bully, stunned mullet, pansy, hare-brained hill-billy, corporate crook, loopy crim, half-baked crim, clown, bunyip aristocrat, mangy maggot, pissant, nong, vermin, dullard, clot, fop, rustbucket, thug, dimwit, gutless spiv, champion liar, fraud, cheat, ninny, dummy, dimwit liberal muck.

Surely, to the media’s chagrin, London got off lightly with Ken?

Yes, Prime Minister

So, The Guardian’s charged with being so unapologetically pro-Ken that it helped Boris win the Mayoral election. Their coverage, I can only guess, was reaction to the Evening Standard’s unapologetically all-pervading pro-Boris stance. Who knows what – or who – finally tipped the scale, suffice to say it is these differences that made the outcome so hard to call. Can a single newspaper sway the electorate? Probably not. Leave it to Yes, Prime Minister‘s Jim Hacker to neatly summise…

“I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”
Sir Humphrey: “Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?”
Bernard Woolley: “Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.”

Good luck to Boris – he needs it. In the meantime, we’ll wait and see how Gordon fares.

Londongrad

So, the current Mayor has crept ahead again in the lastest round of elections polls.

It’s no dionysian whirlwind, but the upcoming mayoral election has whipped up quite the flurry in media circles. As to the outcome – it looks like your guess is as good as the experts’ at the moment.

The policies themselves are either similar on the large scale (greenifying London, cutting crime, improving transport), or negligible on the smaller, electorate-winning scale. The crepuscular soup of promises and semi-promises is a hard one to negotiate and I for one am not taken by any of the contestants so far.

It’s all up in the air and, spectator-wise, there’s nothing like a good down-to-the-line, nose-to-nose battle, especially when the stakes have never been greater.

For, if there is one thing the audacious Ken Livingstone has done for London, it is make London worth fighting for. No matter your political bent, race, sexuality, religion, educational background, Prius-piousness or tap-water-worthiness, the battle for Mayor is the hottest ticket in town and the audience is braying for blood.

And whilst you might not like his apparent love of glasnost (surrounding Lee Jasper, for example), committed perestroika of TfL and that irritatingly insoucient voice, he has succeeded in injecting a heavy dose of partiinost, or party-mindedness, into London life.

Whether it’s a party to which your precious vote is suited is another question altogether.

some guilt with your weetabix?

We analyse elections, oil prices and war in Afghanistan until the cows come home and in doing so we often confuse politics into an overstudied whirlygig. But one development on a global scale has gone relatively unnoticed, despite the fact that its effects will be felt by all at every level of society, in every country in the world.

Cereals - tiny, innocuous, homesteady grains, have reluctantly been thrust into the spotlight for their 15 minutes of fame.

Grain prices have shot up in recent months and here in London a mere ripple across day-to-day life will soon become a splash in everybody’s approach to food and living.  Any politics that directly affects our greedy appetites is a sure-fire way of getting peoples’ attention.

Last year’s dramatic riots in Latin America pricked all of our ears up, whilst just two weeks ago, New York magazine noticed that prices of ubiquitous NYC staples – slizes of pizza, bagels, hot-dogs - are resolutely heading north. Everything from flour to eggs and cheese (grain-fed chooks and cows) is affected.

The reasons for the world food crisis (and don’t go believing that just because your dough balls are piping hot and pillowy, London is spared) are like a knotted ball of string.

In no particular order: the Chinese have developed a taste for meat and the ’westernised’ diet. It takes 700 calories of animal feed to produce 100 calories of beef. Modern farming is oil-dependent and more powers are competing for the same amount of oil, which itself is more expensive because of war with Iraq. Grain-producing countries, in particular, Australia, are suffering massive droughts - owed, in no small way, to climate change. This limits exports, affecting both import and export nations’ food supplies. Many mistakenly see biofuels as an answer to climate change, although one litre of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the ethanol contains. Deforestation has risen with biofuel production. The focus on biofuels essentially – and devastatingly - cranks the spotlight from the third world on to voter-friendly green wash. Each knot is a result of a twist somewhere else along the line.

Time and again we are reminded just how much economy and ecology are not mutually exclusive. Whether you believe that they can exist symbiotically, or like Paul Kingsnorth of Ecologist magazine, you see civilisation heading towards ‘ecocide’, the food crisis is a salutory and inescapable reality.

The sobering words of Paul Krugman of the New York Times encapsulate the situation pretty neatly: “Cheap food, like cheap oil, may soon be a thing of the past.”

Your Weetabix may never taste the same.