Month: Jan 2007

In case you haven’t seen the expensive advertising the London Mayor is currently consulting on his Low Emmission Zone. This is a total fraud.

The current consultation comes to an end on 2nd February. The consultation leaflet is really badly drawn up:

• it does not quantify the benefits of the scheme in any way. It says 1,000 people die prematurely now but it does not say how many will be saved by the scheme
• it does not quantify the extent to which particulates and NOx will be reduced
• it does not quantify the extent to which these will be reduced in any case as new vehicles come into service
• it does not indicate the cost of the scheme
• it does not say how much has been spent on this scheme to-date
• it does not quantify the economic costs of the scheme
• it does not quantify how many vehicles will be affected – 10? 1,000? 1 million?

At the start of last year I read that the scheme was going to cost £78 million (see previous posting).

The stupid man did a consultation (222 pages of expensive waffle) last year and then commissioned some market research (73 pages of extremely expensive Ipsos MORI waffle). Now he is consulting again. All this stuff costs £100Ks and is totally useless. It is just evil to ask people questions like “Would you like something lovely?” without quantifying the extent of the loveliness or the cost of the loveliness. To do it three times is just an insult to Londoners’ intelligence.

This is seriously stupid government as the Euro standards are designed to achieve the objective and will do so in time as vehicles are replaced without any intervention from Livingstone. All this scheme does is to spend £78 million harassing a few vehicles I suspect. Any corporate board examining this proposal would laugh it out as there are no quantifiable benefits and the costs are obscure.

If you care about good government in London respond to the consultation questionnaire and reject the scheme. When Livingstone comes back and says “I will deliver this size of benefit for this price” then it will be time to think again.

Telegraph columnist Sam Leith celebrated his 33rd birthday at the start of this week and finds himself, quite rightly, becoming more right wing as he grows up (see full article). His opinion of Livingstone has moved on in step:

Ken Livingstone, for example: a Man Of The Left, who Stuck It To Thatch, and was therefore a Good Thing. And then, here I was, reading my newspaper, and learning that the Mayor of London spent £30,000 of taxpayers’ money hobnobbing with convicted spies in Cuba. That he was planning to throw a party for Castro. On the London taxpayer.

And here I was, with steam issuing from my ears in great geyserish spouts. Even if we agree that dissident-jailing dictators such as Castro are the heroes of the working man, I thought, what in the name of all that’s sacred does that have to do with London?

And then I started to think back. Cuddly, newt-loving Ken. Uncompromising, man-of-principle Ken. Believer in the collective and the good fight against evil capitalist plutocrats. And I thought: the man’s a raving egomaniac. He plasters pictures of his horrible grinning fizzog all over every pamphlet he issues.

He “brands” – like the worst sort of brand-obsessed capitalist running-dog – every poster with his absurd “Mayor of LondON” slogan.

He breaks his promise to defend the noble Routemaster (“only some ghastly sort of dehumanised moron would actually want to get rid of Routemasters” – remember that, ye bampot?) and mucks up the centre of town with his junction-blocking, bursting-into-flames, freeloader-encouraging bendy buses.

He congratulates himself on the Olympics. He invites gay-hating, wifebeater-condoning mullahs to tea. He sticks up for Mao Zedong. He makes boorish remarks about concentration camps to Jewish reporters. He suggests a couple of Iraqi businessmen who rubbed him up the wrong way might “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”.

And – worst of all – he raises the cost of public transport. “The headlines about big cash fare increases today show that the savings are now to be found on Oyster,” he chirped happily, as if those Oyster cards had just become better value because – look! – we’ve made everything else much worse value.

What on earth would possess us to put this man, I found myself thinking, in charge of a sub-post-office, still less a city?

If only Leith knew the half of it!

Tonight the Evening Standard is reporting that ex-Radio 1 DJ, Mike Read is set to run as a potential Conservative candidate for London Mayor. Not sure what he stands for. I would prefer a real politician me.

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