The Guardian’s Comment is free people have kindly published this piece from me tonight. Essentially I point out that it is all very well the Mayor claiming to be competent but three of his biggest “achievements” do rather undermine that claim.
Author: Phil
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Soylent Green?
Today Ealing Council issued a press release talking about its excellent food recycling scheme. I am very happy to acknowledge that we inherited this scheme from the previous administration and have been enthusiastically moving it forward. The Council has been collecting residents’ food leftovers in green food caddies since 2006. In 2007 it began a six-month trial in partnership with waste management company Cawleys and BIOGEN. Cawleys handle the bulk collection of Ealing’s waste and deliver it to BIOGEN’s Bedfordshire based anaerobic digestion plant.
Seeing this and having Charlton Heston’s recent sad death in mind I was immediately reminded of his excellent sci-fi movie Soylent Green. The plot involved a future dystopia with food scarcity and a corporation manufacturing a food which turned out to be made of euthanased bodies. Maybe one day I will have to wangle a trip to the BIOGEN plant to check where our food goes.
The good news is that the usual post mortem movie season will allow us to see Soylent Green again sooner rather than later.
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Tessa Jowell’s voodoo economics
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.
Yesterday the BBC picked up on the Hanwell lamppost saga also seen at Ealing Times here. This is a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
All the street lights in Ealing are due to be replaced with modern lighting over a five year cycle under a PFI deal signed by the previous, Labour, administration. There was little consultation on the original deal, any consultation being limited to conservation panels in conservation areas. In order to save money a small number of modern “heritage style” columns were procured under the PFI for conservation areas.
Bizarrely one of the places these new heritage columns went in was the post war Cuckoo Estate, a conservation area but one where Victorian style lighting was no use to anyone.
As the PFI got rolled out the new Tory administration was made aware by various residents/campaign groups that the loss of heritage street lighting was of concern to residents, notably the SEAL campaign. Council leader, Jason Stacey, has put a deal of effort into meeting residents and taking their concerns on board, see report of meeting with SEAL last year. As a part of the budgeting process the council have made funds available (£456,000) to save as many of the original columns as are salvageable. The concept we came up with was to concentrate these in a heritage area adjacent to Ealing’s central parks and Pitzhanger Manor. This would have the benefit of saving the lights and enhancing the council’s investment in Pitzhanger Manor.
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Want to vote? Get your skates on
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?
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Good reception at Northfield Tube
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.
The BBC published this story today about how Transport for London commissioned Kings College London to do some research into the the Mayor’s Emissions Related Congestion Charging, which intuitively is a mad scheme, and they found out that … it is a mad scheme. Apparently it will increase CO2 emissions.
This whole policy has been a farce from the start.
The consultation cost £1.4 million – mainly the cost of the ads to make the Mayor look green.
The consultation elicited 4,831 responses and cost £1.4 million. That is £290 per response. Good value for money or just another £1 million towards the Mayor’s £100 million self-promotion budget?
The consultation report was suppressed for three months because it came up with the wrong answer. 60% of respondents thought the higher charge would not work.
Click on the image above to see last night’s debate if you have half an hour to spare.
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Competence
The Mayor pretty much used his whole election broadcast tonight to try to make one point – “I am competent, Boris isn’t”. Interestingly he didn’t really point to some of his so-called achievements such as the Congestion Charge. Aside from Crossrail he wasted no time talking about transport (Tubes, buses, DLR, roads, etc), even though this is the biggest part of his direct responsibilities and is an area where he has totally lost control in spite of being the chairman. Apart from the line “more police on the street” the Mayor’s second priority was ignored too. No mention of the 11 kids killed on London’s streets so far this year.
From what I have seen of the TV coverage the Olympic Torch Relay was a total farce with the Olympic torch surrounded at all times by a team of around ten Chinese goons, who were in turn surrounded by a close team of ten or so Met officers in yellow, surrounded again by twenty or thirty Territorial Support Group heavies in their jumpsuits and big boots. Very butch. Not very harmonious.
The whole thing has been utterly odious from the specially chartered jet (how does that fit into the Mayor’s green posturing?) to the sight of Chinese goons on London’s streets and the pathetic turnout at the finale. Just about every frame of TV coverage had a Tibetan flag in it so that at least bought some colour and passion to the whole thing but perhaps not in a way the Chinese authorities would have wanted.
The whole event had the Mayor’s dabs on it. At the start the Mayor’s deputy, Nicky Gavron, handed the torch to Steve Redgrave at Wembley. At the end the London Fire Brigade’s fireboat ‘Fire Dart’ transported Ellen MacArthur, lone yachtswoman, from Canary Wharf to the Dome. You can read more here about it. Lucky it wasn’t needed for any of the actual firefighting for which it was bought by London precept payers. Oh, and don’t forget the £1 million overtime bill for the 2,000 coppers who might have been more gainfully occupied patting down a few knife carrying youths.
It was totally apt that Gavron was involved because her favourite anecdote is that her mother danced for Hitler at the 1936 Olympics who coincidentally is the person who invented the whole Olympic torch ceremony to promote the Nazi regime.
So her mother danced for Hitler and she danced for Hu Jintao. Hu may not be quite another Hitler but Gavron had a choice, unlike her mother.
Phil Taylor 