Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Mayor’s press team were screaming today in response to another Evening frontpage and double page spread on Lee Jasper and dodgy LDA payments. See the Mayor’s press release here and here and the Evening Standard stories here and here.

Reading the e-mails reproduced on the Evening Standard website it seems very strange, maybe disquieting even, that LDA chief exec Manny Lewis devoted so much time, at such a detailed level, to a relatively small bit of spending. We are talking a few hundred thousand here. Manny Lewis is meant to be responsible for spending a total of £754 million this year.

Today the Mayor used Mayor’s Question Time to announce his proposed rise in the GLA precept. The Mayor has graciously decided to take his foot off our throats and announced that his levy on us will rise by only 2.4%. This is marvellous news but we all know that the only reason he is being so generous is that not only is there an election next year but also that he will have the fight of his life against Boris Johnson.

A quick review of my bills for the last ten years shows how fast the Mayor’s charge had risen in that time. Next year it will be 196% higher than it was the last year there were separate charges for the Police and Fire Brigade before the GLA came into being. In other words it has taken only 9 short years to triple the precept. Shame our incomes haven’t done the same. Who can forget that stand out year 2003 when the Mayor though that it was OK to raise the precept by a mighty 29%?

The figures in red in the table above are those for the year of a mayoral election. The 2000/1 figure was not the Mayor’s fault to be fair. This was proposed by civil servants. Clearly the Mayor was inspired by their boldness and managed to double the precept in four years in the early noughties. But in order to bolster his chances of being elected for a second time he proposed the lowest rise in five years in 2004/5. He even went a notch lower the next year to help protect London Labour MPs in the 2005 general election. But the next year the Mayor reverted to early noughties form and hit us with a 13.3% rise. Interestingly he was not so concerned with the fates of Labour councillors, many in Ealing, who were put to the sword after the Mayor’s excruciating 13.3% just before the 2006 London local elections.

When the Mayor announced his galloping 5.3% rise last year his entire press release failed to give the percentage rise. Instead he used the weasely construction “29p a week”.

This year the rise is so low he does not mind giving the actual figure up front. His comms people continue to demonstrate that they are some of the twistiest people in the business.

This morning the Mayor devoted the entire hour and a bit of his press conference to rebutting the Gilligan accusations in the Evening Standard. He was backed up by Herman Ouseley, Richard Taylor, father of Damilola Taylor and Rev Nims Obunge.

If you want to spend an hour of your life listening to the Mayor and his mates accusing the Standard and Andrew Gilligan of racism and the Mayor’s historical (mutual) antagonism with Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers then tune in here.

The Standard was at it again today for the fifth edition in a row. Their front page story was essentially that, in spite of everything that the Mayor and his mates say, the LDA is in fact looking at some of its grants. In his column Andrew Gilligan asserts that for all his bluster the Mayor has not moved an inch towards actually responding to questions raised by Gilligan.

The so-called press conference included questions from such august organs as the Morning Star and New Nation (both extensively funded by the Mayor) and two directors of the 1990 Trust (BLINK), one of the bodies cited by Gilligan, Karen Chouhan and Koku Adomdza. Not sure why they are at a “press conference”. Both of these characters serve with Lee Jasper on the Mayor’s London Equalities Commission where the disgraced, convicted and disqualified ex-Labour councillor Miranda Grell often represented her boss Nicky Gavron, the Mayor’s deputy. Eroll Walters from the not particularly representative Black Londoner’s Forum is another member of this body.

Postscript: Nick Cohen in the Standard on 12th pretty much shared my analysis, see here.

Tonight the Evening Standard is looking again at the 25 kids killed with knives and guns in London so far this year. Their average age is only sixteen and sixteen out of the 25 kids were black. For all their talk of improvements in policing in London the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner need to account for this terrible toll.

One of the issues that kept coming up when we visited Greenford High School in October was fear of crime and of knives in particular. Livingstone and Blair need to sort this out. Every young person in London needs to know that if they carry weapons they will get a serious jail sentence – then the rest of our youngsters can enjoy their lives free from fear as they should. I could stomach the Mayor spending £100 million a year on advertising if it was spent on this and backed up with police action and prosecutions.

Today the Sunday Times lays into the Congestion Charge with the headline “British cities shun London’s wasteful car tax”. It is good to see the mainstream media trying to give a balanced view on the charge although it is frustrating that the journalist, Steven Swinford, has got some of the numbers wrong and missed out others. It is doubly frustrating as he called me twice to get the inside story on the charge. Sometimes I wonder how journalists’ minds work. Why do they so often get stories wrong?

In his first paragraph he says:

IT WAS intended to get London moving, but after five years of Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge, and more than £800m of tolls and fines, traffic jams are almost as bad as they were to start off with.

The number is over a £1.1 billion. It was £930 million up to the end of March 2007, the annual run rate is about £250 million and we have got through 2/3rds of the year. Only £300 million wrong then. See table here made up from 5 years of TfL’s statement of accounts here.

In his second paragraph he says:

As a new cadre of charge bureaucrats prospers, overheads are now so high that they burn up the equivalent of almost £4 of a standard £8 charge. Money raised to improve public transport has been cut by 10% in the past year.

The Audit Commission says that the figure is more than £5 out of £8. You see the Mayor is a financial idiot or a porky pie teller – he does not recognise the concept of indirect costs. The Audit Commission insists that he does. Hence the Mayors kids us he makes a £122 million surplus (meaning £4.13 out of £8 is burnt on costs) when in fact the net surplus is £89.1 million (meaning that fully £5.18 out of £8 is burnt on costs). See the Audit Commission’s version of the numbers here.

Further on the article says:

By law all profits from the congestion charge have to be put into public transport projects. According to one set of TfL accounts, it reinvested just £280m since 2003.

This is the Mayor’s little fantasy. The article omits to mention the £265 million set up costs of the original scheme and the Western Extension. So that leaves a net benefit of about £15 million, which is pretty much the number I calculated in July, see previous posting.

That’s the Mayor done up like a kipper then. Shame Swinford couldn’t do the job properly.

Andrew Gilligan gave Lee Jasper, the Mayor’s £117K a year Police and Equalities advisor, both barrels again today in the Standard. After four pages on Wednesday and two pages yesterday another two pages are devoted today to Jasper.

I guess it isn’t illegal or even vaguely corrupt to draw a £117K salary from the state and only spend £90 per week to have the use of a £750K housing association home. It is immoral though. He has had a good salary from the GLA since 2000 and most Londoners would expect him to stand on his own feet and not look to housing assistance from the social housing sector.

If this photo from the Standard is indeed Japser’s home then he clearly hasn’t got enough taste to keep the satellite dish from the front of his gracious Victorian home.

Today the Standard is back on the Jasper story and so are the blogs in a big way.

Read the Standard here.

ConservativeHome here and here.

Ian Dale here.

I like to think I got this story first on 13th August. It was picked upon 16th August in the Standard’s Londoner’s diary and the egregious Eroll Walters at Black Londoner’s Forum used a press release to suggest that Black Londoners needed protecting from me. What a prat?

In tonight’s Evening Standard Andrew Gilligan has produced a four page feature on the web of black “voluntary” organisations linked to Lee Jasper that have pulled in a couple of million in funding from the Mayor and the London Development Agency. Remember the LDA is the body the Mayor which he uses as a piggy bank to fund his friends rather than to help promote economic development in London. Follow link here.

The Mayor and the bodies he is criticising have spluttered indignantly to life. Rather than addressing Gilligan’s specific concerns they are just spraying accusations of racism at him. He is clearly on the right track if, instead of rebutting his points one-by-one, they just try to vilify Gilligan himself.

Brixton Base says:

It would only appear that attacking organisations which represent and work with London’s black and minority ethnic communities are easy targets for Mr Gilligan’s race prejudice and biased, discriminatory reporting.

The 1990 Trust (BLINK) says:

Gilligan should be ashamed of this transparent use of the “race card” in the run up to the elections by questioning the role of the Lee Jasper, the Mayor’s top Black advisor.

Both the Brixton Base and The 1990 Trust (BLINK) have talked about taking legal advice, again a typical tactic of those trying to change the subject. Brixton Base come across as being incredibly pompous when they say: “Accordingly, the Board is in consultation with its solicitors”. I bet Gilligan and the Standard are cowering with that one.

The 1990 Trust piece is incredibly windy. It is talking rubbish when it says:

To set the record straight, a few of London’s Black organisations are funded by the GLA through a legitimate, open, budget process, fully transparent to the public.

That’s funny. When I asked the Mayor to tell me about the funding from GLA bodies to the 1990 Trust, Black Londoners Forum and Operation Black Vote, after they had taken part in a clearly political attack on Boris Johnson in the Guardian, it took over a month to get a reply. I wrote on 13th August and I got a reply on 18th September. The answer I got was partial one. I asked about funding from all GLA bodies. The answer related only to the GLA itself.

These funding streams are arbitrary and opaque. The impression given is that the Mayor and the LDA give out cash on a whim to people who are connected to the Mayor’s inner circle and that in return they do the Mayor’s bidding as evidenced by the Guardian letter.

The London Development Agency say:

We are the Mayor’s agency responsible for driving London’s sustainable economic growth. It’s our job to ensure that London remains a global success story.

It is hard to reconcile this mission with the Mayor’s press release today that says he is going to suck £20 million out of the LDA and redeploy it to top up the government’s youth offer.

I don’t know why this cash isn’t being spent on helping disadvantaged young people to work in the City.

According to the Mayor’s press release:

Young People from Bassline Circus performed for the Mayor at City Hall today. Baseline Circus is one of Sound Connections members who have been working on the Youth Music Mentors programme. This project allows young people to become ‘Peer Mentors’ and support other young people to use music to engage them in positive activities and develop new skills.

This all sounds very worthy but it does not sound like it is going to convert our limited economic development budget into bankable benefits for our young people. It does sound like more electioneering from the Mayor. Yet again the Mayor is plundering the LDA for his pet projects.

Tonight the Standard is reporting that the Mayor and TfL are plotting to increase Congestion Charge fines to £120 from £100. As we already know fines exceed the net profit this thing generates every year so the fines income is all that stands between Livingstone and abject failure.

Typically for a bunch of journalists, no science degrees between them I don’t suppose, they get the number all wrong. The editorial says:

Given that fines are a big part of the economics of congestion charging, accounting for nearly 45 per cent of the net annual profit from the scheme, there will be plenty of motorists who suspect thast the increase has more to do with raising revenue than with enforcement.

I think they get this number by dividing the wrong number for fines income last year (£55 million) by last year’s gross profit. Last year’s fines income was actually £95.0 million as winkled out by LibDem AM Hamwee, see previous posting. Last year’s net profit was actually £89.1 million as published in TfL’s statement of account and audited by the Audit Commission (figures here). Fines income therefore EXCEEDS net profit.

Journalists. Aaaaargh!