Month: Feb 2007

I have just bowdlerised this posting in response to an e-mail from Joy Johnson. She calls herself Director of Media and Marketing and is I guess the woman responsible for overseeing the Mayor’s £100 million a year propaganda budget. She says:

Dear Cllr Taylor,

In your recent blog on the Mayor’s trip to Miami, you named one of my press officers and referred to her as ‘a cute little PR’.

Miss X is an officer employed by the Greater London Authority and should not be publicly singled out merely for doing her job. To refer to Miss X in the terms you have is sexist, derogatory and completely unacceptable.

I would ask that you remove Miss X’s name and the demeaning ‘cute little PR’ reference from your website immediately.

Yours sincerely

Joy Johnson

Whilst I admire and approve of a boss sticking up for one of her people I do think she comes across as being somewhat humourless and brittle. It seems strange to put yourself in the position of talking to the press and the outside world in general and then running back under the skirts of the protection due “an officer employed by the Greater London Authority” at the prospect of simply being named. If she was some lowly grunt in TfL say whose job involved planning the next adjustment to traffic light timings designed to slow down drivers even further I could see the need to protect her identity from the righteous indignation of London drivers. But, her name is on the bottom of the press release silly.

Joy’s choice of words: “merely for doing her job”, made me laugh too because the Mayor got into trouble with a certain Evening Standard reporter who was merely doing his job. I guess that when this PR goes to heaven and has to account for all her air miles she will tell St Peter that she was only following orders.

I have not met the PR lady in question and I cannot really comment on whether she is indeed cute or little. The dark craft of spin/comms/PR is though somewhat over-represented by young women so I am not sure that I have strayed that far from the bounds of propriety really.

I am happy to know that Ms Johnson is one of my readers and has nothing better to do with her time.

This morning the Mayor wrote in response to my request for a clarification of bus subsidies. Although he is meant to reply within 20 working days, a figure he uses as a minimum rather than a maximum, the letter took almost 2 months to arrive, see below.

The letter shows that bus subsidies will rise £65 million or 14% next year to a staggering £528 million. This is a huge sum – fifth of the Met budget, the equivalent of running five general hospitals, bigger than the London Fire Brigade budget. In spite of above inflation fare rises, that will result in a projected rise in income of 5.5%, Transport for London’s costs are out of control and will rise by 8.2% next year. TfL are by reputation one of the most wasteful and inefficient parts of government but it is truly excruciating to have cash fare rises of 33% which target the poorest in society and still manage to draw down yet more subsidy.

The Mayor is particularly cynical with his handling of this information. The bus subsidy in not made clear in the TfL annual report. When you ask him to furnish the information, which is a necessary prerequisite for any sensible debate on the funding of public transport, it takes 2 days shy of 2 months to arrive. The final insult is that once he has gone to the trouble and expense of writing an answer on 2nd February he puts a second class stamp on the envelope to delay the answer for as long as possible.

Last week was budget week for the London Mayor and Assembly. The budget was discussed at Mayor’s Question Time on Tuesday and the Mayor had a go at the Conservatives’ proposals to curtail young persons bus concessions in particular, see previous posting. The final vote will take place on 14th February but is a foregone conclusion as the Greens have already been bought for £47 million, see previous posting.

The debate was covered well by the London Salmon blog so I won’t try to repeat that work. Having seen the alternative Tory budget talked about I looked for it online and failed to find it. On Friday the Tory group chief of staff, Darren Bryant, e-mailed it over and said it would be OK to publish it – here it is.

Alternative budget for London

It is a very well worked through document and deserves a wider readership than it will get. It shows how easy it would be to deliver a standstill budget this year while still increasing police numbers as planned. It also made provision for 600 more transport police.

I was pleased to see the Tory group making use of figures I had extracted from the Mayor on how the Londoner was funded – the alternative budget returned all of the Londoner tax back to the GLA bodies so that there could be more police, cheaper fares and more useful economic development rather than wasting £3 million per annum on telling Londoners how great Livingstone is.

The budget clearly points out how the Mayor has increased his impost by 147.1% since he came to power and shows how the low paid need to toil for two weeks to pay this bill. The budget astutely points out that the real increase in the precept is 5.7% not the headline 5.3% as the £20 Olympic levy should not be included in the base. Rather than trying to give a point by point commentary I would recommend a quick read yourself – it really is quite digestible.

As I said earlier the Mayor has had a go at the Tory proposal to take away the current young persons’ concessions on the busses. The other line of attack from the Mayor was his defence of his typically self-aggrandising plans for a London celebration of the abolition of slavery. I don’t suppose that the celebration will dwell on the facts of how the largest military power in the world, spurred on by a Christian religious revival, used its naval might to destroy an obvious evil. Maybe the US Neo-Conservatives are simply not ambitious enough! The Mayor’s hysterical press release is just designed to please the overpaid Lee Jasper and no-one else. The silliest line is:

The headlines in every national newspaper and TV news report this week have shown that there is a major attack on the Muslim communities in this country.

Funny, I thought that the police were attacking Islamic terrorists who were plotting to kill a British soldier on video. The Mayor thinks that black is white but if he spends enough of our money on broadcasting his upside down views, £100 million a year, then we will all lose our reason. The actual, unspun Conservative proposal was:

This year the Mayor has also included £275,000 to commemorate the bicentenary of the slave trade abolition. Whilst we view this as a valuable commemoration to be undertaken, we view it as more appropriate that this event should have been provided and paid for by central Government as a national commemoration rather than by regional Government, especially in light of the £500,000 capital grant from DCMS and the £1.65m award from the Heritage Lottery Fund for the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. We also rather recognise that the funding should preferably have been spent on combating the modern day slave trade and note that had this money been provided to the MPS it would pay for an additional four specialist anti-trafficking Officers – a 50% increase on the current number.

Rather than puffing himself the Mayor might want to spend any spare cash on real people in distress right now. I guess young eastern European women being trafficked for prostitution is not a “left-wing” issue so the Mayor does not give a toss.

On Friday the Mayor announced the teams that are coming to London in October to play a full on NFL football game – yawn! Apparently he is staying on to watch the Superbowl tonight. Good luck to him and I hope he enjoys another freebie paid for by us poor council tax payers.

He is a totally bizarre man though. On Thursday he was blathering on about climate change, and probably quite right too, see press release, but the next day he pops up at a press conference in Miami and announces this game. First of all why does he need to go to Miami, he is the London Mayor after all, and secondly why do we need American football in the UK anyway? Maybe he should have been in London at Twickenham yesterday watching Johnny Wilkinson or would that be too middle class for our jet set working class hero Mayor?

The funniest factoid in the Mayor’s NFL press release is that this initiative will persuade 10,000 Americans to come to London to watch a football match. No concern about global warming there then.

The press release was strangely worded because it did not make it clear the Mayor was actually in Miami although apparently he is there with a female PR whose phone number is given along with the info that she is in Miami. It is pretty clear he is actually there from the coverage in the Miami Herald. While he was there the Mayor could not help pursuing his personal diplomatic mission to the world:

I look forward to the day the American people elect a government as great as they are.