Category: Mayor Johnson

Today the Mayor announced that the silly Venezuelan deal put together by his predecessor will not be renewed and that the half price concession for those on income support will be curtailed six months after that, see press release here.

Last September I reported that the ad bill for this ludicrous scheme would be £975K, see here.

The lefty bloggers are all over it and as usual they don’t get the difference between promises and PR and actual delivery. Tory Troll says:

Around a quarter of a million Londoners on low-incomes were expected to benefit from the cheap oil in return for technical advice and assistance given to Venezuela.

The trouble with all of this is that this deal was never going to help 250,000. Transport for London’s original business case assumed that only 160,000 would take up the offer. In his quotes today the ex-Mayor used the number 80,000 and the BBC used the number 56,000 elsewhere. Now you might say that those 56,000 will lose out. But notice that they will start to lose out by the end of the current tax year about the time that Mayor Boris is going to announce his precept for next year. I suspect he will be able to tell them that they will be enjoying a much lower precept than they would have done under the previous mayor.

If the Mayor focuses on streamling the GLA bodies and doing less better those 56,000 and all other Londoners will be better off under Johnson than they were under Livingstone.

Labour blogger Dave Hill is working himself up into a righteous frenzy over Mayor Johnson’s latest appointment. He has posted no fewer than six times this afternoon on the appointment.

Who cares what Ken Livingstone thinks about it?

More worryingly Labour group leader Len Duvall is talking about legal action. He says:

The chair of the London Assembly is already considering taking legal counsel as to the propriety of Mr Parker’s appointment and it is rumoured that a number of other people were approached for this position before him but turned it down.

Notably it won’t be the Labour group hiring the legal counsel. They want to use public money to make a party political point so it will be the Assembly chairman, Jennette Arnold, doing the dirty work.

Labour will find out tonight in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election what the country thinks about them. Taking the newly elected Conservative Mayor to law at public expense over someone who is offering to work unpaid will not endear London Labour to Londoners. Duvall should think again.

London has been in the Sunday papers over the weekend. There are three stories which all touch on policing/public safety in some way.

The Sunday Times has been reporting that Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has been told that he will not have his contract renewed. Apparently he is not only out of favour with the new mayor but also with the Labour government.

Blair’s contract runs out in January 2010. This is a problem as we will most likely still have a Labour government and a Labour Home Secretary by then. This means that we will have a another Labour placeman as commissioner for five years after Labour inevitably leave power in May 2010. Hopefully Blair will use his last two years to focus on driving out knife crime and other violent crime.

The Mail on Sunday has an interesting piece on how the new Mayor is going to cut out City Hall junkets in favour of public safety spending. No doubt it presages some initiatives to be announced next week.

Finally, there is a piece from Boris in the News of the World which is part of their “Save our streets” campaign:

I was as sickened and horrified as everyone else in Britain by the murder of altar boy Jimmy Mizen at a baker’s shop in London last weekend. It was a tragic reminder—as if we needed one—of the problems we face throughout Britain today. Last year in London alone 27 teenagers were murdered.

Continue reading “London in the Sunday papers”

The Mayor has been quick to follow up on one of his election promises to make life easier for Black Cab drivers by removing the half-yearly inspection which only came in October last year.

I anticipate more Black Cab friendly measures from this Mayor as long as he keeps on cycling in to work. It is simple self-preservation. The Sunday Mirror pictures not only showed him breaking the rules but also chatting to two cab drivers. God help him if he crosses the cabbies they will knock him into the gutter double quick. It is not as if he is not easy to spot on his bike.

Seriously though all good red-tape slashing stuff.

A week since the election and Boris is still going strong with more frantic new broom type sweeping from the new mayor. Today we hear he is sending in the heavies to both the GLA and the LDA to find out where our money is going.

It is striking how he is using the expertise of the Tory borough leaders. He has hired two from Westminster and Bexley and now two more are lending a hand from Hammersmith & Fulham and Wandsworth.

Stephen Greenhalgh, leader of Hammersmith & Fulham is famous for cutting their council tax by 3% two years running since his gung ho young group were elected in May 2006. Edward Lister has 15 years experience as leader of Wandsworth grinding out efficiencies. The A Team are on the job.

The Evening Standard is also reporting that the Chief Executive of the LDA, Manny Lewis, has been given six months pay to go quietly. He will be replaced by Westminster council chief executive Peter Rogers. I suspect we will be seeing a lot more bang for the LDA buck very shortly.

The Mayor today outlined his plans to outlaw alcohol on public transport in London – everything except the trains.

This is great news. My elderly neighbour called it “wonderful”. Some people have criticised it on libertarian grounds, for instance Guido Fawkes, and predictably Bob Crowe of RMT thinks it is all too hard.

People forget that London Underground banned smoking on the Tube about 20 years before the smoking ban and it was entirely uncontroversial. When I first came to work in London in 1984 I remember the cigarette butts lying in rows in the grooves of the wooden floors of tube trains. First they banned smoking on the trains and then after the Kings Cross fire disaster in all LU premises.

The smoking ban itself passed hardly the slightest incident of disobedience last year. By the end of June public transport will be dry and everyone will have forgotten there was ever a time when you would drink on public transport.

Ray Lewis supported Boris at both his initial policing launch and at his last push event.

Good to see the Mayor hitting the ground running.

Lewis’ CV is pretty inspirational and he is a very engaging speaker. He says:

We see no shortage of young black males in the courtrooms, so my vision is to seek to prepare as many as possible for the boardrooms.

Good start.

I have been looking back at some of the figures for the last three mayoral elections. The numbers are quite staggering and belie the headline news that Boris beat Livingstone by some 6% of the vote as predicted by YouGov.

At a time when the popularity of the Labour government is at a 40-year low Livingstone managed to increase the number of people that voted for him with a first preference by 30%. This is an awesome achievement. The Tories need to note carefully how he achieved this in the face of not only a poor national Labour performance but also with a decimated grass roots organisation. I will come back to this as it illustrates how easily our democracy can be stolen by a politician who is ruthless enough.

Boris’ achievement is far bigger and makes me wonder if Norris couldn’t have pulled something slightly less spectacular off four years ago. Boris increased the Tory vote by a whopping 92%. More people voted for Boris in 2008 then voted for Norris in 2000 and 2004 added together.