Month: Sep 2007

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Buses again

Mayor's bus election bribe againTwisty old Livingstone is on the bus theme again.

According to today’s press release from the Mayor TfL commissioner Hendy and Livingstone have given up their Sunday to promote the Mayor’s 10p bus fare cut which came into force today.

As we know the Mayor has shouted from the front page headline of the Londoner about this three times in three successive months.

It is good to see that this blatant piece of electioneering is being done on their own time. If Hendy and Livingstone want to give up their Sunday to get the Mayor re-lected fine. I hope that no-one in the Mayor’s press office picked up any overtime either.

None of the Mayor’s outpourings mention that two years ago off peak Oyster bus fares were 80p, they went up to £1 last year and this year they will be 90p. So off peak fares will be 12.5% higher than they were even after this supposed cut.

Categories
Communications disease

Disappearing Navy

Disappearing Navy.JPG

Compare and contrast this story in the Telegraph this morning about the way the Royal Navy is disappearing before our eyes (click to enlarge graphic above) with this story from the Telegraph back in July which highlighted the 1,000 press people currently being employed by the MoD. Yes, 1,000 not 100.

I figure trading say 900 MoD press officers for keeping a fleet of minesweepers in service to protect our new carriers would be a good bargain.

HMS Fearless

I have been Navy-barmy since 1969 when HMS Fearless came to Lagos to accompany a visit from then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. My Dad, who was working out there for Barclays Bank, met a couple of Royal Marines and invited them over for dinner. In return they gave my brothers and I a tour of the ship and Royal Marines cap badges. You can imagine how this bowled over a 7 year old. HMS Fearless went on to serve as the command vessel for the amphibious assault on the Falkland Islands. Commissioned in 1965 she was only decommissioned in 2002.

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

Bar 38 fly-posters back

DJ fly-posters FunkinDeliciousOver the last couple of days I have noticed 50 or so green and white posters appearing on lamposts between here and Hammersmith. They are promoting a club night at Bar 38 in Hammersmith this Friday. I had hoped that this had stopped after the pub chain’s company secretary, Andrew Green, wrote to say that he had put an end to this, see previous posting.

Previously these posters had named Bar 38. Now they only mention a website – at least a MySpace page. They have been quiet since early May when Green wrote to me. They seem to think it is OK to start up again messing up west London now 4 months has passed.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Brown/Livingstone feud definitely off

We're working together to re-elect LivingstoneAlthough Brown had to work hard to keep his stage grin on yesterday as Livingstone pumped his arm it is clear that the PPP feud between Brown and Livingstone has definitely been been settled. Besides the mood music – such as Brown’s favourite sidekick, the corrupt Balls, joining in the Johnson baiting yesterday – the Brown team are putting themselves out to prop up the Mayor. If Brown is thinking of playing a long game with the general election then having a Tory mayor in place for that period would really make that plan look unattractive so I guess it is not surprising.

Giving Livingstone the main conference platform is one example of this.

This story (left) popped up whilst I was on holiday and provides another example. Whilst youth provision is properly a subject for minister Balls and for the Boroughs I really don’t see how the Mayor fits in. How does youth provision fit into the Mayor’s competences? It does not. Balls is quite happy to do a photocall with Livingstone to allow him to rebrand £40 million of an existing government programme as his own. The Mayor also seems to be happy to divert £20 million of LDA money towards this programme. Aren’t they meant to promote economic development rather than youth clubs? I’m not saying that youth clubs are a bad thing. Just that the LDA’s economic development pot seems to be being spent on anything rather than economic development.

Right now Labour ministers are twisting the City’s arm to get more cash for Crossrail but at the same time LDA budgets are spent on anything other than what should be their main priority – getting young Londoners good jobs in the City. Or am I missing something? Are Livingstone, Balls and co so patronising that they don’t think that London youth are capable of working in about the only world class industry that we still have left? What is the LDA doing? Investing in the Tate gallery, sponsoring the Tour de France and paying for youth clubs.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Brown cringe

Get off LivingstoneYesterday at the Labour conference Gordon Brown kept a fixed grin as Mayor Livingstone grabbed Brown’s arm at the end of his speech and held it aloft, see BBC footage here. He pretty quickly pulled it back down again. Talk about cringe-making.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Boris is selected by 79%

Back BorisA few minutes ago the ConservativeHome website reported that the results of the Conservative primary to select a candidate to be London Mayor are as follows:

Boris Johnson: 15,661 (79.0%)
Victoria Borwick: 1,869 (9.4%)
Andrew Boff: 1,674 (8.4%)
Warwick Lightfoot: 609 (3.1%)

20,000 people took the trouble to vote. I hope that most of those will join the Conservative party in working to remove King Newt and replace him with Boris.

We know that the Labour party are worried about this development from the amount of flak that Johnson got at the Labour conference yesterday. Ed Balls, he of the dodgy housing expenses claim, called Johnson “a gaffe-prone, TV quiz-show clown – a Bullingdon club throwback to a bygone age”. Apparently although Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper earn about £240K a year they still bend the rules to claim £27K per year to pay their London mortgage by claiming that their Stoke Newington home, where their kids go to school, is in fact their second home. Let’s see, you work in London, your wife works in London, your kids go to school in London but your main home is in Yorkshire. Talk about hand in the till.

The BACKBORIS site is carrying this message from Bozza:

I’d like to thank Londoners for giving me this opportunity.

As I visited all of London’s 32 boroughs in the last few weeks, the message is loud and clear – King Newt’s days are numbered. Across London I’ve met people fed up with paying so much to city hall and getting so little in return.

The job of the Mayor is simple – to get people to work on time, to ensure people feel safe on the streets, to help people find a place to call home, to celebrate our diversity and to champion our success.

My determination to lead this city is stronger than ever. After seeing both the good and bad that London has to offer, I am committed to making London greater and standing up for every Londoner that invests so heavily in our city.

I want to be a Mayor for all Londoners, from Zone 6 to Zone 1. A Mayor that will listen, will learn and will lead.

Categories
Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Completely Caracas

completely-caracas.JPGBoris Johnson used this phrase during his Mayoral bid launch at the start of September to describe the Mayor’s Venezuelan joint venture with the totalitarian Chavez regime. I wrote to the Mayor on 24th August to ask him a few questions about this as it clearly does not add up, see previous posting.

His response, sent by flunky Kevin Austin, says that TfL will get £15 million from the Venezuelans which will broadly cover the cost of the half price concession (if you accept TfL’s estimate that only 160,000 of the 250,000 entitled to the concession will take it up and that their additional travel will also partly offset the cost).

The Mayor’s office will only admit to direct costs of £16,000 associated with supplying services under this scheme – travel costs incurred by a TfL transport team in June. The Mayor wants us to believe that TfL has made no estimate for the cost of providing £15 million worth of services per annum. I asked for this and my request has been ignored.

The Mayor does admit to another million Pound ad budget of £975K for this deal. The Mayor tries to persuade us that this will be paid for by the Venezuelans but their money can only be spent once. It can’t ofset the cost of the concession AND pay for the ads. One or the other Mr Mayor.

This deal stinks. The oil money, which might better be spent on needy Venezuelans, will pay for the travel concession if you make some favourable assumptions maybe. It will not cover the £975K ad budget, other administration costs of the scheme, the cost of providing services to justify the Venezuelans £15 million spend or the original £100K set up costs. The real net cost of this deal to London is in the area of £5-10 million. Our lying Mayor will not admit this.

Categories
National politics

Brown’s speech

Gordon BrownI don’t normally cover national politics but Gordon Brown’s emetic speech yesterday to the Labour conference has spurred me into action.

The first passage I came to was:

I attended the local state primary school in Kirkcaldy a few streets away from where I lived – and then I took the school bus to the local secondary school up the hill.

This really is disingenuous rubbish. Between 1958 and 1972 Kirkcaldy High School, Brown’s alma mater, was “the only provider of senior secondary education in the area” according to that school’s current prospectus. Gordon Brown went to the only grammar school in the area but the arch spinner describes it as the “local secondary school up the hill”. Remember Brown lost his eye playing rugby at a public school-aping grammar.

After a lot more blather the Chancellor talked about personalising education:

Learning personal to each pupil.

Education available to all – not one size fits all but responding to individual needs.

This is the future for our public services. Accessible to all, personal to you. Not just a basic standard but the best quality tailored to your needs. Education is my passion.

It is hard to know how you are going to make education more personal if you believe in command and control as Brown does. In the passage immediately before this guff he laid out more central prescriptions for schools:

And because I want every child to be a reader, every child to be able to count, we have decided that one-to-one tuition will be there in our schools not just for Max, but for 300,000 children in English and 300,000 in maths.

And because we want to unlock all the potential, not just the three R’s, for every pupil as we look ahead with pride to the Olympics we aim for the first time for five hours a week sport and time for arts and music too.

So for every secondary pupil a personal tutor throughout their school years – and starting with 600,000 pupils, small group tuition too.

So we are to have personal services in our 100,000s. Doh!

Brown does the same thing with health. First the rhetoric:

So let me set out how we take the NHS into a new era.

Our great achievement of the 1940s was a service universal to all. In 2007 we need a service that is accessible to all and personal to all.

Our great ambition now: a National Health Service that is also a personal health service.

Then comes the list of centralised prescriptions:

And to make sure every hospital is clean and safe, following best practice around the world, there will be new funds direct to every hospital for a deep clean of our wards.

We will more than double the number of hospital matrons to 5,000. We will give matrons and ward sisters in all 10,000 wards the powers to report cleaning contractors and safety concerns directly to hospital boards and a stronger health care commission.

And I can announce that matrons will have the power to order additional cleaning and send out a message – meet the highest standards of cleanliness or lose your contract.

The guy can’t be truthful about his own roots and is appropriating the whole personalisation shtick to sell his vision of Soviet style centralised services.

Categories
Parking Services

Herding cats

Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny PanelHaving arranged to go on holiday a couple of days after our second panel meeting on 11th September I have only now had the chance to reflect on our session.

It was something like herding cats as a lot of people came with some pretty narrow issues they wanted to discuss at length in front of as many people as possible. The Gazette reported that 50 people turned up which I think was close to the mark. 50 cats is a lot of cats.

It was clear from the meeting that there is much discontent, especially amongst the business community, with the state of parking and loading in Ealing. Although some of the causes of this discontent are outside the scope of our panel, for instance the law itself and policy decisions like how do we use road space, we have recorded the gist of what was said and this will form a valuable input to our work. Thanks to all of those who came.

We had hoped to split the audience down into smaller groups to allow more people the opportunity to speak in the given time. We settled for two groups. The policy group was larger and noticeably more voluble. The service group which I participated in covered a wide range of issues productively as we had hoped.

It was all very well Patrick Kennedy from Ealing Chamber of Commerce telling the Gazette that “Action speaks louder than words” but this panel was never going to look at loading arrangements as he would have known if he had cared to read the papers. One reason we had hoped to divide the group was to avoid large amounts of time being hijacked by particular individuals with axes to grind, especially where we were not seeking to tackle that particular issue in the first place!

The Gazette report stated that “No one was brave enough to appear from the contractor APCOA, …” This is unfair. Two APCOA staff did attend and hear what was said. But the contractor and its representatives were neither invited nor expected to speak. The Council is big enough I think to face up to public criticism without putting its suppliers up to take the punishment on its behalf.

I hope that we will get an equally good attendance for our third meeting on 15th November even if it is a bit nerve wracking! At that meeting we will focus exclusively on the finances of Parking Services.

We got some press coverage in both the Gazette and Ealing Times.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Buses again

buses-3-times.jpg

The London Mayor is now using the front page of the Londoner for the third time to highlight his bus fare cuts. As I have pointed out before, see previous posting, this cut cannot be justified by the Mayor in any rational business terms. It is an election bribe fair and square. He is not shy obviously to use his £3 million a year not-so-freesheet to make sure you know BUS FARES HAVE BEEN CUT BY 10%.

On the one hand I am shocked by the Mayor’s use of public funds to get himself re-elected. On the other hand it is so grotesque you have to wonder if it will not be counter-productive.