Even the Observer is laying into the Mayor this morning with an editorial and a piece about malpractice during the 2004 election. Nick Cohen, who has spoken out against the Mayor, from a left perspective, a number of times previously summarises things nicely.
20:20 Update: One of the Mayor’s 265 comms staff has had to come in on a Sunday to do this rebuttal. It tries to undermine the source of the story without denying the substance of the story.
Apparently Ken Livingstone’s Socialist Action cell at City Hall is new to the Sunday Times which prints this piece this morning.
Anyone Googling members of the Mayor’s team such as Redmond O’Neill, Neale Coleman and John Ross (according to the The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List all three were paid £117,882K last year) would have come across Socialist Action. The most amusing commentaries on their behaviour is provided by the Weekly Worker, a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for instance. Pretty turgid but typical of wild lefties falling out with each other – Leninists duffing up the Trotskyists again.
Weekly Worker was particularly down on Anne Kane, another SA bunny, the lady the Mayor paid £29K of public money (search for Kane) to trash Trevor Phillips.
The Telegraph has picked up the whole Dispatches/Phillips/Kane thing too.
Tonight the Standard is all over the Mayor again, this time highlighting next Monday’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme which is going to raise a number of problems for the Mayor. It will be indispensable viewing so make a date for 8pm on Monday night. I know the researchers have been trawling far and wide to get the full Livingstone story – I met them in September.
One piece in the Standard tonight relates how Redmond O’Neill, Neale Coleman and John Ross, three of the Mayor’s senior staff and old buddies from Socialist Action broke the rules to run the Mayor’s 2004 election campaign whilst in politically restricted jobs. According to the The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List all three were paid £117,882K last year (the same as Lee Jasper and Joy Johnson). How equal!
My eyes did rather glaze over when the Mayor tried to do his crime porkies act again yesterday.
Halfway through the financial year he did a piece and I laboriously went through the figures to show that the Mayor was at best exaggerating and at worst simply lying about the trajectory of crime in London.
His trick is to talk about recent falls, many of which are driven by changes in reporting, eg many frauds being handled by banks rather than the Police, and changes in our behaviour, us locking our houses up better and taking more care of our cars, and to ignore soaring crime in his first term as Mayor.
The Mayor thinks this is a good news story so he ran it on October 18th (after the half way point of the financial year) and again yesterday after the end of the calendar year. No doubt he will run it for a third time in mid April, just before the elections (after the end of the financial year). Funnily he didn’t make a big thing of the 2003/4 murder peak at 204 in April 2004. Yesterday of course he failed to mention the 26 teen murders we endured in 2007. He talks of more police on the beat but will not explain how a threefold increase in the precept since the formation of the GLA has resulted in such a small uplift in police numbers.
Now that Team Boris is up and running their rebuttal skills have improved markedly and this press release sums the situation up nicely.
Update: For more insight read the excellent Burning Our Money blog here.
A posting on Guido Fawkes’ blog yesterday made me think that it was time to revisit the whole Livingstone self-promotion story. I have never linked to any Guido stories previously because the comments tend to be rather sweary and ranty, so be warned. Yesterday’s posting was about about how the Londoner is distributed to MPs. It also made a possibly erroneous claim about copies being posted to households outside London.
Many posters reported how they were not getting copies although they actually live in London albeit most of them reckoned not to want to see it anyway. For myself I haven’t seen a copy in months. I have been reduced to getting copies off the Mayor’s website in order to criticise its blatant bias.
The Londoner is one of the key elements of the Mayor’s £100 million a year comms spending. The figure makes the £1 million each the Mayor and Boris are going to spend on their election campaigns look like small beer.
The Londoner is costing £2.8 million in the current financial year. This is paid for by extorting levies from the GLA bodies in return for which they get advertising space. Transport for London have to pay £1.5 million and the London Development Agency has to pay £500K. Even the Metropolitan Police, who should probably be concentrating on stopping teenagers being stabbed to death, have to pay £250K. The net cost of the Mayor’s self-promotion to the Greater London Authority is therefore only £550K.
It is notable that the Fire Brigade (LFEPA) pays nothing. It is no coincidence that the Mayor has been complaining about LFEPA’s governance. In other words he chafes that he does not control it. They told him to get stuffed when he asked for a contribution to the Londoner.
The Mayor’s press officers and comms people now number 265. Let us assume that the average cost to Londoners of these staff is £50K per head, ie an average salary of £30K plus on-costs of £20K per head per annum to recruit and manage them and put them in smart, new, IT equipped buildings. That adds up to a £13.25 million per annum bill which is another important element of the Mayor’s £100 million a year comms spending.
We know that these people are tragically under-employed. As well as trying to police the Guido Fawkes blog, see above, the Mayor’s comms people have been keeping an eye on me too, see here and here.
To get the 265 figure Assembly Members have had to ask the question three times, it has taken over a year and the Mayor has dissembled all the way.
After last week’s launch of Boris’s campaign in the Standard it was Brian Paddick’s turn for the LibDems today, see his piece here. He is majoring on crime obviously and points out that the Police could tackle knife crime if they prioritise it highly enough and ridiculed Livingstone for his impotence in the face of knife crime and his attempts to spin the crime statistics after his previuos pre-election pledge to halve crime.
Note that Gordon Brown was waffling on about knife crime on Sunday and talking about zero tolerance zones in London amongst other places. Where would the tolerance zones be? The main problem is that Brown’s state only sends 17% of knifemen to jail.
Ludicrously Paddick wants to close down central London by banning cars. I’d like to see Brown and his ministers give up the limos.
Paddick did have one good idea – kill the Low Emission Zone. This is a Livingstone con, see previous posting, and Paddick has rightly spotted that it will simply increase prices with little direct benefit that would not come in due course through normal upgrading of vehicles over time.
Sure enough Andrew Gilligan was straight onto the City Hall grants scandal today in the Standard. Three MPs, one from each main party, has asked the District Auditor to review the cases that Gilligan has raised. Quite right too.
On Friday both the Mayor and the LDA issued 1,200 word press releases claiming that the LDA’s own internal investigation had cleared them all of “corruption” charges. Both press releases are, of course a load of twaddle and no doubt Andrew Gilligan will be laying into them in the Evening Standard in the week to come. The press releases are designed to make you read the positive headline and first paragraph and then glaze over without exploring the details. Boris Johnson’s team were pretty quick to cut through the crap and pull out the main point which was that four or five projects are being investigated by the Police, three of which were referred to them by the LDA as a result of Andrew Gilligan’s investigations.
It is much more fruitful to read Andrew Travers’, the LDA’s Group Director Resources and Risk, actual report to the board. It makes it pretty clear that Andrew Gilligan’s columns in the Evening Standard have been hitting home. It is particularly telling that the conclusions of this document (Section 8.) use nothing like the form of words used on the Mayor’s front page.
It is always a good laugh reading other party’s literature – or at least it is if you a bit of a political spanner like me. I particularly enjoyed the Walpole FOCUS No. 14 which I saw this weekend. Apparently the LibDem “FOCUS team”, led by local LibDem parliamentary candidates Jon Ball and Nigel Bakhai, has been studying at the Bassam Mahfouz School of Hubris. According to them:
Following a concerted campaign over many years by local Liberal Democrat councillors, the Council recently began recycling plastic in Ealing.
Yeah, right.
Phil Taylor 