Who can vote for the next London mayor?

Think of it this way. Most people who don’t live in one of the 32 but commute in are going to be voting Tory. So Ken may lose your vote but by exclusing non-residents (which after all is only fair) Boris has lost a lot more.

Posted about 1 year ago by comradem

I agree with comraden. Commuters voting won’t be a good idea if you want ken to win. Additionally, if you don’t live in london you shouldn’t vote. The problem here is why do you (and many many other) have to commute from outside of town to come into town to work. Surely there is something wrong with this way of life and local government wasn’t really set up to deal with mass commuting.

Make sure you change your local government and make them more accountable/efficient. That is a good way of starting.

Posted about 1 year ago by emmasuarez

But where would it end – business travellers from outside the UK who visit London?

Just keep pushing the message home to your friends who can vote (and convince those who can but don’t) and just see BJ as that lovely toff off Have I got News For You. Or join the Labour Party. [I’ll get my coat]

Posted about 1 year ago by jobytc

Potty, your intentions are honourable but I don’t see at all why commuters should influence the mayoral vote in any way. Just coz you pop in and out 5 times a week a Londoner makes you not, sorry.

Maybe we should also give the vote to the slack-jawed cretins who swoop in from the Home Counties to the capital for their stag/hen weekends, too. They also contribute to London’s financial welfare.

Posted about 1 year ago by SFULG

Contribute massively, or leach from excessively? I not only pay council tax, I spend all my wages inside the M25, why should you have an equal say when you only earn your cash here to spend elsewhere?

Or what SFULG said, and I should type quicker.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mockernee

I’ve been to the US a couple or three times, so maybe I could vote over there too.

Posted about 1 year ago by Flashboy

Maybe we should vote for a mayor that charges admission to anyone crossing the M25 :)

Posted about 1 year ago by bendylan

i liek google! it knows lots of things if u ask it!!!

(Doesn’t give you 10 kudos every time you ask it something inane though I guess.)

Anyhow, I no longer care about the Mayoral election now that Mike Read’s come out and said he won’t be standing. None of the others will be campaigning for underground parking and against murderers as far as I know.

Posted about 1 year ago by cutta

I live inside the M25 but outside London. What does that make me? (Don’t answer that…)

And do you really think that excluding commuters will keep down the right-wing brigade? Obviously, all the people that live in Docklands, Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead, and so on are raging lefties who only bought their ex-council houses from Tesco Queen, or forced residents out of the Isle of Dogs etc so that they could have penthouse apartments because they had no choice?

SFULG, the Mayor controls the Underground which includes the station I get on from, and therefore how much it costs me to commute. Why shouldn’t I have a say on that? Yes, yes, I know, you go to see your auntie Brenda in Croydon every other Sunday and you don’t get any say in how much the horse and cart ride costs…

I’m sorry, Emmasuarez, but commuting is not an option for me nor, I would suggest, the vast majority of people that do it. Believe it or not, we don’t actually enjoy stuffing ourselves into overcrowded and frequently over-heated carriages, nice though London is.

And I think local councils are already bloated with unnecessary individuals so I don’t think that’s an option either.

Bendylan – I agree with you – as long as the tax works in both directions.

Posted about 1 year ago by pottytime

Personally I’m looking forward to voting for Boris. I think many people will be pleasantly surprised at how things may turn out after a few years of him being in. I dont think the “buffoon offensive” is terribly effective at undermining him. Its clear from much of his writing he has far more than his have I news for you alter ego at his disposal.

Should be good.

Posted about 1 year ago by Liono

Emmasuarez- lots of people live in London but have to come “into town” to work. I don’t understand your statement there.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mamfer

Mamf and Potty, read Emma’s point again. She’s not denying people do, or indeed that people have to, she’s simply questioning how we’ve arrived at a point where long-distance commuting is so widespread. It’s a genuine problem, few people live near their work any more and the city’s resident working population is emptying of all but the richest, many of whom will still commute in a way, either business travel or weekend country homes. We need to look at low-cost housing near employment, rather than part-time and low-wage earners spending long hours and high proportions of their pay on commuting. Somewhere at work we do the numbers for this, but I’m pretty sure the average commute has lengthened in time and distance over the last 20 years, when we should be looking to reduce both.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mockernee

Stop paying people housing benefit, and subsidising council rents. If people had to pay the market value for their properties, they would have to move, and their employers would either have to follow them or put their wages up. Also, demand for property in the expensive south would reduce, thus taking the heat out of the housing market. There are huge distortions in the housing market caused by unnecessary subsidies.

Posted about 1 year ago by part-timer

Similarly, but targetting slightly less impoverished people, how about removing the laughable “non-domicile” status from the 200,000 Londoners currently exploiting the loophole? They’re paying zero tax on huge incomes, while hoovering up new builds to either buy-to-let or leave empty, driving both prices and rents up by choking the supply.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mockernee

grr

silly double post

Posted about 1 year ago by bendylan

Lol, part-timer you’re a comedy genius. The way you send up the crazies with their ill thought out bile is inspired.

Posted about 1 year ago by bendylan

Entirely serious. Incidentally, failing to doff one’s cap to leftie orthodoxy does not make you a crazy, no matter how much you’d like it to. But if my proposal is so ill thought out, why not explain how?

Posted about 1 year ago by part-timer

People wouldn’t move with the job, nor would wages rise significantly, they’d just live longer with their parents and/or in overcrowded conditions. I know you’ll say pay’s set by the market, employers will pay the minimum to fill the job, but still, pricing the poor out of London as a way to calm the housing market seems perverse.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mockernee

Not to mention that the current lack of affordable housing is severely restricting London’s ability to have things like teachers, police officers, and other “key workers”.

Posted about 1 year ago by bendylan

PT, that’s such a beautifully naive monetarist argument that doesn’t really have any grounding in the real world. So if ‘people’ (proles who are on housing benefits and council tenants) have to move, where would they move to? Given the number of ‘people’ in this position, it would probably entail a mass migration of Gold Rush proportions. And why should a working-cass family in, say the East End, have to uproot and leave London where they’ve been for generations? Punished for being poor, or maybe you think that if they’re poor it’s probably becuase they deserve to be. Yeah, thasseanswer, sendemallupnorf! You’re not crazy, but many more people with your way of thinking and I’d start to worry.

The fact that you think inflated house prices are because of subsidisation is frankly preposterous. What’s your basis for this claim? So I guess the crisis with house prices today has got nothing to do with City boys (with their 7 figure cash bonuses) and foreign nouveau-riche swarming into the property market by paying well over the odds in cash (and of course estate agents milking them by setting prices higher), thereby dragging up the price of each successive stratum of properties—has it? That’s one ‘trickle-down effect’ i could do without fanks.

And what makes you think that employers would follow the hordes of the working class, dragging their wordly goods on horse and cart up the M6? They’d just bring in Eastern Europeans who would be happy to work for a cut-price rate – easy. And on the subject of mass migration, the huge inequalities between countries’ wealth these days has led to huge levels of ‘economic refugees’, uprooting hitherto-settled populations the world over. Your plan is simply a microcosm of that at a national level. If you’d been round at the time of the Irish Potato Famine you’d probably have seen it as a great opportunity to bolster the American workforce…

Posted about 1 year ago by SFULG