Editorial: Big Smoke and the coming election

With just four weeks to go until the London Assembly elections it seems like an opportune moment to clarify Big Smoke’s approach to the election.

The intention of the site, as you probably know, is to further a jihad against modern capitalism and everything you hold sweet and dear. We also promote environmental ideas, community building, the love of bicycles and some kind of social progress.

That means we’re really interested in the outcome of the election in May and have opinions about what are good, and bad, ideas for London. We want to welcome and include different voices and, magpie like, pick up good ideas where ever we find them – so we’re not going to take a formal position on who to vote for in this election, even though some  candidates and policies may well get more traction here.

We do want to highlight some of those things you won’t find in the mainstream media, partly to help excluded voices be heard and partly to keep it all interesting. It’s not all about the Boris and Ken snoozefest you know.

Make up your own minds, with our helpful guidance.

We will be producing an election guide that both explains how the voting system works but also how it works in practice so you can assess what impact your vote will have. We’ll be assessing the manifestos of the parties and fitting them into a strict criteria of the “good, bad and ugly”, trying to maintain an open minded but critical stance on the proposals put before us.

Take, for example, the Liberal Democrat ideas for transport. They may be modest but the early bird tube fares and one hour bus tickets are sound ideas that would make some Londoners’ lives much, much easier without costing the city a packet. We’re really happy to say this at the same time as really being quite angry at the way Lib Dem candidates have tried to use the specter of the BNP to morally blackmail people into voting for them. Even the maths doesn’t agree with them that the votes for the two parties’ are correlated, leaving aside the irresponsible politics of it.

Good on buses, bad on fascism – all very balanced.

As ever we welcome your contributions and suggestions. If there are people you’d like us to interview or ideas you’d like us to run articles about drop us a line at editorial@bigsmoke.org.uk and we’ll do our best to make you happy.