Month: Sep 2006

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor’s inflation busting fare rises

oystercard.jpgToday the London Mayor has announced inflation busting fare rises for buses and tubes. See press release. The tube package means fares go up by RPI + 1%. The bus package is an eye watering RPI + 3.8%.

Some people think I am a bit strong calling Livingstone a liar. He probably does not lie. He just stretches the truth to the point where you cannot believe anything he says. For instance, you have to be really sharp to realise that whilst the government uses CPI as a measure of inflation to ensure that benefit rises are low, the RPI is typically about 1% higher than the CPI. This is not a downright lie it is just crap though all the same. Benefit claimants getting on buses won’t get the distinction. If claimants are not au fait with the new technology of Oyster cards they’ll be paying £2 a journey. Funny how that 33% price increase is not the headline. Even with an Oyster card off peak bus fares will go up 25% from 80p to £1.

Don’t forget that at the same time the Transport for London is spending £78 million a year on advertising.

There is no need for these fare increases.

Categories
Health, housing and adult social services

Telly shows up Ealing Hospital

Ealing Hospital.jpg
Both the Ealing Gazette and Ealing Times covered the “How clean is your hospital?” show with Kim and Aggie this Friday. I did not get a chance to see the show but some of the coverage makes you think.

I am not surprised that they found some big problems in such a large and complex building with so many staff. Even in a small building you can find some reall horrors lurking in corners. What really worried me was the systematic lack of hand hygiene.

Apparently it was revealed by secret cameras, placed in the hospital over one weekend, that 55 per cent of nurses and 93 per cent of doctors did not use hand gels when entering wards, something which is designed to reduce the spread of infection. I cannot believe the arrogance of these doctors who almost all refuse to observe this basic precaution. The nurses seem to be not much better. Until the leaders of this organisation get out on the wards and pull up the senior staff in front of their colleagues for hygiene breaches there will be no real improvement.

Fiona Wise, the chief executive of Ealing Hospital, give the impression of being complacent and out of touch. She said: “I think the hospital is broadly clean but there are areas that are not, due to a number of factors. It is impossible to achieve 100 per cent cleanliness 24-7, because people do abuse the hospital, but NHS cleaning standards are reached and are maintained rigorously.”

Mrs Wise went on to say: “I am not trying to defend the fact that more than half my staff don’t wash their hands. We are not perfect but it is very difficult to be perfect 24 hours a day.” Umm. I think that doctors ignoring hand washing almost entirely and half of nurses too is a bit beyond “not perfect”. It is deeply crap.

The hospital’s medical director, Dr Bill Lynn, said: “We have been criticised on TV before for cleanliness on our wards and have been making a massive effort to improve cleanliness throughout the hospital. An action plan has been put in place and many of the issues raised in the programme were already, or have since, been addressed.” Less action plans and more rapping senior doctors over the knuckles is required I think.

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

Red Room/Townhouse nuisance stopped?

This weekend I have not seen any new posters from our antisocial DJ friends (see previous posting).

Let me know if you see any. I will be keeping an eye out.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone Tram

Tiny Tramlink

I have written back to the ASA today to point out that they have accepted Tramlink/TfL’s arguments too easily.

According to TfL’s 2005 Annual Report London Underground had 976 million passenger journeys and London Buses had 1,973 million passenger journeys in 2004-5. Croydon Tramlink journeys are so trivial that they do not even mention them beyond saying “Though passenger journeys were up on Croydon Tramlink, TfL still has concerns about the performance of our concessionaire company …”.

Croydon Tramlink.jpgSome indication of Tramlink passenger journeys can be found in the NAO report on trams. See Table 6 on page 21. This says that the promoters of Croydon Tramlink were expecting passenger number of 25 million. They achieved 15 million in the first year of operation and 19 million in 2002-3. This represented a 24% shortfall.

This tiny number are in no way comparable with London Underground (50 times bigger than Tramlink) and London Buses (90 times bigger than Tramlink). The total so-called network amounts to 18.5 miles of track with three tiny routes. Whilst there is nothing wrong with Croydon Tramlink it is utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of Londoners. Therefore the recent TfL ads that put trams on a par with the tube and buses are essentially dishonest.

Categories
Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor will decide London newspaper war

thelondonpaper.gif
This month sees a battle royal between the Daily Mail/Northcliffe publishing empire and Murdoch’s over who owns London daily newspaper publishing. This week saw the launch of News International’s thelondonpaper, a new free sheet. The DMGT Evening Standard has put its price up to 50p and launched London Lite as a free sheet a few days ahead of thelondonpaper to try and kill it at birth.

This contest will all come down to money. The biggest ad spender by far in London is Livingstone with his £100 million budget (see previous post). The way he places his spending over the next few months will determine our reading for many years to come.

The Standard is under real threat. Although it is far from being perfect it is at least a real London newspaper with some shreds of journalistic integrity. Both the new freesheets and the Metro (a joint venture with TfL) are just gossip sheets with snippets of news off wire services. The Mayor hates the Standard and has the market power to crush it. Yesterday the Mayor’s TfL put 2 full pages of ads in thelondonpaper and none in the Standard or London Lite. I am sure he welcomes the opportunity to punish the Standard.

The Mayor and TfL have huge market power as customers but are also market participants. TfL has its JV with the Metro. The Londoner is the Mayor’s own £3 million freesheet delivered to all London homes. How can the Standard compete when its main customer wants to publish newspapers at tax payer’s expense and is happy to push advertising to newspapers with no journalists?

The Mayor and TfL should get out of newspaper publishing entirely. The conflict of interests is unacceptable. They also need to stand aside in the current newspaper war and ensure that they do not use their spending power to destroy London’s one real newspaper just so that they can avoid a bit of criticism.

I have today written to the Director of Competition Enforcement at the Office of Fair trading to request that they review the London newspaper market.

See Dan Sabbagh writing in the Times yesterday.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone Tram

ASA think Croydon = London

The ASA responded to my complaint of 22nd August today (see previous posting) regarding the Mayor and TfL trying to kid us all that Croydon Tramlink is available across London. Apparently they agree with him. Pretty quick work I guess. Only a 2 week turnaround.

ASA 4-9-2006.jpg

Categories
High tax, low pay

Britain’s poor are paying higher taxes under Brown

Alistair Heath writing in the Business this weekend describes how the poor in Britain today are paying more and getting less than they did under the last Conservative government.

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

Townhouse apologises

Townhouse.jpgResponding to my letter of Thursday the Assisant Manager at the Townhouse wrote today in response to my letter about their DJ flyposting the neighbourhood (see previous posting). Quick work.

He said:

“I have today spoken to the promoters of the event who have assured me that all such promotional material has been removed. The advertising was done by the promoters without our prior knowledge or consent. I apologise for any inconvenience or upset this may have caused and can guarantee you that this shall not happen again in the future.”

Sounds good. I will be checking. Let me know if you see any other venues flyposting in the neighbourhood.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Livingstone uses same old slur on his enemies

Mayor Ken Livingstone who currently has a Standards Board ruling hanging over his head over his likening of a journalist to a concentration camp guard is at it again.

Livingstone & Phillips.jpgThis morning the papers (for example see Times story) are reporting his interview on BBC London radio where he said that Trevor Phillips has “… gone so far over the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP”.

Basically Livingstone is charming and lovely until you disagree with him. Then you become a fascist.

The biggest laugh is that he accuses Phillips of turning the Commission for Racial Equality into a “vast press department”. This is rich coming from the man who spends £100 million a year on promoting himself.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Lazy old Gazette

The Gazette gives space to an opinion piece by Darra Singh this morning covering his role as Chairman of the Government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion. The piece is clearly a straight lift from the Department for Communities and Local Government website of his speech on 24th August. If the Gazette was a student it would be accused of plagiarism rather than laziness. They don’t say the piece came from Darra so we can assume it did not.

The Gazette also shows laziness of thought in its Voice of the Gazette piece. They suggest that “Recent reactions to mass migration as well as terrorist attempts on transatlantic flights show a worrying move by society to the right”. Apparently “This must be stemmed urgently”. The writer of this piece, the editor presumably, would be taken apart by any 6th form debater. It is lazy and insulting to equate racism with the right. If migration is currently a political issue there are many voices on the “right”, at least in business and commerce, that are all for it. Last year’s 7/7 massacre has pushed security up the agenda which is hardly a “right-wing” response, it is self-preservation.

I am sure that the Gazette gets lots of cranky calls from silly old racists. I have an old boy in my ward who usually makes negative references to coloured people as soon as he gets warmed up. I have yet to point out to him that people like him, with such heavy Eastern European accents, might be viewed in a similar light by some people. We are all different. Great!

The Gazette asks that Darra Singh “must do what it takes to stabilise and enhance multiculturism (sic)”. The list of people that are disowning multiculturalism now includes Ruth Kelly, Trevor Phillips, Michael Nazir-Ali and George Alagiah. Multiculturalism has not allowed us to take our differences and build an unassailable unity. This is the challenge for Darra’s commission. Maybe the Gazette needs to move on if it is to contribute towards the debate.