The campaign for London’s 2020 Mayoral election has hardly started, but already the Tories have chosen their candidate, and Shaun Bailey is proving to be a campaign manager’s worst nightmare, as his past utterances have been swiftly unearthed, with condemnation of the views he expressed following in short order.
Shaun Bailey
As Zelo Street concluded last week, the Tories have already lost the battle to persuade the capital’s electorate that Bailey would be worth throwing incumbent Sadiq Khan under the financially squeezed red bus Many Londoners know full well that TFL’s finance problems are significantly down to the previous very occasional Tory Mayor, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his ability to spray money up the wall.
The latest Bailey blunder to hit the headlines has been a pamphlet from Iain Duncan Cough’s Centre for Social Justice to which he contributed. And it makes for grim reading, as Politics Home has told. “Conservative London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey has defended a string of ‘raw’ comments about women and poverty he made in 2005”.
How raw is “raw”? “Mr Bailey - who is hoping to unseat Sadiq Khan as mayor of London in the 2020 vote - said ‘good looking’ local girls ‘tend to have been around’ and claimed that ‘poor people’ need ‘rules’ to stop them becoming involved in crime”. That raw. Unsurprisingly, this has been duly pounced upon. “Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan told BuzzFeed News … hat Mr Bailey had shown ‘appalling sexism and misogyny’”.
Bailey’s response did not inspire confidence. ”Now my words are being used to attack me. That's politics, and I'm up for it … But we're never going to tackle the problems facing some of our poorest communities if we only listen to career politicians”. Er, Shaun, right now, you are a career politician. Inasmuch as you still have a career.
But one media outlet is prepared to defend Bailey, and to no surprise at all it is the increasingly credibility-free Evening Standard, which in 2008 and 2012 was the London Daily Bozza, and in 2016 the Zac Express. Now, as Dave Hill at OnLondon has quipped, it is rapidly morphing into the Daily Bailey. Here’s their take.
“Shaun Bailey, the Tory contender for Mayor of London, today revealed how he has been subjected to appalling racist attacks by Labour supporters … The London Assembly member has been called a ‘vile disgusting Uncle Tom’, a ‘lying coconut’ and a ‘token ethnic’ since announcing he wanted to challenge Sadiq Khan for City Hall”.
There was more. “Mr Bailey condemned the abuse and called for the mayoral election campaign to be a ‘battle of ideas’ on issues affecting millions of Londoners, such as housing, transport and crime”. But there are two problems here.
One is that three Labour members calling Bailey an “Uncle Tom” does not quite stand up the headline, and Two, the Standard calling for a clean campaign after the Islamophobic bigotry it either ignored or cheered on in 2016 is just a bit too rich for words.
Shaun Bailey is still toast. The only question is how long the Tories will keep faith in him before they have to bite the bullet and put someone else on the ticket.
Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at
14 comments:
A tory "Centre for Social Justice"?
Oh how we larfed.
Social Justice is only for lefties. If you are black, not a muslim, and conservative in your views you are fair game for personal and racial abuse.
Meanwhile London is run by the most inept and useless Labour politician ever to hold power, Mayor Khan't do owt it's not my fault!
Having unfortunately met IDS' front woman for the Centre for Social Justice one Phillipa Stroud in 2009, where she basically told big fat whoppers about Easterhouse and Labourso called neglect of the poor then introduced us to the dreaded Universal Credit.
I tend to take anything from that less than truthful organisation with a large pinch of salt. Likewise with Shaun Bailey, who believes in the poor being subjected to coercion and punishment, we have experienced over 120,000 deaths due to benefit sanctions from the DWP.
Shaun Bailey should know better, a helping ng hand doesn't hide behind its back a dirty great big stick to beat someone if they fall down.
Anon 12:29 - when the most inept and useless politician/London mayor ever (Johnson) left office it was found that he had left next to nothing for Khan but a rotten lousy set up and no plan on how to proceed. A bit like gutting a building before you leave then complaining the following day that the new incumbent hasn't put in a new floor yet because he is lazy and incompetent...
But, hey, just carry on defending the man who made sure all his mates benefitted from his time in office even as London nose dived.
Hey Anon post of 12:29, grab this: "By the busload: £940m bill for Boris Johnson's mayoral 'vanity projects' The Guardian, 18 August 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/18/bridge-940m-bill-boris-johnsons-mayora-vanity-projects-garden-bridge-routemaster-bus
Whose defending Boris? Pointing that way doesn't excuse Khan't being a completely hopeless dullard, all mouth and no trousers, even his expensive bogs for bus drivers turned out to full of crap!
PS: the so-called vanity project gave the so-called greatest city in the world a bus for the job and just cheap off the shelf foreign built cattle trucks!
"A bus for the job"? If anyone is defending Johnson on this thread, it's you. Utter bs. If you want facts about Johnson's bus, search the Zelo Street archive.
@7
The "Bus for the job" I assume is the New Bus For London, often wrongly called the "New Routemaster".
It was too heavy to carry its maximum design load, more expensive than off-the-shelf hybrid buses - whether built here or abroad - and as it has all-door boarding, has not addressed the problem of fare evasion which it was supposed to solve.
Also, no operator wanted it, and so TfL had to buy it and impose it on operators. Then there is the problem of it baking its passengers in Summer due to the inadequate air cooling system. So all 1,000 of them have had to have opening windows retro-fitted.
I note the criticisms of Sadiq Khan are little more than name calling.
You're welcome.
Name calling rather than giving examples. Don't want to say that there was another reason for Anon 12:29's criticism since I don't want to call the racism card, but it does make you wonder...
Not to worry the Tory faithful coated their hero Bojo in Teflon along with the Torygraph still roll out the red carpet for the former clown 🤡 Mayor of the Big Smoke.
Who blew over £200 million on two second hand water 💦 cannons before checking with Maybot if she would let them onto London s streets, unfortunately Bozza didn't bother checking, so they sat doing nothing after being refurbished for UK streets.
Bojo blew another load on the new buses, which have to expensively retrofitted. Let's not forget the Garden Bridge....
Khan as Mayor of London is seen abroad that London is no longer a British city and in thrall to islam, and they are not wrong! The Great Wen indeed!
@12
This is just dishonest, paranoid rubbish.
But I'm sure you will provide examples. Then you can explain why more and more tourists visit London every year.
@Anonymous 02:01.
I think you'll find the Suits responsible for turning London into the World Number One Money Laundering Centre are overwhelmingly non-Muslim. At the last estimate, the dirty money amounted to £90 billion per year; which is probably a fraction of the actuality. To say nothing of the small army of "consultants" who enable this filth. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury is a former "City man".
Not that any of this will alter a mind too far gone for change.
Post a Comment