Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

I initially wrote off the Mayor’s press release yesterday as yet another attempt to convince people that Waste for London would be a good wheeze. Another press release from Hammersmith & Fulham sent to me this afternoon, which essentially argues for the Belvedere incinerator in particular, made me re-read what the Mayor’s office is saying and it looks to me like he is coming round to a view that incineration may well have a place. Or maybe he is so desperate to hold onto his WfL dream that he doesn’t mind if he flip-flops on Belvedere in the process.

He says in paragraph 3:

The Mayor believes that London’s rubbish should be recycled and that new technologies, which can extract both heat and energy from waste should be used for the rubbish that cannot be recycled. The days of landfill are over and the Mayor does not support mass burn incineration. However even with the old technologies and incinerators that London currently has, London is missing a real opportunity to cut emissions by not extracting heat from waste. If this process was used in the four incinerators existing and planned, in or around the capital, the provision of heat and hot water to nearly 100,000 homes could save 670,000 tonnes of carbon, the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as six million people travelling by plane to Paris, the equivalent of 30,000 return journeys.

The Mayor seems to be differentiating between “mass burn incineration”, I think he has just coined this term to get himself out of a self-dug hole, and “new technologies, which can extract both heat and energy from waste should be used for the rubbish that cannot be recycled” – in other words incineration. The Belvedere incinerator is just such a new-style incinerator but one which the Mayor has been fighting. It seems the Mayor is finally admitting that incineration has a place in London.

The impression is reinforced by note 1:

By extracting heat from waste we could make significant savings on carbon emissions. We would save 670,000 tonnes of carbon emissions which is the equivalent of 30,000 return plane journeys from London to Paris, six million passenger journeys to Paris through the heating of nearly 100,000 homes. Belvedere incinerator could receive waste from Essex and Sussex if it opens it doors.

Doesn’t the last line endorse Belvedere? Perhaps the Mayor doesn’t want any more judges telling him that his case is “totally without merit”, see previous posting.

The London Assembly has just been suspended by Chairman Brian Coleman after a shouting match between the Mayor’s so-called Chief of Staff Simon Fletcher and himself. It was quite extraordinary to see a local government officer shouting at the elected chairman at such a scrutiny type session. I brought an issue of The 8 Best Crossbows Reviewed & Revealed ( 2018 Hands-on Guide ) to read since the meeting was to be drawn out and boring. However, the meeting broke up after only 12 minutes, most of which was taken up with formalities. The travel information requested by the London Assembly on 3rd January was simply not available two weeks later. John Ross, Director for Economic and Business Policy (they do love their titles these people), the man responsible failed to turn up and sent a deputy who explained that it was all too difficult and then Fletcher was incredibly insolent as Coleman tried to work out how to proceed in the light of the failure of the GLA staff to submit to scrutiny. Coleman finally suspended the meeting in a hail of invective from Fletcher.

Fletcher has previous. LibDem AM Mike Tuffrey has said previously: “Simon Fletcher comes across as a shadowy figure in the twilight zone of the Mayor’s decision-making”. Another quote from Fletcher himself is: “I don’t sneeze without the mayor’s permission”. As a member of the Trotskyite splinter group Socialist Action Fletcher has been careful to keep his mug out of photographs so no pictures to show you unless you follow the link below and see him in action.

Clearly the Mayor and his staff don’t like it up them. Follow the link if you want a laugh. The whole thing is only 12:36 but skip to the last minute for the bust up bit.

Livingstone must be worried as he has issued a pre-emptive press release about this morning’s GLA session.

The Assembly Members are quizzing various members of Livingstone’s staff involved in the Mayor’s foreign travel. No doubt they will be questioning the costs involved and pointing out how little has been achieved.

You know he is getting desperate when he starts taking quotes out of local papers that are three years old:

… why should the people of north London suffer in order to attract hundreds of foreign students?

Brian Coleman, Barnet and Potters Bar Times, 8 April 2004

His press release goes big on a trip to New York and plans to visit India. Fair enough. It does not mention him wasting his time in Cuba and Venezuela. It does not mention him hanging out with the Chinese but being uncharacteristically silent about their human rights abuses.

Talking of no shit, no WfL either.

The poor old Mayor is out of sorts today after being told by Ben Bradshaw, Labour’s Minister for Environment, Marine and Animal Welfare, that he can’t have his grandiose, strategic, pan-London waste authority.

Even a Labour minister has the good sense to know that it will be a total waste of cash:

Even after the initial set up costs, our analysis indicated that it could cost up to £5 million a year more to manage London’s waste through a Single Waste Disposal Authority because of the introduction of an extra tier of management.

You can read Bradshaw’s letter here.

As I have blogged before the Mayor’s now busted strategy talked of a fifth functional body. Imagine Waste for London in addition to Transport for London. We have saved WfL’s £78 million comms budget and the 821 people who earn more than £50K per year. At least that is what they would have been if WfL was anything like TfL.

In case you haven’t seen the expensive advertising the London Mayor is currently consulting on his Low Emmission Zone. This is a total fraud.

The current consultation comes to an end on 2nd February. The consultation leaflet is really badly drawn up:

• it does not quantify the benefits of the scheme in any way. It says 1,000 people die prematurely now but it does not say how many will be saved by the scheme
• it does not quantify the extent to which particulates and NOx will be reduced
• it does not quantify the extent to which these will be reduced in any case as new vehicles come into service
• it does not indicate the cost of the scheme
• it does not say how much has been spent on this scheme to-date
• it does not quantify the economic costs of the scheme
• it does not quantify how many vehicles will be affected – 10? 1,000? 1 million?

At the start of last year I read that the scheme was going to cost £78 million (see previous posting).

The stupid man did a consultation (222 pages of expensive waffle) last year and then commissioned some market research (73 pages of extremely expensive Ipsos MORI waffle). Now he is consulting again. All this stuff costs £100Ks and is totally useless. It is just evil to ask people questions like “Would you like something lovely?” without quantifying the extent of the loveliness or the cost of the loveliness. To do it three times is just an insult to Londoners’ intelligence.

This is seriously stupid government as the Euro standards are designed to achieve the objective and will do so in time as vehicles are replaced without any intervention from Livingstone. All this scheme does is to spend £78 million harassing a few vehicles I suspect. Any corporate board examining this proposal would laugh it out as there are no quantifiable benefits and the costs are obscure.

If you care about good government in London respond to the consultation questionnaire and reject the scheme. When Livingstone comes back and says “I will deliver this size of benefit for this price” then it will be time to think again.

Telegraph columnist Sam Leith celebrated his 33rd birthday at the start of this week and finds himself, quite rightly, becoming more right wing as he grows up (see full article). His opinion of Livingstone has moved on in step:

Ken Livingstone, for example: a Man Of The Left, who Stuck It To Thatch, and was therefore a Good Thing. And then, here I was, reading my newspaper, and learning that the Mayor of London spent £30,000 of taxpayers’ money hobnobbing with convicted spies in Cuba. That he was planning to throw a party for Castro. On the London taxpayer.

And here I was, with steam issuing from my ears in great geyserish spouts. Even if we agree that dissident-jailing dictators such as Castro are the heroes of the working man, I thought, what in the name of all that’s sacred does that have to do with London?

And then I started to think back. Cuddly, newt-loving Ken. Uncompromising, man-of-principle Ken. Believer in the collective and the good fight against evil capitalist plutocrats. And I thought: the man’s a raving egomaniac. He plasters pictures of his horrible grinning fizzog all over every pamphlet he issues.

He “brands” – like the worst sort of brand-obsessed capitalist running-dog – every poster with his absurd “Mayor of LondON” slogan.

He breaks his promise to defend the noble Routemaster (“only some ghastly sort of dehumanised moron would actually want to get rid of Routemasters” – remember that, ye bampot?) and mucks up the centre of town with his junction-blocking, bursting-into-flames, freeloader-encouraging bendy buses.

He congratulates himself on the Olympics. He invites gay-hating, wifebeater-condoning mullahs to tea. He sticks up for Mao Zedong. He makes boorish remarks about concentration camps to Jewish reporters. He suggests a couple of Iraqi businessmen who rubbed him up the wrong way might “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”.

And – worst of all – he raises the cost of public transport. “The headlines about big cash fare increases today show that the savings are now to be found on Oyster,” he chirped happily, as if those Oyster cards had just become better value because – look! – we’ve made everything else much worse value.

What on earth would possess us to put this man, I found myself thinking, in charge of a sub-post-office, still less a city?

If only Leith knew the half of it!

Tonight the Evening Standard is reporting that ex-Radio 1 DJ, Mike Read is set to run as a potential Conservative candidate for London Mayor. Not sure what he stands for. I would prefer a real politician me.

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