Author: Phil

The Mayor was on the Today programme this morning defending himself from reasonably robust questioning by James Naughtie. Click here to hear it. The Mayor pretty much said that he was justified in spending public money to discredit Trevor Phillips and that it was OK for his staff in politically restricted posts to campaign for him in their own time. As for the LDA scandal, well, shit happens seems to be the line.

The Mayor’s interview was preceded by a hard-hitting investigative piece by Angus Stickler and an interview with Labour MP Kate Hoey, click here.

The Harry’s Place blog also covers the Today piece here.

For some time certain people have been suggesting that the Evening Standard was a lone voice in raising these issues and was therefore irrelevant. The BBC coverage today pretty much picks up all the Standard’s points so I think we can say they are pretty mainstream – it is just a shame that it has taken the BBC six weeks to get on the case, story written up here. In reality the BBC has picked it up sporadically but today is the first concerted effort on this set of stories.

Yesterday BBC London News was all over the Emodi/Jasper/Walters thing also, video here.

Martin Bright on his New Statesman blog is still going at Ken following up his Dispatches show in Monday, see here.

According to the Standard the Mayor reckons he is having a hard week. No sympathy here mate.

In August of last year, shortly after TfL published its annual report, I had a look at TfL’s finances and ConservativeHome were kind enough to publish the results here.

At the time I really could not understand the numbers for the Docklands Light Railway so I did not talk about them. I pointed out that TfL loses 30p every time someone takes a bus and loses 55p every time someone takes a Tube. It now appears that the equivalent number for DLR is £1.28. Aaaagh! Click on the table below to enlarge it.

The picture is similar to the rest of TfL. Although fares have increased rapidly costs have increased even faster ensuring that ever greater amounts of subsidy are required. There are almost 2 billion bus journeys a year in London and a billion Tube journeys so the DLR is relatively small beer weighing in at 60 million journeys. Luckily it is not much bigger as they made a loss of £78.5 million.

As I pointed out in August the buses are losing £617 million a year and the Tube £553 million. What is true of all three modes of transport is that their costs are too high and the Mayor does not collect fares from all of the passengers. Note that the Mayor only has to collect £2.15 per journey to make the thing break even. Even better he might bear down harder on costs and make the thing affordable whilst still covering its costs.

You might ask why am I bringing this up now. Well, I first wrote to the Mayor on 2nd August to get these figures and it has taken the best part of six months to get a proper response. It took almost 3 weeks for the Mayor’s office to forward my letter to TfL. It took almost 2 months to get a rubbish response out of TfL and over 3 months to get a decent response today. The Mayor is also chairman of TfL so it is not as if he is not the right person to write to. I can only assume that he is being difficult.

Whilst I enjoyed this evening’s Dispatches programme and its dissection of the Mayor’s time in office you can see why it was relatively short on numbers – the Mayor goes to some lengths to conceal them.

If you want to read TfL’s original document click here.

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!