Reasons to vote for Ken, no.3

Because Boris Johnson is a racist, which makes him totally unfit to run a diverse city like London. Boris accuses Livingstone of practising "the politics of division", but racist comments can be pretty divisive Boris.

Sample BoJo quotes:

• As a journalist in 1999, Boris accused the Macpherson Inquiry, which reported on police racism following the Lawrence murder, of 'hysteria', adding that the "weird recommendation" the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour "other than in a public place" was akin to Ceausescu's Romania".[source] Try telling that to someone who actually lived in Ceausescu's Romania.

• On a Blair visit to war-torn Congo: "no doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."[source]

• In 2003, he is reported cheerily remarking to Swedish Unicef workers and their black driver in Uganda, "right, let's go and look at some more piccaninnies".

• As recently as 2006, he said "we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing".[source] David Wearing takes up the story: "[This] elicited an understandably brusque rejoinder from the Papua New Guinean High Commissioner. Johnson’s reply was that he would gladly add the insulted nation to his “global itinerary of apology”, racked up from past gaffs, and that he “meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity”. Johnson’s half-suppressed smirk was palpable. It was plain that Papua New Guinea might as well have been Narnia as far as he was concerned. His feeble explanation that his remarks had been inspired by “relatively recent” photos in a Time Life book, which he was “fairly certain” depicted Papua New Guinean cannibalism, hardly helped matters."

• He employed the racist Taki on the Spectator. In Taki's columns during BoJo's editoriship, writes Wearing, "New York Puerto Ricans have been described as “a bunch of semi-savages … fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty”, Kenya... as “bongo-bongo land”, and black people referred to as “Sambo”. After Charlene Ellis, 18, and Latisha Shakespeare, 17, were shot dead in Birmingham in 2003, Taki blamed “black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs,” adding for good measure that “West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war, multiply like flies and then the great state apparatus took over the care of their multiplications”. And in other articles: ""Orientals ... have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole." In another, he described black American bastketball players as having "arms hanging below their knees and tongues sticking out"."

Plenty more from Michael Hodges.


Admittedly, this is a reason not to vote Boris, rather than reasons to vote for Ken. But I don't think any of the other non-Ken candidates have a hope in hell chance of winning, so if you don't want to a racist for London Mayor, vote Ken.

(Next week, I plan to post on who to vote for in the Lewisham and Greenwich Assembley elections, a topic which has exercised commenters here.)

Previously: Reasons to vote for Ken, no.1, 2, 2.5