Ken and Boris

I voted for Ken today. "Yeah, obviously", I hear you thinking - but for me it's not as straightforward as that. Under Ken Livingstone, CCTV cameras and monitoring of the population have proliferated, he has endorsed a reactionary police force (fully backing Ian Blair over de Menezes) and although I agreed with him over the principle of the congestion charge, he didn't need to rig the traffic lights and roadworks to clog the city until we agreed with him.

Also, the figures for the c-charge don't add up; they could have put a lot more money back into public transport. Finally, he's been in charge for too long; he promised only to stand for two terms, and although people are entitled to change their mind, he's often guilty of massive hypocrisy. He said he would never adopt a "zero tolerance" approach, but is now going back on that, probably to compete with Boris. Zero tolerance is modelled on Rudy Guiliani's policy in New York, and that makes me worry. By the account of people who actually lived there at the time, Guiliani made Manhattan a better place for rich people, and poor areas were more excluded.

You would have thought Boris would want to monitor people less, and not feed on our fears. But no, read his manifesto and it's all about more uniformed officers everywhere, more CCTV cameras, "beef up the police presence", crack down. Yeah, I'm all for cutting red tape and cutting down on the overspending on city hall, but those are the only good parts of his "fresh solution". Ken critics suggest that Ken doesn't really care about London (and I think that is absolute bollocks): Ken is for Ken, he's a megalomaniac etc. However, that charge applies double to Johnson - getting the London mayoralty is simply his only chance of getting into serious public office. He may be right about the congestion being caused by lights and roadworks being rigged. But in the end I asked myself the deciding question: who would Jeremy Clarkson vote for? Obviously, it would be Boris. So it had to be Ken.