The percentage figure given at http://results.londonelects.org.uk/Results/MayoralResult.aspx suggests that the Green candidate took 331,727 second preference votes, or 16.55% of the vote. This percentage is indeed approximately one in six. But is one in six much to be pleased with?

The figure also doesn’t take into account the votes cast, where no second preference was expressed. Out of 2,456,990 votes, 412,054 were rejected, or gave no second preference. That turns the 16.55% into 13.5%, or 1 in 7, getting on for 1 in 8.

Furthermore, the turnout – which anon is positive about – was 45.33%, or 2,456,990 of an electorate of 5,419,913. This reduces the 13.55% still further, to 6.1%, or one in sixteen.

And it was only a second preference vote.

So Anon’s claim that “nearly 1 in 6 Londoners expressed support for Green politics” is very much mistaken.

Once you add in second preferences in the mayoral vote, nearly 1 in 6 Londoners expressed support for Green politics.

And in the Assembly vote the Green percentage held up (meaning with higher turnout many more people voted Green than last time), while the Lib Dem vote collapsed. Do you regard this as a repudiation of liberalism?

You seem to have read more about and by Frank Furedi than we have. You don’t, however, seem to have actually read this site, or your contributions would be more constructive than they are, and you would know that our argument is precisely that environmentalism absolutely is politics. Albeit bad politics. That’s the problem.

As for “the emergence of environmentalism as a powerful new motivating force in society”… the trouble is that it isn’t a powerful new motivating force. It’s something that we are told should motivate us, but which most of us are still not motivated by. But hey, that’s our problem isn’t it.

That said, we enjoyed your grape metaphor.

Never mind. I’m sure when he does so it will prove just as persuasive as that of the Revolutionary Communist Party that he led into the UK election of 1987. Not a single one of its candidates attracted enough votes to retain their deposit.

It was this spectacular failure to connect with the public that led Frank and his crew to conclude that politics was bankrupt. Sadly, the sour grapes that they’ve been busily munching ever since have only been made more acid by the emergence of environmentalism as a powerful new motivating force in society.

Don’t these upstarts know that politics has been declared officially dead? Or hang on, could it be that what environmentalists do isn’t politics at all? Yes, that’s it! It’s religion – and not just any religion, but a death cult no less!