Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

It comes to something when even Labour politicians start to point out to the London Mayor that spending large amounts of cash and putting out press releases is not the same as achievement.

The Mayor is getting hot under the collar with Labour Assembly Member John Biggs today because he has pointed out that whilst the Mayor is spending £34.4 million on helping schools to produce somewhat bureaucratic school travel plans his claim that this is being translated into an actual reduction in people using their cars to transport their kids to school is pretty tenuous. See the original report from the London Assembly’s Transport Committee here and BBC coverage here. Interestingly the left-biased BBC cannot bear to include the cost of this scheme in its piece, in spite of the number being highlighted by the Assembly, in case that it inadvertently alerts any citizens to the vast quantities of cash being spent so inefficiently.

All this targetry is pretty dumb. The Government said lets make sure all schools have a plan by 2010. The Mayor, Mr Green football fan, trumped them by suggesting that London should achieve this by 2009. No-one really knows though if all this “planning” will really change anything though. Certainly they are not bothering to measure the output in a systematic way.

The Mayor is going on about Freedom Passes again, see today’s press release, where he is misquoting me for at least the third time now. Guess I will have to get used to it.

The Mayor uses the Freedom Pass issue to pose as the voters friend whilst holding the boroughs to ransom to pay for it all. The notes in his own press release make it all quite clear:

Under the existing ‘reserve scheme’, if the London boroughs have not reached agreement with Transport for London by 31 December before the next financial year then the statutory reserve scheme comes into effect at a cost determined by Transport for London, effectively ensuring that the concession cannot be watered down or under-funded.

Or to put it another way: effectively ensuring that TfL can charge what it likes for the scheme and the boroughs just have to pay up.

TfL can hold the boroughs to ransom and yet it can:

• allow bus costs to rise 8.2% in one year
• waste £78 million on advertising
• spend £22K on two job ads in the Economist
• employ a staggering 821 people who earn more than £50K of whom 76 people earn over £100K
• waste £27K on sponsoring an event and then pull out because of a personal argument between the Mayor and Trevor Phillips

So when the boroughs say abolish the reserve scheme they don’t mean take away Freedom Passes. They mean allow us to negotiate Freedom Passes with the overblown and wasteful TfL as equal negotiating partners without the Mayor holding a gun to our head. The boroughs have real responsibilities for the old and disabled. The Mayor is a poseur.

Back in February I noticed that Livingstone not only flew to Miami in his one man crusade to save the planet from climate change but also that his NFL game in October will encourage 10,000 Americans to fly the Atlantic to see their own game played in London (see previous posting).

I really quite like Americans, heck I even married one, but I don’t really see the point of ferrying a foreign game plus its spectators to London.

10,000 seemed bad enough but this number seems to have jumped to 15,000 now.

Labour assembly member, Murad Qureshi, is in the habit of asking planted questions of the Mayor when Livingstone wants to brag about something or other. In the last round of questions he came up with this easy ball for the Mayor:

Murad Qureshi: What benefits will hosting the NFL in October bring to London?

Ken Livingstone: The economic benefit to London of the visitor spend for the NFL game this October, negotiations for which started with my visit of October 2005 to New York, is estimated at £20 million. An estimated 15,000 American fans are expected to travel to watch the NFL Game in London and spend leisure time here at the same time. The viewing audience will also be swelled by British & European NFL fans travelling from other parts of the UK and Europe and staying in the city, bringing further economic benefit throughout the capital.

All of a sudden it is 15,000 transatlantic flights rather than the 10,000 described in the Mayor’s original press release. I can’t quite work out how this fits in with his London Climate Change Action Plan. The Action Plan suggests that the Mayor and GLA bodies:

lead by example ensuring that all agencies under Mayoral control avoid flights wherever possible and offset their emissions when air travel is the only option.

Unless you are coming to London for a football game. Doh! It seems where the Mayor’s new greenery clashes with his old GLC habits of funding bread and circuses the later will win out.

The Evening Standard carried a headline yesterday of “Mayor in £12 million space mission” along with the obligatory picture of an Ariane launcher blasting off. I couldn’t understand why the London Development Agency thought it was appropriate to commit to a £12 million punt on a new generation of geostationary comms/global positioning satellites. Apparently two other DTI-funded regional development agencies, South Eastern and East of England, are also putting up £12 million each. I went off to all three website this afternoon to get some explanation of what they were doing – none.

Between the three of them these unaccountable quangos spent almost £800 million last year. They get most of this in grants from the DTI. Apparently this scheme is a bid being made by Inmarsat, which is essentially a commercial telecomms operator based in the UK, to the European Space Agency. To qualify you need £34 million of state funding. The DTI itself turned down Inmarsat but the development agencies think they should be playing in this space in place of our government. Sounds like choosing winners to me which is not the place of regional bureaucrats.

The FT has more detail but I have not been able to find out what the programme is called and what it hopes to achieve. Any insight anyone?

The Radio 4 Today programme this morning had Max Hastings and the London Mayor’s Director of Equalities and Policing, Lee Jasper, “debating” the notion of apologising for slavery this morning. Jasper was arguing for an institutional apology for slavery and Max Hastings was not. Hastings said:

Ken Livingstone and the Mayor of London’s office are playing their usual political games. Political flatulence at the council taxpayers’ expense.

Quite so. Jasper’s salary was £117,882 last year.

The British state does not need to apologise for inventing the institutions that destroyed slavery, the British Parliament and the British Navy. Doh!

Yesterday the Green Party announced that its candidate for London Mayor would be the Sian Berry and today the Mayor is on his green megaphone.

Before yesterday Berry toiled under the bizarre moniker Principal Female Speaker for the Green Party.

Apparently Berry is also fourth on their PR list to be an Assembly Member which I guess is her back up plan in the likely event that she gets ignored in the Mayoral race.

Oxford educated Berry managed to get 5.3% of the vote in the Hampstead and Highgate seat at the last general election in 2005. All very lovely. Less than two weeks ago the Mayor was giving the woman house room to write a foreword to his Climate Change Action Plan and now she will be trying to take his job. Glad she is not my friend.

Anyway, back to Livingstone. Although TfL’s own figures show that the Congestion Charge has not made any money the City Hall lie machine can still come out with such gems as:

Revenue from the scheme will go into improving transport infrastructure for buses, trains, cycling and walking all of which are low carbon emission forms of transport.

There has been precious little revenue to-date and there is little prospect of any significant revenues in the future. See how the finances work here – the Mayor has collected £927 million so far and made a net surplus of only £25 million.

The Mayor’s press people seem to be a little slow on the draw. Yesterday in a press release he was complaining about an article by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard on Monday. Gilligan was in turn complaining that the Mayor was exaggerating somewhat about the benefit to young people of his freebie bus passes. The Mayor says they are worth £350 and Gilligan says £280. Anyway the Mayor laboriously explained that there is no such thing as a young person’s concessionary annual travel pass at £280 so Gilligan is the one who is wrong. The Mayor then says that most young people used to buy weekly bus passes which would be £7 each at today’s rates. He manages to multiply the weekly rate by 50 to get to the £350 benefit he is quoting.

There are two problems with this. First is that the school year typically comprises 190 days or 38 weeks. If you think in terms of the young persons’ concession being made available to get kids to school then the concession is worth £266 which is even less than Gilligan’s figure.

It gets worse though because for young people not in education the actual weekly fare is £6 not £7. So 38 weeks at £6 is £228.

The bottom line is that the Mayor couldn’t brag what a boon to people his concessions were if the fares weren’t so stupidly high in the first place. Doh! The Mayor can’t have it both ways.