Author: Phil

Livingstone’s transport porkies

Post author By Phil
Post date 29th Apr 2008
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Yesterday Livingstone launched his last big push and unveiled this poster. Typical Ken. £39 billion? Over what timescale? The context of this £39 billion is that London remits £17.8 billion net to the Treasury EVERY year. Livingstone’s big problem is that he has failed to get London’s fair share out of the Treasury. He makes out that it is such a big deal that he has succeeded in getting an additional £4 billion out of the Chancellor for social housing in London but fails to acknowledge what a poor performance this really is.

As I have blogged before the Mayor really screwed up the Crossrail negotiation. London will only receive a £5.1 billion government grant for Crossrail. London will itself have to pay the rest of the £16 billion with unlimited liability for overruns. As the Standard reported last week London’s Tube and bus fares will rise above inflation to pay for some of this bill. Livingstone is a terrible negotiator. He was so keen to add Crossrail to his train set he drove a really bad bargain.

It is the Mayor who is the joke.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone Mayor Johnson

London Elects

Post author By Phil
Post date 25th Apr 2008
1 Comment on London Elects

On Thursday I got a pretty expensive mailing from London Elects. You probably did too if you are registered to vote in London. On Friday my local paper, the Ealing & Acton Gazette, carried a full page “How to vote” ad from London Elects. By coincidence, really?, there was a full page ad from Livingstone on the next page. How did his campaign know that London Elects would be running their campaign on that same day? Did the Livingstone specifically ask for the next page? Did the other campaigns know this was coming? I have written to London Elects to find out. If they are as cynical as the rest of the Mayor’s empire it will be 28 days minimum before I get any answers.

According to their website:

London Elects is the independent body in charge of organising the elections of the London Mayor and London Assembly. The team works directly for the Greater London Returning Officer (Anthony Mayer) under a separate budget and reporting lines from other GLA staff.

London Elects has two distinct functions – operations and communications.

Ealing and Northfield

Stacey swats Greenhead

Council leader Jason Stacey has today roundly swatted Labour Hobbayne councillor Phil Greenhead for issuing a press release that has been exposed as a load of twaddle. The press release issued on the 23rd April by the Labour Group on behalf of Cllr Greenhead stated that:

The Conservative Leader of Ealing Council, Jason Stacey, has been referred to Ealing Council’s Standards Committee.

Apparently, no such referral has taken place and no formal complaint has been made to the Council’s Monitoring Officer. The Labour press release also claims that the matter would now be considered by the Council’s Standards Committee. In reality no formal referral or complaint has been made. In response Stacey said:

Why would Cllr Greenhead issue a statement on the 23rd April saying I have been referred to the Council’s Standards Committee when this is not true? When challenged on this the following day by a journalist she attempted to change the thrust of her story by claiming that she was actually seeking advice. This is very different and certainly not what she said the day before.

In the past couple of days Cllr Greenhead has thrown a lot of loose words around without any attempt to back them up. She has accused me of lying but is unable to say how. Cllr Greenhead should be careful before she throws around false and defamatory accusations.

You may have seen the stories in Ealing Times here and here.

The Gazette today talked about 30 Hanwell lamppost protestors outside the council meeting on Tuesday but their photo only showed 22 people. Experience shows that photographers of such groups do their best to get everyone in so it is usually useful to judge such “crowds” by the number you can count in the photo. These guys say they are apolitical and I have no reason to doubt them but they have been wound up by someone and Labour activist Lauren Wall appears in their group photos and Cllr Greenhead is visibly making mischief. The way this issue might have been amicably settled some time ago would have been for Cllr Greenhead to make representations to Cllr Stacey not try to make a point after this issue had been discussed at length. It sounds like Greenhead was asleep and is trying to make it look like she can “add some value” at this late stage. Stirring it more like.

Mayor Johnson

Question Time

After a night of Overview and Scrutiny Committee followed by West Ealing Neighbours I finished off with watching the Question Time mayoral debate on BBC1. It really was pretty disappointing as have been all the TV debates of this campaign. Why do TV producers think that the public is going to be engaged by a load of tittle tattle? The real issues remained unilluminated. The productivity of the Met – untouched. Cost control at Transport for London – untouched. The value of the London Development Agency’s spending – untouched.

At least three times Dimbleby took it on himself to have a go at Boris Johnson. He didn’t bother with Paddick and had a go at Livingstone maybe once.

Boris managed to keep it serious but he still had two of the best lines. He described Livingstone as “emanating from the bowels of the Labour movement”. In relation to the BNP’s suggestion that their supporters should give their second votes to Boris and asked to explain it he said: “You’ll have to ask the tiny minds of the BNP”.

On balance the two main candidates were pretty evenly balanced with Paddick looking like a pigmy. Paddick pretty much said that those voting for him should use their second votes, in effect their first votes if given to Boris or Livingstone, as they see fit.

Comment is free Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Taking down the LDA

My latest Comment is free piece for the Guardian looks at the Mayor’s piggy bank – the London Devempment Agency or LDA.

On Wednesday the FT were quoting Steve Norris on the LDA. He said:

It is the most dysfunctional body that most of us can think of.

Ealing and Northfield

Sharma makes Three Line Whip

Post author By Phil
Post date 23rd Apr 2008
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Virendra Sharma A little bird tells me that our MP made the Three Line Whip blog run by the Telegraph on Saturday. Could it have been the same little bird that pointed Jonathan Isaby at my blog?

According to Isaby:

Ealing Southall by-election winner, Virendra Sharma, has remained on Ealing council since entering Parliament last July, but until last week, the last time he’d shown his face at a meeting was in October.

Had he not rolled up at the most recent Education Scrutiny Panel, he would have faced ejection from the council for six months’ non-attendance — but he’s still claiming the £9,000 annual councillors’ allowance.

“He does plan to get to more meetings in the future, but if anything the many constituents who contact him get a better service because he is an MP as well as a councillor,” insisted his spokesman.

The spokesman will be Cllr Bell I guess.

Sharma didn’t make it to the council meeting on Tuesday and tonight the loquacious Cllr Bagha substituted for Sharma – returning the favour as it was Bagha that stood to one side to allow Sharma to collect his £4,500 cheque earlier this month, see previous posting.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Wasting police time, wasting your money

Post author By Phil
Post date 22nd Apr 2008
2 Comments on Wasting police time, wasting your money

I picked up this report in the Guardian that policing the Chinese secret police torch event cost us £750,000 according to the Metropolitan Police Authority. Apparently the document rather undermines the Mayor’s claim not to have known in advance that China’s secret police goons would be muscling their way through our streets two weeks back.

According to the MPA briefing paper the Chinese goons had been part of a legal agreement between the Greater London Authority, ie the organisation that the Mayor is responsible for, and the Beijing organising committee of the Olympic games, drawn up last year. According to Brian Paddick the report made it clear Livingstone had known about the guards before the event.

This gives a lie to the Mayor’s statement that:

We did not organise that. We did not know beforehand these thugs were from the security services. Had I known so, we would have said no.

To his credit the Mayor usually has a firm grip on the detail. How did this detail escape him?

Mmm. The truth and the Mayor. How far apart?

Ealing and Northfield

Ealing works

Sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend – I have been busy with the election.

I spent an hour before lunch today leafleting Murray Road. I chatted to a chap at the east end of Murray Road who wanted to write to council leader Jason Stacey to tell him how much he appreciated how the council had been able to get things done on his street. He liked our recycling initiatives and pointed to a new street tree outside his house. I talked to three or four residents on my way. My line was: “If you are happy with Jason Stacey’s Ealing, you’ll be happy with Boris Johnson’s London”.

As I finished off there was a street cleaner energetically using a narrow brush to sweep between parked cars. Just as I got to Junction Road one of the Safer Neighbourhood team went by on his bike. It’s all simple stuff but its what people want. Ealing works.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Getting my retaliation in first

Post author By Phil
Post date 18th Apr 2008
1 Comment on Getting my retaliation in first

Forgive me for being a bit smug but I managed to pre-empt Mayor Livingstone’s competence offensive in a small way yesterday.

The Guardian’s Comment is free published this piece from me last night which demolishes three of the Mayor’s claimed achievements, namely Crossrail, the Congestion Charge and increased police numbers. Today the Mayor did a comment piece in the Guardian claiming a competence he simply cannot sustain and got the aptly named Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, to underline his point, reported in the Evening Standard here.

Apparently Balls said:

But I can tell you we never came across a tougher negotiator at the Treasury than Ken Livingstone. In my seven or eight years at the Treasury, particularly on the Tube, we knew Ken was the person who was going to fight his corner hardest.

In my Comment is free piece I said:

The mayor keeps trying to make out he is the only person who can safely deliver Crossrail because it is such a risky project. Who made it risky? Who negotiated it? Livingstone. He was so desperate to get control of it, he wrote a blank cheque with Londoners’ money. He managed, he says, to limit our liability with the Olympic project, but there is no such limit of liability with Crossrail. Don’t forget the context – London remits £17.8 billion net to the Exchequer every year and we only get £5bn back over 10 years for Crossrail. We have to provide the other £11bn of the total £16bn and if it all goes wrong, we have to make up the difference.

It sounds like Balls got the upper hand over Livingstone in his last job if you ask me.

Ealing and Northfield Policing

Ealing police now have their own website

Post author By Phil
Post date 18th Apr 2008
No Comments on Ealing police now have their own website

This graphic gives you a feel for what the Ealing police’s new website looks like. As well as obvious stuff like contact info there are some useful links to photos of stolen property and photofits. If they can make this timely and if people look at it now and then it might help fight crime in Ealing. We’ll see.

It’s nice to see what our borough commander Sultan Taylor (no relation) looks like but why do commanders, mayors, commissioners, chief execs and the such like always think that we want their mugs to be the most prominent features of websites, annual reports, etc? Let’s have a nice picture of Ealing up double quick.

In his March column (sharpen up CS Taylor April is more than half gone) CS Taylor says:

We have now entered the final month of the current performance year and I am delighted to state that we are on course to achieve significant reductions in most crime categories by the end of the financial year. We have achieved a reduction of over 3000 reported crimes this year alone, meaning there are over 3000 less victims of crime in Ealing.

This sounds good but that is 3000 less REPORTED victims. As we found last week in Northfield there were seven cars broken into on Northcroft Road last weekend but only three were reported by Tuesday. Apparently these seven were part of a spate of 20 related car crimes that night.