Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Mayor’s £3 million a year not-so-freesheet, The Londoner, is far from being immune to popular culture, however right on the Mayor pretends to be. You have to go back to the August 2005 issue to find a “newsy” photo on the front page. That issue showed a policeman laying a floral tribute in the memory of those killed and injured in the 7/7 bombings.

In the 21 issues since then every issue has carried a front page celeb picture. We might have an argument about Nelson Mandela on the front page of the June 2007 edition. Clearly a world icon and superstar but with limited connections to contemporary London. Of these 21 issues there have been 11 men and 10 women on the front page. The men are a right old mixture including oldies such as Mandela, Sir Ian McKellan, Lionel Richie and Henry Winkler. Also on the list are noted ugly bugs Martin Freeman (the drippy one from The Office) and Gordon Ramsay.

You have to agree though that the ladies are all corkers. Note that 7/10 of the images are cropped to maximise the amount of flesh tone across the image. No sexism there then Mr Mayor. Still, it sells papers. Well, no, it doesn’t. If you are a London council tax payer you are required by the Mayor to contribute your hard earned cash – so enjoy the pics.

I saw the Mayor’s press release about his Venezuelan oil deal yesterday and my first reaction was to be just to be so depressed. It will be great for people on income support although if the level of income support is wrong I might suggest that that is an issue for central government to solve not London council tax payers. I might also suggest that benefit dependency will not be tackled by more concessions to those that choose to stay out of work because they could not match their income from benefits by doing actual work and getting paid like the rest of us.

Yesterday I showed pretty comprehensively that the existing reduction in bus fares in September was unaffordable whilst TfL’s costs were so out of control. Now the Mayor is giving away even more money. As ever the Mayor is being totally disingenuous about the costs and benefits involved here. By all means talk about the benefits but what is all of this going to cost?

The Evening Standard said yesterday:

The Mayor’s office today revealed that the oil deal was worth between £10-£12 million when measured by current oil prices and exchange rates.

The piece goes on to remind us that:

In return, a team of officials from the GLA will work in Venezuela advising on recycling, waste management, traffic and on reducing carbon emissions.

The cost of these services is unknown (see press release from the GLA Budget Committee). They are likely to be in the order of millions if you are thinking of paying for expensive GLA/TfL people to be in Venezuela and not doing their day jobs here. I can’t imagine that the Venezuelans will expect anything less than £10-12 millions worth otherwise they would be getting a very bad deal.

It is hard to believe that the oil deal will make ANY contribution whatsoever to this new fares concession. This will be paid for by higher fares for the rest of us than would otherwise be the case or reduced capital expenditure. There is no-one else to pay.

A previous press release from the Mayor back in February suggested that 250,000 would receive a benefit of £280 each. This is a claim that the Mayor did not repeat yesterday as last time around Damian Hockney from One London did the math and suggested that the scheme could cost up to £70 million (the math being multiply £280 by 250,000).

Although the Mayor did not repeat the statement that this concession would be worth £280 he does keep talking about 250,000 even though his own people are estimating that only 160,000 will apply. Apparently the Mayor’s office claim the cost will be £15 million due to lower take up than that implied by the 250,000 and the fact that some people will travel more as a result of the concession. So not only will you pay higher fares but the buses will be more crowded too!

You have to wonder if the Mayor isn’t feeling just a tiny bit defensive about all of this. He has got fully 20 of his little helpers (a mishmash of leftwing MPs, trade unionists and spokespeople of left-leaning advocacy groups) to back him up. I also note that so far there is not a big ad campaign running. Remember the totally gratuitous £793K spent on ads to give away 100,000 free Oyster cards. See previous posting. Only last week the Times was reporting that his old buddy Hugo Chavez was proposing that he be allowed to serve as president for life and get control of central bank assets. No wonder he is feeling the need to wrap the old security blanket around himself.

Just in case you had any scintilla of a notion that the Mayor’s £3 million a year not-so-freesheet, The Londoner, had any relationship whatsoever to news the Mayor will have completely destroyed that idea this month by ensuring that it has had the same headline for two months running.

I exaggerate maybe, not quite the same:

August: Bus fares to be cut by ten percent

September: Bus fares down by 10% from the end of September

One reason that TfL is in such a poor financial position is that it has to give the Mayor £1.5 million a year to pay for this rubbish.

After last month’s frankly untruthful statement that:

I am pleased that the strength of London’s economy, and efficiencies achieved by Transport for London, mean that fares can now be reduced with no cut in this investment programme or financial risk to the transport budget. This economic strength and operating efficiency creates benefits that should be returned to London.

this month the Mayor repeats the porky:

The reduction in fares has been made possible by London’s economic growth which has meant that fares income is more than expected.

Last month I published a letter from the Mayor himself that showed that this cut was unaffordable. Click to enlarge his letter below:

TfL’s own annual report and accounts underline the unaffordability of this move, see below (click to enlarge).

Today ConservativeHome has published some in-depth analysis from me on Transport for London and its finances. The highlights are:

• In five years Transport for London has consumed £12 billion in subsidy but £8 billion of this has been wasted supporting TfL’s bloated cost base.
• TfL has a structural deficit of £1.6 billion per annum which it can’t seem to solve in spite of ramping up fares.
• In three years highly paid managers have more than trebled at TfL from 450 in 2004 to 1,441 in 2007.
• TfL loses 30p every time someone takes a bus.
• TfL loses 55p every time someone takes a Tube.

Follow this link for the whole thing.

Today the Evening Standard covered the Mayor’s latest proxy attacks in a most naive way. Their “Deputy Political Editor” Paul Waugh wrote:

In a further blow to the Henley MP, the black newspaper New Nation today launched a fierce attack on his remarks about race and Africa.

Under the headline “Is This Man Fit to Run London?”, the paper said his selection would be an “insult” to ethnic minorities. It criticised a 2002 Spectator article in which he called for the return of colonial rule to Africa, joked about tribal leaders sporting “water melon smiles” and described black children as “piccaninnies”.

Fellow writer Rod Liddle also claimed that, while on a trip to Uganda, Mr Johnson used the word again in the company of Swedish Unicef workers.

Mr Johnson’s record on race issues was highlighted last week when Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen, said he was “not an appropriate person” to run London. Mr Johnson had lambasted the Lawrence Inquiry claiming it was a “witch-hunt” against the police.

A spokeswoman for Mr Johnson today said that he had been “inundated” with support from London’s ethnic minorities.

One ally added: “This is the lowest attack you can make on a Tory – just call them racist.”

I assume he is the deputy because he can’t spot that the New Nation piece is simply the latest in a string of proxy attacks by the London Mayor which all use the same quotes (see previous posting).

The reason that the New Nation is coming out for the Mayor is that they are bought and paid for, just like the other Livingstone proxies.

Follow this link to find out how when the Mayor spent £793K to give away 100,000 free Oyster cards he spent £77K with ineffective ethnic press (including New Nation) – a bung.

Follow this link to find out how in 2003 the GLA spent £261K on recruitment advertising. The bulk went to the Guardian and the rest to the “ethnic” press. No advertising in mainstream media outside the Guardian – corrupt in itself. The total ethnic press spend led to one appointment at a total cost of £79K. The Guardian ads led to 59 appointments at a cost of £182K. So ethnic press costs £79K per job. Guardian costs £3K per job.

The New Nation is part of Ethnic Media Group organisation which was given £38K but generated only 1 shortlisted candidate and no appointments.

Like I say the New Nation is bought and paid for.

Mayor’s Question Time and the answers it generates is a good source of information on the workings of the Mayor and his bodies.

In time for the last meeting on 18th July Tory AM Bob Neil asked this question:

Regarding the Mayor’s expenditure on upcoming conferences outlined in MA 3086, will the Mayor provide a breakdown of how much he has budgeted for each separate conference?

The Mayor’s answer is:

The budget for the exhibition stand and advertising at each conference breaks down as follows and reflects the different prices for exhibition sites and advertising space:

TUC 20,800
Lib Dem 25,000
Labour 30,200
Conservative 26,500

Income from TfL and the LDA for these activities is in total £65,000.

In addition, the budget for the Mayor’s reception at the TUC Conference is £12,000 and for the Mayor’s reception at the Labour Conference is £16,000.

The Mayor seems to be unembarassed by the total bill of £130,500 or the fact that he is spending three times as much on the Labour and TUC conferences as he is on either the Lib Dem or Tory conferences.

On the one hand we might be grateful that the Mayor has been able to offload half the bill on TfL and the LDA. On the other that means fares are higher or services are worse on TfL and there are less jobs being created by LDA. Even the Mayor hasn’t the brass neck to ask the Fire Brigade and Police to contribute. Or, more likely, he asked and they had the gumption to say bog off.

It is just over a year since the Mayor mooted the idea of charging the most polluting vehicles £25 to enter the Congestion Charging Zone.

Since then the idea has been refined to include the notion that such vehicles inside the zone should lose the residents’ concession.

One year on and the Mayor is talking about consultation. This is just another bout of electioneering from the Mayor. He thinks that the green shtick has resonance – he is right, even a pretty libertarian conservative like me thinks that 4WDs are anti-social.

Today he says he wants to consult. He doesn’t really. According to a poll conducted by IPSOS/MORI for the Mayor in July 2006, 64 per cent of Londoners think the most polluting cars should pay a higher congestion charge. So the Mayor knows this will be popular and he has already spent out on the poll. He doesn’t mind though spending another few hundred thousand of our cash to put a leaflet through our doors telling us how green he is. Whatever the result, which is bound to be positive, he will proceed as planned. There are few central London 4WD drivers, apparently only 8% of cars in the zone would be affected, so we are talking about a minority of a minority. This is a fairly safe piece of rich people bashing for the Mayor.

The Mayor’s use of tendentious language such as “gas guzzlers” and “Chelsea tractors” demonstrates, as ever, that he is not the sober public servant but a populist politician who happily spends our money spinning to stay in power.

I will find out how much he is spending. I will report back after the usual 20 days have elapsed.