Bloody buses…
Marina Hyde contends for Ali’s ranting crown on the London election in the Guardian today. The bulk of the column is centred on the idea that Ken and Boris are, stylistically, very similar.
This seems a superficial and ultimately irrelevant point. A candidate might indeed be a deeply unpleasant person. But I’m far more interested in what and why they’ll do something than whether I’d have dinner with them.
And it’s there that Hyde hits something far more solid: the overwhelming triviality of much of the debate. And especially the buses:
“Then again, let us not be too dismissive on the ideas front. Let us not forget the bus obsession. Bendy or Routemaster? Double- or single-decker? For great stretches of this campaign, the two candidates have appeared to be fighting for bus shapes. I defy you to find a pettier way of arguing about London’s future. Even as someone who uses the capital’s buses every day, I fail to see these red craft as the most pressing issue in London politics. Yet to hear Boris talk, you would think this vehicle represented the cradle of all the city’s hopes and fears - while Ken recently announced he was spending £500,000 to send a double-decker bus on a three-month journey to the Beijing Olympics. Here it will embody London (a giant latex Ken presumably being unavailable).
In any sane world someone would invent a bendy Routemaster, so Ken and Boris could bury their differences and run on a self-defeating joint ticket. You can’t help feeling London would proceed quite nicely without them.“
I have to agree, in a large part. There are substansive, major differences between Boris and Ken - and yet, for all that, they spend a surprising amount of time talking about the shape of buses. Not whether they run on time, or how much it costs to ride them, or anything that so daily affects the commuter - but shapes. Changing these shapes would come at a further, massive cost, which could be spent on rectifying those actual daily issues like cost and speed.
And yet people listen to them.
Something wrong, surely?
Posted in: Grumpiness, Lead Story, London Mayor, Transport
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