Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

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Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Londoner keeps up its expensive misinformation

The London Mayor’s £3 million “free” newspaper dropped on my mat this week.

The front page story was free bus travel for London’s under-18s. Typically the article did not tell us how much this initiative is costing. We might like the benefits, but we should be told the cost at the same time though. A real newspaper would cover both sides of the story.

Although the Mayor admits to this piece instant recycling costing £3 million a year, he is not telling the whole truth. He makes the various parts of his empire pay for advertising so really he steals from their budgets and spends it on puffing himself up. The Londoner usually has 20 pages. This month fully 4 pages of ads are paid for by other parts of the GLA. There is less than half a page of real adverts. Your tube and bus fares are more expensive because of The Londoner and there are less police and firemen protecting us because of The Londoner.

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Ealing and Northfield Ex-Mayor Livingstone Tram

Mayor brands old Ealing Labour administration as incompetent

Ealing Times today covers the Mayor’s weekly press conference that took place on Tuesday. Mr Livingstone said: “The Labour-run council in Ealing were frankly not good enough in their performance, and the people were deeply unhappy with the incompetence.”

The Mayor would rather blame the Labour administration for Labour’s loss of Ealing than blame the Tram although he did conceded that if public opinion continues to move against the West London Tram the project will have to be reviewed.

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Ealing and Northfield Ex-Mayor Livingstone Tram

Local Labour sees the light, Mayor still not listening

Ealing Times quotes local Labour politicians on their somewhat belated realisation that the Tram might have done for them.

It seems the light has dawned on the likes of ex-leader Thomson and ex-finance portfolio holder Beecroft that ignoring people and trying to foist the West London Tram on them is not a good way of getting elected. The next person who needs to start listening is the Mayor unless he wants to get booted out too in May 2008 just in time so that he can spend lots of time watching the London Olympics.

There is no sign of Ken listening though. He is sailing along with the West London Tram and has just published what is called Supplementary Planning Guidance for consultation (follow link for tedious document). Among other things, this document effectively says:

  • Borough planning policies should seek to help make the Tram successful
  • Boroughs should refuse planning permission for developments likely to prejudice the development of the Tram
  • Boroughs should aid the Tram by supporting a Transport and Works Order Application.

The most Canutian paragraph of this document, paragraph 3.6, is really quite funny:

“As tram schemes, both Cross River Tram and West London Tram projects will be taken forward through an application for powers under the Transport and Works Act (1992) (TWA), and where appropriate the relevant London boroughs should show their support by being prepared to co-promote any such Transport and Works Order Application. The TWA process will help to safeguard and provide for compulsory acquisition of the land required for construction. Appropriate support for the scheme within borough planning documents, including SPG, will be a material consideration at the TWA Inquiry.”

In other words the Mayor is asking for help from the three West London Tram boroughs when two have previously stated their opposition and one will formally change its position on May 18th. The logic of this paragraph is that the three boroughs should look to scupper the Tram by ensuring that their planning frameworks specifically exclude the Tram and make no concession to it whatsoever.

The real issue is why does Ken Livingstone want to proceed with the Tram and initiate the Transport and Works Order process that will lead to a very expensive public inquiry. Could it be that he wants to use the public inquiry, currently scheduled for Spring 2007, as a platform for electioneering for re-election in May 2008? The public inquiry will be futile and extremely expensive. We are talking about £10s of millions. We know Ken likes spending our money like water and he will not baulk at hiring the best barristers he can. This will force objectors, all of us, to spend similarly. The inquiry will become a pre-election political jamboree paid for by us.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Safer Neighbourhood Teams will be short

Ealing Conservatives issued a press release yesterday confirming that 8 out of 23 Met Safer Neighbourhood Teams will be short staffed. We were promised teams in place by both the Mayor and Commissioner by the end of April but Cleveland, Ealing Common, Elthorne, Hobbayne, North Greenford, Northolt Mandeville, Perivale and Southfield wards will be short of PCSOs. There are only 7 opposition wards out of 23 in Ealing but fully 4 of them are short on their teams. No favouritism then?

The information came from a memo from Chief Super Bloomfield to Richard Barnes our Conservative GLA member for Ealing. This is the same policeman who assured me only a few days ago that there was nothing untoward with removing names of policeman from the SNT part of the Met website.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Met promises clarity on SNTs

On Friday 13th April I e-mailed Commander Hitchcock at the Met to complain that the SNT pages of the Met website have been changed to remove all named officers except the sergeants leading teams. I pointed out that this is most unhelpful from an accountability point of view. Up until now ward councillors and candidates have been able to check progress on Safer Neighbourhood Teams by looking at this site. Now their only recourse will be to phone up sergeants to check on progress.

On 10th January both the Mayor and the Commissioner announced that teams of 4 would be in place in all wards by the end of April. Does this change to the Met website mean that they are intent on not allowing us to check on the delivery of this most political of pledges in the run up to the local elections on May 4th?

I asked Commender Hitchcock to put the names back on the site. I got a reply from Chief Superintendent Stephen Bloomfield this Monday, the 24th April. He reassured me that there was nothing untoward in the fact that only the details of the ward team sergeants are shown on the website. He promised that: “the names of all the Safer Neighbourhoods Team officers will be on the website in the near future”. I have written back to Chief Super Bloomfield to suggest that the end of the month would be a suitable timetable for this task given that we were promised SNTs by the end of April by the Mayor and the Commissioner. Let’s see the beef.

The Conservatives in Ealing are right behond these teams. We feel though that it is a tad political to bring them forward very publicly so that their roll out coincides with the local elections and spend £300K of the Met’s money advertising them. Sure enough the Labour Party in Northfield has come out with leaflets saying “Thanks to Labour, Northfield now has its own dedicated Safer Neighbourhood Team”. Well yes, thanks to a Labour Mayor who is charging us all 2.75 more. We really should have a lot of extra police for the extra money we are spending.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Londoner lies Part 4

The biggest whopper the Mayor tells is that the Londoner only costs £3 million per annum. This figure does not include all of the so-called advertising revenue that the Londoner gets from forcing all the parts of the Mayor’s empire to use the Londoner for advertising.

The latest issue comprised 20 pages. There was absolutely no display advertising from any non-GLA body. There were four and a half pages of display ads from captive GLA customers such as TfL, LDA and the Met. Pants on fire.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Londoner lies Part 3

The Mayor is required to report periodically to the GLA under Section 45 of the 1999 GLA Act. It is part of his duty to be accountable to the public. You can read these reports on the Mayor’s website but he is not quick to widely publish these even though he spends £3 million a year telling you inane rubbish like the location of old football grounds.

You might think that he could have published his latest report, dated 22nd March, in his April edition of the Londoner. But no, if he did that you might get bored because the Mayor thinks that Londoners have the same attention span as his newts.

Some of the detail you will find in his report include:

  • £24,000 for a risk assessment looking at the transportation of nuclear waste through London
  • £4,000 to Southwark Cathedral to defray their costs in objecting to a lap dancing club in Tooley Street
  • £74,000 for a capital waste facts website http://www.capitalwastefacts.com/
  • £50,000 to the Black Londoners Forum
  • £180,000 to the National Assembly Against Racism

He might think these are good uses for our money but we might not. Either way he does not want to give us the information so that we can have a debate.

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Communications disease Ealing and Northfield Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Met still over-claiming and under-delivering

I think that the Met may have some problems with the Advertising Standards Authority. In today’s Ealing & Acton Gazette there was an ad from Safer Ealing Partnership pointing to the Safer Neighbourhoods part of the Met Police website. There was also a full page Safer Neighbourhoods ad from the Met and the Mayor (part of a £300K campaign). Unfortunately the website shows 11 out of 23 wards without the promised teams of four. The Mayor and the Met have been quick to advertise these teams before they are in place (this is the 5th full page ad I have seen in the Gazette). They are not so quick to deliver the service. The Mayor is now taking 2.75 times as much from us compared to before he came to power. Shame he is not delivering the service promised. A commercial organisation would pretty quickly be told by the ASA that they should stop their adverts until the service was available as advertised.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Londoner lies Part 2

The front page story in April’s issue is “Free Tube travel for under elevens”. You may think that this is a good thing. Many parents can afford to pay their childrens’ fares so maybe this benefit is not well targeted. But who said the Mayor was responsible for child poverty anyway? He is not. He is well outside his brief here. The lie here is what is not said. The article fails to mention that this measure will cost £1 million per annum. Small beer you may say in an overall budget set for next year at an eye watering £3 billion. On the other hand a real journalist would give you the information so that you could weigh for yourself the benefit against the cost. The Mayor does not trust your judgment so he just tries to tell you that all his baubles cost you nothing.

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Londoner lies Part 1

My copy of the Mayor’s one-sided, £3 million a year Londoner arrived on Monday 20th. Apparently this is the April issue. I guess if the Mayor consistently delivers these early every month then he can justify, to himself at least, that he is not using our money to try to influence the local elections and put out a May issue at the end of April.

Londoner Lie No 1 – the US Embassy are being unreasonable in not paying the Congestion Charge. The Mayor does not say in his article that their refusal to pay coincided with the Mayor putting up the charge by 60% from £5 to £8 last July. He contends that the CC is a charge for a service not a tax. The embassy is exempt from taxation under the Treaty of Vienna. I think if you can arbitrarily raise a charge by 60% then you are a state organ taxing something not a business charging a reasonable fee for something.

The £3 million a year we pay for the Londoner allows the Mayor to tell his lies and half truths, unchallenged, at our expense.