Month: Apr 2008

Paul Waugh and the Evening Standard should know better than this. In the article Tessa Jowell Minister for London said: “Boris Johnson has been caught out admitting that his bus policy would cost £100 million more than he originally told us. For Londoners, that means an extra £2 a week on a weekly bus pass.”

This is voodoo economics. It confuses current spending with capital spending. But worse than that it shows why so many Labour politicians, including senior ministers, aren’t fit to run a piss up in a brewery.

On the current account TfL lost £617 million on the buses alone in 2006/7. In 2006/7 every bus journey cost TfL 87p but they only managed to collect 55p. Doh! Their bus fare dodging bill is £46.7 million of which £8 million is down to the bendy buses that Boris is seeking to replace.

One of the Mayor’s own capital expenditure plans for the buses, announced last November, is to spend £10 million on just 10 experimental hydrogen powered buses.

It does not take much wit to work out how you replace one capital asset, the bendy buses, which will have a finite life in any case, with another, newer one, the new Routemaster, and to fund this from the savings you will make by having bus conductors to clamp down on the fare dodging. We might not get £100 million of new buses in Boris’s first year but I don’t think anyone was planning for that.

The Boris campaign should just turn around and say we will buy new buses over time, they will be better than bendies, they will be paid for at least in part by reducing fare dodging, what’s the problem? The Livingstone campaign claims to be serious but this is just fatuous nonsense.

If you are not registered to vote or need a postal vote you need to get your skates on. The deadline is 5pm tomorrow, that is Wednesday 16th April.

You can download the form here to register to vote and here for a postal ballot (London Borough of Ealing residents only).

You then need to fill them in and run around to the Town Hall – probably too late to post now if you want to be sure.

London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham have a very good voting guide here.

Yesterday in the Evening Standard Andrew Gilligan did a pretty good job of explaining the importance of your second vote in the Mayoral election. If you vote for either Boris or Livingstone your second vote is totally irrelevant. You can not use it, vote twice for your favourite or vote for anyone else and it will make no difference whatsoever.

If one candidate gets over half the votes that is it and no second votes are ever looked at. But, if no candidate gets at least half the votes then all other candidates are excluded except for the two most popular, who will almost certainly be Boris and Livingstone. Then the second votes OF THE EXCLUDED CANDIDATES are examined and any second votes for the remaining two candidates are allocated to them. Therefore if you vote LibDem, Green, UKIP, etc your second vote is worth more than your first vote in effect. You get to chose the next Mayor. Boris or Livingstone. A fresh start or 4 more years of Livingstone?

Tonight Cllr Reen and I spent an hour at Northfield tube station handing out a leaflet with this graphic on one side and a few highlights from Boris’s crime manifesto on the other.

It reminded me of when we were doing this two years ago in the run up to the local elections. Although we won big time in Northfield it was dispiriting trying to get people’s attention on their way home. At the time I said:

This is experience slightly took the wind out of our sails. People in a hurry to get home don’t want to see yet another obstacle standing between them and their hearth. Maybe one in five took the leaflets with many muttering as they went past that we had their votes. I was impressed how polite and interested many people who you might think were not natural Tory voters were. Many new immigrants seem to be much less cynical about politics and happy to see local activists in their faces. Too many white, professional looking types were avoiding eye contact, tut-tutting and looking too important by far to engage with a mere candidate for the council.

Although Mark and I were not met like prodigal sons the reception was definitely warmer than I remembered it two years ago. I am confident that we will have a new mayor on 2nd May.

One London (ex-UKIP) assembly member Peter Hulme Cross stopped to chat. He lives locally. He suggested that Tories should use their top up vote for them as the Tories won’t get any top up seats. I don’t think so.

The hour was enlivened by a couple of heroin smokers who kept trying to use the loos along with a few hippies that had incense and cbd products for sale. We swapped banter with the station staff trying to sort them out. One was for Boris the other wasn’t – but then he wasn’t for Livingstone either. That’s how you win modern elections. You persuade your opponent’s voters to stay at home. Too many of Livingstone’s voters will I am sure.