Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The contrast between the Nelson Room and the City Hall chamber could not be greater. Sitting on the sumptuous suede effect gallery seats, surrounded by state of the art audio visual equipment my only complaint was that I was too cold. The Mayor is getting very windy on the subject of carbon but perhaps he could turn down the aircon a couple of notches.

The main topic for the first hour or so were the TfL price increases. Nobody had spotted Livingstone’s RPI wheeze. There was much talk of mitigating the effect of these above inflation rises on poorer Londoners but the fact is that if you don’t get onto Oyster TfL are going to plunder you. In many ways the Mayor comes across as an extremely bright and capable man. He then blows it by describing how his weird oil deal with Venezuela is going to help poor Londoners.

Tory spokesman for transport, Roger Evans, asked a question following up on the £78 million number that I got out of TfL:

“Why is the budget for TfL’s ‘Advertising, marketing and communications’ £78 million? Why do you think it is necessary for a public body that provides a monopoly service to spend such an amount on advertising?”

The Mayor tried to pretend that this was a small sum compared to overall TfL spending and to justify it in terms it being spent on things like timetables. In his breakdown of this spending he still had to admit that £40 million goes on advertising.

The Mayor admitted that this figure was a £14 million overspend on this budget and that he would expect to see spending in the same ballpark next year. The self-promotion goes on.

One of TfL’s expensive ads warns young people that if they misbehave on public transport they will lose their travelcard. The Mayor admitted today that only 4 cards had been withdrawn in a year. I can’t see this measure stopping many hoodies from scratching up bus windows.

I was interested to see this component of London democracy in action but it was pretty poor sport. Although Livingstone was suffering from a cough he seemed happy enough batting away the questions of the assembly member. Incidentally our member, Richard Barnes was not present.

Although not quite the marathon that the EAC was it still went on for 2 hours 37 minutes – not for the faint hearted.

This month sees a battle royal between the Daily Mail/Northcliffe publishing empire and Murdoch’s over who owns London daily newspaper publishing. This week saw the launch of News International’s thelondonpaper, a new free sheet. The DMGT Evening Standard has put its price up to 50p and launched London Lite as a free sheet a few days ahead of thelondonpaper to try and kill it at birth.

This contest will all come down to money. The biggest ad spender by far in London is Livingstone with his £100 million budget (see previous post). The way he places his spending over the next few months will determine our reading for many years to come.

The Standard is under real threat. Although it is far from being perfect it is at least a real London newspaper with some shreds of journalistic integrity. Both the new freesheets and the Metro (a joint venture with TfL) are just gossip sheets with snippets of news off wire services. The Mayor hates the Standard and has the market power to crush it. Yesterday the Mayor’s TfL put 2 full pages of ads in thelondonpaper and none in the Standard or London Lite. I am sure he welcomes the opportunity to punish the Standard.

The Mayor and TfL have huge market power as customers but are also market participants. TfL has its JV with the Metro. The Londoner is the Mayor’s own £3 million freesheet delivered to all London homes. How can the Standard compete when its main customer wants to publish newspapers at tax payer’s expense and is happy to push advertising to newspapers with no journalists?

The Mayor and TfL should get out of newspaper publishing entirely. The conflict of interests is unacceptable. They also need to stand aside in the current newspaper war and ensure that they do not use their spending power to destroy London’s one real newspaper just so that they can avoid a bit of criticism.

I have today written to the Director of Competition Enforcement at the Office of Fair trading to request that they review the London newspaper market.

See Dan Sabbagh writing in the Times yesterday.

The Telegraph today reports that the state is emplying 3,200 press officers.

This includes 69 in the Metropolitan Police (not-force-but) Service and 25 in Transport for London.

Over the weekend the September copy of Livingstone’s £3 million a year Londoner arrived on my doorstep.

Livingstone is at his lying worst with a front page that declares “London’s buses now free for under-18s”. This is true so long as you are still in education. Because this is not a real local newspaper but a piece of political propaganda he does not bother to tell us how much this exercise is costing. It may well be good value for money and we may well think it is a good thing. But, Livingstone does not want us to worry our little heads about the costs of his projects so he refuses to tell us.

Another aspect of his lying is the game he plays with using trams in the plural. There is only one tram in London, the Croydon Tramlink. In his press releases and adverts Livingstone tries to kid us that there are trams across London. The use of buses in the plural is reasonable as you can pretty much get a bus anywhere in London. The use of trams in the plural is just a Livingstone lie.

West London does not want his tram but he hopes that by twisting language like this he will win the argument subliminally. What a creep. If you go to the TfL website they carry on this silly subterfuge with the Trams section of their website.

I have today complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about TfL’s current Oyster campaign which pluralises the Croydon tram.