This site started on Friday 2nd May, the day after the London mayoral elections when it became clear that Ken Livingstone had lost the mayoralty to Boris Johnson.

It started as an act of frustration, at the loss to apparent personality politics, and the accusation that somehow young people are to blame.

Authors

Tom Barry

Tom Barry is a scruffy IT guy currently working for a major ISP. An engineer by training and inclination, he has lived in London for the last eleven years and currently mooches about somewhere under the Heathrow flightpath being periodically attacked by his hyperactive offspring. A semi-regular writer at Blairwatch since 2006, he has never been a member of a political party but, if pressed, would define himself as a liberal, further defined as ‘not suffering from the disease of ideology’. Main blogging interests are transport issues and the law, with a side order of military lunacy. If elected, he promises to read through TfL Board minutes so you don’t have to.  In October 2008 he was described by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard as:

‘one tireless Johnson-basher’

He is currently considering whether to have this framed or inscribed.

Mr. Stop Boris/Pushing the boundary

Mr. Stop Boris was so horrified by the thought of Boris becoming Mayor that he took that most modern of preventative measures immediately upon first hearing rumours that Boris was putting himself forward for the position in July 2007: he started a Facebook group called Stop Boris.

In the two months leading up to the election his desperation spilled over into StopBoris.org and before he knew it he’d become a several-posts-a-day blogger on the Stop Boris blog. Whichever way the election went, he assumed he’d be able to kick that habit after 1 May, but how wrong he was.

He’s grateful to Boris Watch for providing him with a more appropriately named outlet through which to continue to expose just what a shocking Mayor London now has, and has since started a non-Boris-related blog, Pushing the boundary, in an effort to reassure people that he doesn’t only think about blond buffoons – and to try to make a name other than Mr. Stop Boris for himself.

Fenby

Fenby writes at Scribo Ergo Sum.

Naadir Jeewa

Naadir Jeewa is an undergraduate student in Politics and Society at Birkbeck University. He also works in IT up the road at University College London. He looks after this blog, but doesn’t really write for it. Anytime this site goes down is his fault.

His interests are in civil society discourse surrounding climate change, its impacts and possible responses in terms of paradigm shifts in International Relations and transnational approaches. These interests are explored at his other blog, Random Variable.

For the public record, when he was 18, he once spent three months as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, but left over a disagreement over whether to trust Max Weber or an angry Palestinian lawyer for an accurate explanation of the origins of capitalism, and is now religiously unmusical. He is currently a member of the Labour Party (though this happened years after this blog started).

Helen

Helen has spent her whole life within screaming distance of Heathrow Airport. A regular user of public transport since she was a foetus, she endured the horror of journeys to school on a Routemaster (if it ever turned up) and now likes to visit other European cities to ride on their trams, articulated buses and trains. If you ask nicely, she might show you her collection of Scandinavian Travelcards.