Boris was elected for his image (at least first time round) and because he appears to be fairly moderate compared to the rest of the Conservative party.
If Boris wins his seat at the next general election I can easily see Labour winning the mayoral election. I can’t think of any other Conservative who could win it for them.
Johnson certainly isn’t moderate. People just don’t notice because he’s ‘a character’.
He won in London because he’s charismatic, and because Ken Livingstone was hardly a less divisive character.
But yeah, if they put up someone like Stephen Norris again they’re wasting their time. Zac Goldsmith? Seb Coe?
The funny thing about Johnson running as an MP for Uxbridge is that he’s been campaiging against Heathrow for years and now he’ll have to perform a complete 180 on that.
Libertarians are the Furries of the political world. They ruin perfectly good threads with their weird fetishes.
I meet too many people who with their busy lives prefer to IMHO approach politics or policy as a team sport, choose one of two teams, often because of locality, personality cult, or their education; and stick to the party line for the most part because their team supports policy XYZ.
There are also the occasional libertarian, socialist, anarchist, or other nutjobs who if they are educated can actually espouse an interesting personal policy choice menu rather than picking form the big two.
I think our alien overlords said it best.
Libertarian-socialists are strongly opposed to libertarian-capitalists, who falsely claim to be the only true libertarians.
Basically Libertarian-socialism is a spectrum from the Green parties to most of anarchism (“anarcho”-capitalism and some individualist-anarchism excepted).
I personally don’t think Boris is moderate. I’m just going by what some (normally) Labour and LibDem voting people in London have said to me.
I will admit to not having talked to many people about it though.
I almost deleted my post as I thought it was a bit too flame-baity. I appreciate your considered reply, and will summarily do some reading on the topic. Superficially, it seems a bit chimerical, but we’ll see!
Cheers.
Edit: yup, I totally got that one wrong. After many years, I tend to abbreviate the ideas of Libertarianism (as it exists in the US context) as a bunch of selfish capitalists that don’t want to share their toys with anyone, but as you pointed out, there are other ways to decentralize government authority.
I still don’t like Objectivist Libertarians, though. 
You’re also not getting fair representation of “cities” here, due to the strict definition by size. Salt Lake City, as defined strictly by city boundaries, only has a population of 191,000 by the last census. But the area known as “Salt Lake City”, or the Salt Lake Valley as a whole, is a continuous mass of populace and holds well over a million people. And I think you’d find SLC to be at the top of the chart if this strict definition wasn’t so . . . strict.
Straight up, dude. People who want everyone to be able to live subject to as little coercion as possible, but who recognize that economic coercion has the potential to be just as oppressive as government coercion. Think greens but with more drugs and guns and, potentially, even less faith in some tenets of our current capitalist order. (Particularly letting private institutions practice fractional reserve banking for profit.)
When you put it like that it doesn’t sound so good 
Whilst guns would not be regulated as they are now, there wouldn’t be as much of a focus on them. Some places will be open carry, others will have a ban, but it would be the choice of the people living in the local community not the state (government).
Drugs and addiction will be less of an issue, I believe in the rat park model of addiction and highly stressful environments will be reduced when coercive environments are.
What? It sounds pretty damn good to me.
I think you’re right about the rat park model. Addiction is a symptom of social problems, more than a cause.
What I always bring up when suggesting that hard drugs should be legal is, “Would you do heroin if it was legal?” “Right. Neither would I, or pretty much anyone I know who doesn’t do it already. So why do you think there’s this huge army of people who are so different from you and me and everyone we know that they would suddenly start shooting up the instant it was made legal?”
Nobody does.
I also believe that deep down, that includes most Objectivist Libertarians, which is a big part of their problem.
Nothing with more nuance than temperature can be accurately represented along a single axis.
Ever heard of wind chill factor? 
Arlington, number 6. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a nice place to be from.
Interesting discussion about measuring cities vs. including their suburbs – Arlington is, or at least was, a suburb. I’m not sure what the cut-off is where a place changes into a city, though Arlington hit a quarter-million people at least 25 years ago.
Ft. Worth’s still my 2nd-favorite city in Texas, though.
Edit: Heh. Wrong Arlington.
I doubt Gillibrand ever visited (or lived in) Arlington TX. If she had, her assessment of Arlington VA may have been more charitable.
I’m certain people do have many opinions most of them quite similar, but they are scaling municipal policies not people. These affect people & are made by people but may not actually reflect upon them.
This is important because the policies probably should reflect the people they serve. Left & Right are shorthand & quite useful in this way.
I for one, not living there & having no one close to me there & having not visited for more than 20 years, am surprised San francisco has a conservative govt compared to other cities. Maybe that’s cool for them but the image of that city projected in media certainly makes that seem odd.
@dobby, It comes down to the nature of democracy. 50%+1 vote wins therefore you had better get your ducks in a row or the side of the issue you don’t want will take the day and you will be living under laws you don’t like. We have sorted this out in the US by creating the nomination process where you are free to vote your heart and mind and vote for a candidate that suits you or cast a protest vote to pull your end of the spectrum in a particular direction. But! if you do that in the general election you run the risk of throwing the election to the other side and that is counter-productive. Save your protest vote for the primary and get behind the candidate who can win and is closer to you in the general. Please.
What you have described is “First-past-the-post voting” not democracy.
First-past-the-post is NOT the only way to run an election, but once you have a two-party system, BOTH parties have a vested interest in maintaining FPTP, since it creates a tremendous barrier for entry for third (fourth, fifth, etc.) parties.
This directly ties to the notion (false, IMO) that all politics can be placed on a one dimensional continuum from “Liberal” to “Conservative.” In a two party system, all you really need to do is convince the voters that “We’re not them!” In such a system, the convenient labels are quite handy.
