Yesterday at the Labour conference Gordon Brown kept a fixed grin as Mayor Livingstone grabbed Brown’s arm at the end of his speech and held it aloft, see BBC footage here. He pretty quickly pulled it back down again. Talk about cringe-making.
Boris Johnson used this phrase during his Mayoral bid launch at the start of September to describe the Mayor’s Venezuelan joint venture with the totalitarian Chavez regime. I wrote to the Mayor on 24th August to ask him a few questions about this as it clearly does not add up, see previous posting.
His response, sent by flunky Kevin Austin, says that TfL will get £15 million from the Venezuelans which will broadly cover the cost of the half price concession (if you accept TfL’s estimate that only 160,000 of the 250,000 entitled to the concession will take it up and that their additional travel will also partly offset the cost).
The Mayor’s office will only admit to direct costs of £16,000 associated with supplying services under this scheme – travel costs incurred by a TfL transport team in June. The Mayor wants us to believe that TfL has made no estimate for the cost of providing £15 million worth of services per annum. I asked for this and my request has been ignored.
The Mayor does admit to another million Pound ad budget of £975K for this deal. The Mayor tries to persuade us that this will be paid for by the Venezuelans but their money can only be spent once. It can’t ofset the cost of the concession AND pay for the ads. One or the other Mr Mayor.
This deal stinks. The oil money, which might better be spent on needy Venezuelans, will pay for the travel concession if you make some favourable assumptions maybe. It will not cover the £975K ad budget, other administration costs of the scheme, the cost of providing services to justify the Venezuelans £15 million spend or the original £100K set up costs. The real net cost of this deal to London is in the area of £5-10 million. Our lying Mayor will not admit this.
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.
I was struck reading the Gazette this week by the double page editorial on the Childcare Affordability Programme. This is a heavily advertised LDA programme to spend £33 million on providing help to people on low incomes with childcare. I will write to the LDA to find out what proportion of this cash is being spent on advertising. You can’t have failed to see their beige ad with photogenic family on a sofa. This ad has appeared 6 times in as many weeks in the Gazette.
In six weeks the Gazette has benefited from almost 10 whole pages of display advertising from the Mayor and his bodies (LDA, TfL, etc). It must have been hard for them to turn down LDA’s request for some editorial. Two whole pages is somewhat generous. By printing a 9 column inch letter from the Mayor on the subject of child poverty this week along with with 3 half page ads, two from TfL and one from LDA, the Gazette is starting to look like the Londoner.
The Mayor spends about £100 million a year on comms so perhaps it is not surprising that it is hard to distinguish the Gazette from the Londoner.
It is a shame that only 4% of the childcare places created by the LDA have come to West London, see question to Mayor.
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.
Today the Bow Group, a Tory think tank, publishes its report “London Under Livingstone, An evaluation of Labour’s Mayor”. It is an excellent analysis of the reality of living in Livingstone’s London. Although the Mayor’s £100 million a year hype machine might have persuaded you that Livingstone is on your side this paper systematically demolishes that idea. Please have a read. I will be looking at it in detail myself this weekend.
You might have seen this graphic on various posters around London recently and in full page ads in local papers. In early August the Mayor announced he was consulting on his variable CO2 based charging scheme for the Congestion Charge. This is of course an attempt by the Mayor to rebrand the failed Congestion Charge as a carbon tax and is effectively electioneering paid for by you and me.
As soon as I saw his announcement I thought “How much?”.
TfL provided the answer today, see their letter reproduced below (click to enlarge). To their credit TfL have managed to answer in slightly less than the 20 working days that the Mayor’s office treats as a minimum rather than a maximum. The consultation will cost £1.137 million. Most of the money is being spent on high profile billboards and newspaper ads whose real role is to present the Mayor as a green warrior rather than to find out what people really think.
In June 2006 a telephone poll costing £1,660 found that 64 per cent of Londoners think the most polluting cars should pay a higher congestion charge. The consultation asks only noddy questions. See full consultation questionnaire here. You might want to tell TfL what you think.
I have largely stopped writing letters to papers – I would much rather do a posting on my blog where I know I will get published!
Yesterday though I thought that the Telegraph had let Mayor Livingstone off lightly in its leader column on this week’s Tube strike, see here. They seemed content to blame RMT and maybe to a lesser extent Gordon Brown and his PPP.
They failed to nail Livingstone himself who has been chairman of the TfL board since its creation. Here is my letter:
Sir – You let London Mayor Ken Livingstone off the hook (leading article, September 5). London Underground has been subsumed within the Mayor’s Transport for London since July 2003.
Mr Livingstone has been chairman of the TfL board since its creation. He invited Bob Crow, the general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, to serve on the TfL board from June 1, 2002 to July 31, 2004.
As chairman of TfL, the Mayor has been responsible for its strategic direction and the setting of its priorities since its creation in 2000.
The public transport system we enjoy in London today is the Mayor’s creature. The Mayor has worked with RMT and the other unions to give Tube staff excellent, some would say cushy, terms and conditions, but still Mr Crow is prepared to humiliate the Mayor to prove his power.
Instead of just waving the white flag, a London Mayor needs to work to take the strike weapon out of public transport in London without making concessions that would make the majority of London workers look askance.
It is no good blaming Bob Crow and the Metronet collapse for this strike. It is the Mayor’s job to fix things. Fixing Mr Crow is a priority.
Cllr Phil Taylor, London Borough of Ealing, London W13
I have just got home after an afternoon/evening at work and checked on TfL’s Tube performance. Almost a day after the end of the strike and six out of 12 services are still affected by a so-called one-day stoppage. One line is totally out, two are severely compromised and three are merely delayed. Note the Waterloo & City line is not running at this time of night so they can have the benefit of the doubt there.
Is this any kind of way to run a public transport system? 2,300 workers led by a hard left idiot ruining 5 journeys for about 4 million commuters. That is about 20 million journeys. If each one caused an hour of wasted time that is the equivalent of 30 people living for 75 years – or the same waste of life as killing 60 randomly selected people.
Strikes on the Tube need to be outlawed soon and all the candidates for Mayor should be proposing this.
Phil Taylor 