Category: Mayor Johnson

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Unusually for me I went into town today and was not greatly inconvenienced by the Tube strike unless you count having to spend £27 on cabs to get me from Paddington to Westminster and back. Today’s headline in the Standard is “Defiant commuters beat the Tube strike to get to work”. I saw lots of people walking and cycling in largely good humour.

In a comment piece Simon Jenkins rails against “dinosaur” Bob Crow. I think he draws the wrong conclusions by suggesting that Crossrail should be cancelled and funds directed at existing services. Jenkins is mixing up capital and revenue.

The real problem with the Tube is that fares are extremely high yet Tube costs are so out of control that the Treasury has to inject almost £600 million a year of subsidy into it. You can run six Ealing hospitals for that kind of money. Bob Crow is mad if he thinks that the rest of the country is going to bear giving Londoners 56p every time they get on a Tube. Tube costs have got to be bought down and Crow’s overpaid members are a large part of the problem. See five year’s worth of revenue and expenditure figures below (taken from TfL website here).

The Mayor was slightly on the back foot yesterday at Mayor’s question time in the face of a question from LibDem AM Dee Doocey regarding senior Metropolitan Police officers’ chauffer driven cars. Follow this link and move the clock to 37:00. Doocey put a figure of £2 million on the total cost and the Evening Standard reported yesterday that this spending involved some 41 officer entitled to cars.

Doocey rightly pointed out that the Mayor had himself recommended to David Cameron that he reduce the number of ministerial and other government cars, see previous posting here.

It does I have to say seem pretty bizarre that the Mayor and his predecessor can do without a car but 41 policemen can’t. Boris indicated that “I can’t snap my finger and make these cars disappear in one fell swoop”. No doubt the Mayor will get rid of these cars during the course of this term. After that any contractual hold outs will need to be names and shamed.

The Government Car Service’s cars cost nearer to £100,000 each so I suspect that Doocey’s number is an underestimate.

In Boris Johnson’s speech today the announcement of the second successive year of freezing of the GLA precept was almost a throw away line.

With even deepest red Labour boroughs proposing to finally rein in their increases (some years too late) I guess this is not huge news.

The reason that there are only 8 Labour councils left in London out of 32 is because they have been so slow to learn that they are simply unaffordable. Hopefully there will be even fewer next May.

Boris’ announcement is yet another step in the right direction from Conservative London government though. Well done.

Some Yanks that is. Not my Wife!

Today the Evening Standard carries a story that an environmental advocacy group called ClientEarth has challenged the Mayor in respect of his attempts to remove the Western Extension of the London Congestion Charge. You can see their letter here.

Anyone with a memory will know that our previous mayor pushed the Western Extension through in a thoroughly anti-democratic way in the face of a very negative consultation, see here. ClientEarth on the other hand is essentially an American lawyer called James Thornton with no memory, certainly with no sense of irony. I guess he wasn’t in London when Ken Livingstone was railroading the Western Extension through.

ClientEarth is funded by a couple of American silver spoon chomping, trust funders called Winsome and Michael McIntosh. You can read about the exploits of them and the rest of their extended trust fund family at their hilarious family foundation website:

The Hartford Family Foundation is dedicated to preserving the memory of the late George Huntington Hartford, and the company he founded in 1859, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

Any objective analysis of the Western Extension will show that it is exceedingly marginal (and not even necessarily positive) from an environmental point of view. To have American lawyers and trust fund drones trying to overturn the expressed will of Londoners stinks to high heaven I have to say.

The London Mayor made the following pledge in his published transport manifesto on which he was elected:

I will do what Ken Livingstone did not, and listen to Londoners on the Western extension. The Western extension was introduced despite the overwhelming opposition of local residents and I think that was wrong. I will consult the residents in the zone and on the border on whether we should keep the Western extension, and whatever the result I will abide by it.

I don’t think these people are challenging the Mayor’s consultation which showed that 69% of people were in favour of ending the Western Extension, see here.

It does seem to be anti-democratic to be trying to get the Mayor on a technicality. Maybe their time would be better spent challenging the previous mayor’s consultations? Of course ClientEarth don’t publish financial information or records of meeting. They are an unaccountable bunch of busybodies who should be sent packing by the Mayor.

When the revolting RMT union last had a long strike in September 2007 I pointed out that all those hours of extended journeys was the equivalent amount of wasted life as would occur if Bob Crowe went outside with a machine gun and shot down 60 people. You may think that this is a bit strong but most of us think that an extra hour in the car, waiting at a bus stop, dodging in and out of traffic on a bike is a waste of life compared to say hanging out in the park with the baby, taking a long bath, having a pint with a mate – I could go on.

I have pulled out five year’s worth of figures from TfL’s annual reports, see below (click to enlarge):

Today the Mayor and the Prime Minister went to Canary Wharf to anoint Crossrail. People still doubt that this project will be completed. They are wrong.

Crossrail is one of the most defendable pieces of public spending there is. It is pure capital spending that will result in a super-productive asset that will help drive the economy of our most productive region.

Today’s BBC story muttered:

There have been concerns that the Conservatives could abandon the project because of the economic conditions should the party win the next general election.

This is pure mischief making. This line echoes stories in the Standard here for instance. Ditto.

Although the Conservatives will challenge the way businesses are taxed to fund Crossrail and I would expect them to revisit all of its estimates a number of times I confidently predict that they will not cancel this programme.

No doubt Gordon Brown, who cares for his party way more than he cares of the country, will try to spin a line that Crossrail is at risk if the Conservatives replace him next May. It is just another Brown dividing line – and another Brownie.