Author: Phil

The London Mayor is now using the front page of the Londoner for the third time to highlight his bus fare cuts. As I have pointed out before, see previous posting, this cut cannot be justified by the Mayor in any rational business terms. It is an election bribe fair and square. He is not shy obviously to use his £3 million a year not-so-freesheet to make sure you know BUS FARES HAVE BEEN CUT BY 10%.

On the one hand I am shocked by the Mayor’s use of public funds to get himself re-elected. On the other hand it is so grotesque you have to wonder if it will not be counter-productive.

I had hoped that I might start back from my holidays with a more positive story but this story caught my eye in the Times yesterday.

A Labour councillor was yesterday found guilty of falsely accusing her political rival in an election campaign of being a paedophile and having sex with teenage boys.

Miranda Grell, 29, had been considered a rising star in Labour ranks and had been photographed with high-profile figures such as Cherie Blair, Jesse Jackson and John Reid. She beat her opponent Barry Smith to the previously safe Liberal Democrat seat in the 2006 local election. Mr Smith, 56, a prominent member of the council cabinet who has a long-term, 39-year-old Malaysian partner, lost his seat by 28 votes.

Ms Grell, a 29-year-old aide to the Deputy Mayor of London, was found guilty of two counts under the Representation of the Peoples Act 1983 of making false statements about another candidate to gain electoral advantage.

She was fined £500 for each offence and ordered to pay £3,000 towards the prosecution costs.

Ms Grell wept as the sentence was passed. The public gallery, packed with family and friends, gasped in shock.

Educated at Manchester Uni and the LSE the woman is bright one assumes. She works for the Mayor’s deputy Nicky Gavron and is on the Executive Committee of Compass, the hard left pressure group that has been at the centre of attempts to smear Boris Johnson. On her website there are numerous pictures of Grell with various Labour bigwigs including the Milliband brothers, Harriet Harperson, Caroline Flint, etc and stories of her attending Labour events.

No doubt lots of researchers and aides will have been trying to call Grell over the weekend to get their bosses’ pictures pulled from Grell’s look-at-me website.

I lambasted Grell earlier in the year when she appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme to speak for the notion of giving more cash to councillors, see previous posting. I was not impressed with her then and now I can only conclude that there is a hole where her moral compass should be. It seems she was bright and clever and thought that she could follow in the footsteps of her heroes, Labour MPs Dianne Abbot and Dawn Butler. All she had to do was get elected. In the process she did not mind throwing mud at the successful and hard working LibDem incumbent.

Yesterday the Mayor’s office furiously rebutted the Bow Group report that came out yesterday, see yesterday’s posting.

Please note that the Mayor is quite unconcerned about using public resources to rebut what it is essentially a political attack. I met the guys from Bow Group back in August and had a very nice lunch with them in a West End cafe – liver and bacon with veggies. We discussed their paper and my own work on TfL’s finances and the Charge.

I know the CC numbers and the Mayor’s people are spinning outrageously. There comes a point where you have to say they are just lying. They have been challenged to discuss the finances of the CC in the round and they keep ignoring the bits of the financial picture that undermine their case. They say:

Far from costing London £930m, the first full three years of operation in the central zone produced an income of £591.7 million with an operating cost of £288.6 million – giving a net operating income of £303.1 million.

The first number £930 million is not made up. It is simply the sum of all the income from the CC recorded in audited TfL accounts for the last 5 years. Londoners have paid TfL £930 million in charges and fines in this time. It is a matter of undisputable fact.

The Mayor’s figures are snatched out of the air, are not audited and are untrustworthy. The figures the Mayor is using ignore the capital costs of the scheme (£161.7 million to set up and £103 million to extend). Laughably they also exclude indirect overheads which the Audit Commission insists that TfL include in its accounts. The Mayor’s figures treat the Congestion Charge as if it was run out of a garage and not part of a grossly inefficient organisation with frightening overheads. To give a concrete example the £8.6 million the Mayor spent on advertising the Western Extension, more than even the Tories spent on all their 2005 general election campaign ads, is not included in what the Mayor calls operating costs. The Bow Group figures, as bad as they are do not include the cost associated with research into technical issues such as the comparison between tag and beacon and ANPR or the cost of consultation. As we saw this week consultation on the politically motivated re-branding of the CC is costing £1.137 million. More electioneering paid for by us.

Just so you know the two Bow Group guys are volunteers. The one figure the press release did not try to rebut was that there are 173 press officers working for the Mayor and his bodies. They can’t very well rebut this figure as it is based on published, though notably inaccessible sources – you can pull it together by following these links: Hamwee question 2471/2006 and TfL numbers. Note that LibDem AM Hamwee had to ask twice to get the full answer out of the Mayor.

I do wonder though if diligent volunteers like Christopher and Alastair working on behalf of the Tory leaning Bow Group will be enough to turnover the Mayor’s £100 million a year comms budget – more on this later.