One of the rewards for people who pledged to the recent, giddily successful, On London crowdfunding campaign was an early copy of the Guide to the forthcoming borough elections I had compiled with top political analyst Lewis Baston. That version of the Guide was distributed to people a couple of weeks ago. But politics, like London, never stands still, so Lewis and I have produced an update – a second edition of the Guide, with more information about particular candidates, the odd refinement to layout and text and a few small errors from the first edition humanely culled.
A huge amount of work has gone into this project, and the final result runs to something like 80,000 words – the length of a typical novel. It is wide-ranging, in-depth, and packed with facts and stats. We have tried to capture both the big London picture and the sometimes bewildering mosaics of highly localised parties and issues that mobilise some London neighbourhoods and disrupt the dominance of the big party machines. We have sought to combine comprehensiveness, clarity and readability as best we can. Lewis’s knowledge is astounding. Working with him has been an education.
Now, at last, we feel able to make the Guide available to the general readership of On London. It comprises 33 separate PDF documents – one for each of the 32 boroughs, plus an Introduction. Readers can purchase a single borough profile for £1 or the full Guide, including the Introduction, for just £5. All you have to do is choose between the two options using the menu below and pay using the “Buy Now” Paypal button below that. It doesn’t look very pretty, but it seems to work. In reply, I will email you as soon as possible the PDFs of the Guide that you require. If you select the single borough option, be sure to tell me which borough it is.
Over the days that remain before 3 May I will be publishing extracts from the Guide here at On London – sometimes adapted to make them work well for the website or included within new material – and soon after election day I plan to make all the Guide material available here too. But until then you will only be able to read the full Guide or sections of it by purchasing it. Remember, even though the crowdfunding target was hit, On London still needs to keep going and growing!
Many thanks to you once more for your support.