Boris Johnson, yobs and hypocrisy

By Shelly Asquith / @ShellyAsquith

Today, Boris Johnson claimed in his Telegraph article that it was Labour’s plan to: ‘get a load of aggressive crusties and Lefties to attack the Ritz hotel, to storm Fortnum’s, and to cause so much argy-bargy that 4,500 police officers are obliged to waste their time.’

I’d like to know what the Mayor of London is basing this claim on. When has Ed, or indeed any member of our Shadow Cabinet, championed Saturday’s violence? They haven’t. Where was the Labour contingent when the riots were happening? We were marching peacefully along Embankment, screaming chants like ‘Boris, get out!’

His response? To childishly link Labour with the minority group of yobs, who were inflicting violence miles away from where our marching members were.

Johnson’s patronising attack on ‘youthful Ed Miliband’, a sneer at a man only 5 years his junior, is merely another example of the Mayor showing just how pitiable he really is. During the recent student protests, Boris shamefully trivialised police officers taking advantage of young female protesters. Fabricating utter tripe in a cheap attempt to smear Labour is nothing new to Boris and his team, either: just look to Conservative Home’s incorrect allegation about Ken Livingstone’s press officer moonlighting at the RMT: or the Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan’s untruth of Ken’s office whereabouts: or the false claims that Val Shawcross has joined tube strikers at picket lines.

Yesterday, the Tories made a most weak attempt at forging a direct link between violence at UK Uncut and the Labour Party. The evidence for this is that a large number of MPs previously praised the peaceful campaigns of UKUncut over tax evasion, and that a spokesperson from the group once appeared at the same conference as Ken Livingstone and about 100 other speakers. It’s laughable.

Boris Johnson claims that his alternative is to ‘cut taxes as soon as possible’, while his government has just put VAT up by 2.5%, and he keeps London council taxes static. Boris boasts his plan is ‘to create tens of thousands more apprenticeships for 18- to 24-year-olds’, a poor exchange for the scrapping of hundreds of thousands of jobs for young people through the Future Jobs Fund; the thousands more who will be priced out of Further and Higher Education.

Boris wants to ‘cut waste’: presumably 1,000 police officers and 800 tube staff are wasteful. Presumably, ‘investing in education’ means scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance which saw thousands more students in London stay on in Further Education; removing 100% BSF funding, which would improve school buildings and increase intake numbers; scrapping 10 Sure Start centres in Brent, 9 in Hammersmith & Fulham, and 8 in Barnet. Boris has of course, stayed quiet on these proceedings, while uttering not a word on the prospect of £9,000 fees in conjunction with 80% cuts to London universities’ teaching budgets.

It is Johnson’s hypocrisy which must be damned. And while he’s asking: I have an ‘alternative’ for you, Boris: the re-election of Ken Livingstone in 2012. I hope you like it.