Author: Phil

Today the Mayor has launched a new electioneering website and a set of online ads – which I saw first on Iain Dale’s blog. The artwork for the new site/ads owes much to the artwork for the Low Emission Zone ads that went with the £1.9 million LEZ consultation and another million or so of ads to announce the start of the scheme.

Here is the Mayor’s artwork:

Here is the LEZ artwork:

London’s taxpayers have spent £ millions building up this lovely Teletubbies green and blue branding and getting it established in people’s minds and the Mayor is simply stealing it for his campaign. This is passing off, plain and simple.

We shouldn’t be surprised as his race and police advisor, suspended but still paid from the public purse, is electioneering on the Mayor’s behalf in EMG’s Voice “newspaper” – see Evening Standard piece here.

These guys are just bandits.

After my story last week about how the Mayor had suppressed the emissions related congestion charging consultation report, see here, and the POLITICALBETTING.COM story about how TfL has leaned on Ipsos MORI not to publish the details of the polling done in the same exercise Andrew Gilligan reveals tonight that the Mayor has a some form in this area already.

It appears that he is a serial poll cheat.

This comes as no surprise to Ealing after the Tram consultation shenanigans.

This morning ConservativeHome took this piece from me on the Congestion Charge.

Read how the Mayor has taken £1.2 billion off Londoners in 5 years and, well, just spent it all on out of control set-up and running costs. All gone. Yep, all of it. None left, not a bean. When Peter Hendy and the Mayor say that it is contributing £120 million towards the buses or cycling or walking they are telling three fibs that add up to one big lie. The three fibs are:

1. they ignore capital costs
2. they ignore indirect costs (ie they assume the charge is run out of a garage)
3. they ignore the first year’s losses.

If these guys were businessmen they would have been sacked about four years ago on this performance.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the London Mayor’s congestion charging scheme.

Tomorrow I will be showing how the Mayor’s Congestion Charge has cost Londoners £1.2 billion in five years of operation whilst achieving nothing.

And if you thought any of the cash would be left over for good works …

It appears that not only was the suppressed consultation on emissions related congestion charging not what the Mayor wanted to hear but it also seems that the polling data he used in its place was dodgy too.

The POLITICALBETTING.COM blog ran this story yesterday about how the polling data published by the Mayor in December (see previous posting) is going to be reviewed by a body called the British Polling Council. Ipsos MORI have enough to be ashamed about given the way they wrote the management summary of the consultation, see previous posting.

On Tuesday the consultation results from November were published. Tory AM Angie Bray formally asked for these twice last year, in November and December, but she was stonewalled each time. The consultation showed that 60% of Londoners thought that the scheme would not work.

Ealing people will remember that the Mayor pulled the same stunt with the West London Tram. A very expensive consultation exercise came up with the wrong result so the Mayor spent even more cash on some market research that delivered the answer that the Mayor wanted to hear. Maybe there are some bodies buried there too?