BORIS JOHNSONvsDEAN COX
Matt Haynes
Coffee in Meze Patisserie, Church Lane, Leytonstone. Don’t seem to have room for more than one baklava; heart’s too much of a mouthful.
I don’t believe that economic equality is possible.
Boris Johnson, lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, 27th November 2013
Slow walk to Brisbane Road past Norlington Junior High, as it was called when this was my walk to school, which it was every day for three years, back in the days when we all just walked to our local school.
Some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.
Boris Johnson, lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, 27th November 2013
Shaun Batt causing havoc in the Sheffield United defence; two bad misses by Mooney. Must be a thousand fans in the away stand. Big club, United. Still nineteen places below us, though. Money, like Mooney, isn’t everything.
That is an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin’s Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?
Boris Johnson, lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, 27th November 2013
Dean Cox volleys past the Blades’ keeper from outside the box. Deano! Get in. Eighty-second minute. 1-1. Does Boris really think hedge fund managers toil like miners, or add as much to the sum of human contentedness? I wonder how Dean Cox would have fared on the famously level playing fields of Eton. Maybe they’d have let him cut the grass.
We should fête them and decorate them and inaugurate a new class of tax hero, with automatic knighthoods for the top 10%.
Boris Johnson, lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, 27th November 2013
Two pints of London Fields bitter at the William IV, Leyton High Road. Two points dropped? Not sure. Just be grateful for what we’ve got? Not sure.
It is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130.
Boris Johnson, lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, 27th November 2013
Aubergine rasavangy and vegetable passanda, a poppadom and a pint of Cobra at the Star of India, Leytonstone High Road. It’s just politics, isn’t it? Like Eton is just Slough High School for Boys.
You know he’s introducing 24-hour tubes? I’d vote for him. I think he’s done some good things…
Overheard conversation, 257 bus, Leytonstone High Road, 30th November 2013
… and sterilisation for the feeble minded, apparently. Or just brand them on the forearm and send them off to dig the tunnels for HS2. Are these people real? Don’t they ever read the news?
Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.
Margaret Thatcher, interview with the Sunday Times, 3rd May 1981
DLR home from Stratford, changing to a Lewisham train at Canary Wharf. I hear they’re about to start work on yet another new tower, twenty feet higher than the one on Canada Square.
Some projects, it turns out, are much more long-term than you think.
