London Mayoral Contest, Pence’s Stands, ‘Oppenheimer’ & Polycrisis

If anyone can, Khan can

The London Mayoral Election took an odd and nasty turn this week when the Conservatives put out a US-style attack ad (featuring an actual American voiceover and footage) on the incumbent and favourite Labour’s Sadiq Khan. The hit piece was withdrawn but was a sufficient signifier of the tone the Tories are likely to adopt between now and the election date of 2^nd May. The main challenger to Mayor Khan is the Trump-light figure of Susan Hall, a gaffe-prone candidate who seems to be doubling down on negative tactics in the hopes of putting a dent in Khan’s lead.

The Tories have two things going for them. The first is that they’ve changed the voting system from a form of proportional representation to first past the post. The second thing in their favour has been the controversy over the Ultra Low Emission Zones, or ‘ULEZ’, where Hall is seeking to place herself firmly as the motorist’s champion. However she quite simply is neither as popular nor as liked as Khan, and has little of the appeal that Boris Johnson had which saw him twice elected in the position.

Sadiq Khan is a formidable municipal politician of international standing. He may have more relative spending leeway than the next Labour government, and has focused on transport and policing as key issues during his campaign. London needs strong leadership in the post-Brexit age, and in Khan, they have a tried and trusted representative who has demonstrated his leadership qualities. His re-election will help in keeping his city as one of the world’s greatest, a status it truly deserves.

Pence takes a Stand

Trump news from the US now floods the zone with so much shit (as vile neo-fascist Steve Bannon once said he wanted) that the extraordinary is dismissed as quotidian and something has to be utterly, gobsmackingly outrageous for it to break through and remain in the news cycle. So a statement by Mike Pence (someone in the opinion of this writer wrongly reviled by the Democratic Twitteratti) that he could not endorse the man he served as Vice-President to for four years should have been something dominating current affairs shows for weeks. Instead, it has barely been noticed at all.

It is high-time that Pence be given huge credit both for this and for his refusal to bow down to Trump’s threats and intimidation round the certification of Joe Biden’s election in what seems like eons ago. The fact that he believes the last President as someone he is unable to endorse will, as he said himself, ‘come as no surprise’, but is still utterly without precedent. It is no wonder considering Trump’s mob wanted to literally put a noose around his neck on January 6^th 2021. Pence will never be a hero figure for liberals but he did the right thing twice on two big occasions that really mattered. There are so many variables in play for the November election, and if Pence has managed to shift the dial even in a miniscule way towards Joe Biden (whom he did not endorse either), then he will have made a material difference to the outcome of the vote and the direction of America for the coming years.

‘Oppenheimer’ and Polycrisis

The Oscar success of ‘Oppenheimer’ is richly deserved. It succeeds as an artistic endeavor at the directorial, acting, screenplay and cinematography level, and while for some it may have been overly long, it is not only undoubtedly a serious movie, but also commercially and critically a hit. Yet there’s another way of viewing Christopher Nolan’s film, and that’s as a story that captures the zeitgeist, reflecting the anxiety of a time of fear and anxiety, as the World experiences a polycrisis, with one piece of disastrous, traumatic news blending into another.

First there was Covid; a frightening modern-day plague, where medieval remedies of quarantine and isolation were enforced – albeit mostly accepted by the people – until a vaccine was discovered and life could return to normal. There was barely time to catch our collective breaths before Putin invaded Ukraine and was soon himself threatening NATO with nuclear annihilation. The 2022 invasion marked the confirmation of Russia as international outlaws unwilling and unable to adhere to a rules-based global order. The killing of Alexey Navalny further emphasized how bleak the short to medium-term future is in Russia. The brutal terrorist Hamas attack and genocidal – according to the U.N – Israeli response have dominated the news for nearly six months now, with Netanyahu’s Israel increasingly and deservedly assuming the role of an pariah state.  When you add in growing concerns of the rise of ‘Terminator’ Artificial Intelligence, or at least the lack of definite knowledge about where the A.I. project will end up, you have the polycrisis of 2020 to the present noted by commentators. We will look back on ‘Oppenheimer’ and see it as a signifier of the age we’re living through, the same age we have concerns about making it through alive.