Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Dave Hill blog is carrying our obsessive old mayor’s rebuttal of the Forensic Audit Panel. Clearly the old mayor has still not got out of the habit of repeating outrageous porkies in the hope that they will stick in people’s minds. Take for instance this claim:

The waste so far of Boris Johnson’s administration includes £30 million a year extra cost to Transport for London for implementing its cycling programme now that the income to cover it from the £25 a day charge on gas guzzlers will not be received …

The old mayor knows full well that the Emissions Related Congestion Charging scheme he proposed would have led to a reduction in Congestion Charge income. A small number of increased £25 charges from large vehicles would have been more than offset by the loss of £8 charges from many more band A and B cars. The idea that the scheme would have generated new net cash to the tune of £30 million is an outrageous lie.

Whilst the new mayor is busily transforming London and making some cash for himself on the side (see below), maybe the old mayor, with more time on his hands, will support the RMT union’s Garden Party for Cuba today.

Be careful though with all that free booze around you never know when things are going to kick off.

I have just received a copy of Ken Livingstone’s thank you e-mail to his supporters; I signed up to receive communications from our ex-mayor in order to better keep an eye on his campaign. To the end he tries to link the BNP to the Boris campaign in spite of the fact that the BNP appeal directly to Labour voters. He says:

It is noteworthy that a number of parties to the right of the Tories notably the BNP polled much higher in the Assembly list than in the Mayoral vote, suggesting that some of their voters voted tactically for Boris Johnson.

Finally, here are some words that I will personally strive to make sure he eats:

There is no doubt that the new Mayoralty will inaugurate decline and division.

Bitter and vile to the end.

The mayoral result did not come out until near enough midnight and some of the constituency results weren’t confirmed until almost 1am. Considering the count started at about 8.30am this is a pretty poor performance on the part of London Elects – which is effectively a combination of GLA staff and various borough election people.

I was at one of the the three counts at Olympia in the afternoon, the photo above shows the Ealing and Hillingdon part of the count. Officially I was a counting agent but in practice there was not much to do except stand around and chat to people. Angie Bray was on good form and looking forward to going on holiday after working hard to get out the vote in her future Central Ealing and Acton constituency. She has stood down from the assembly and her West Central seat has been won by senior Westminster councillor Kit Malthouse. By the time I got to the count at 2.30pm Richard Barnes was already pretty confident of his seat and that Boris would win the mayoralty.

At Olympia they were counting six constituencies. By 4pm they had only got about half the voting papers through the scanners. All the computers were working fine but a combination of a high turnout and problems keeping the scanners online meant that there were just not enough scanners to do the job. Next time London Elects need to make sure that they do the job properly. As soon as Johnson was confirmed as the candidate for the Tories it wasn’t a big leap of imagination to think that turnout might go up. Doh! It was a bit humiliating to have London’s result fully 24 hours after many local election results and to miss even the 10pm news the next day. Someone voting early on Thursday and going to bed at a reasonable time on Friday would not have known the result of their action for two days. Ridiculous.

It was a good night for the Tories on the London Assembly. Although they lost a seat, Bob Blackman’s in Brent & Harrow, they gained three London-wide seats so the number of Tory AMs went up by two to eleven. It was previously accepted wisdom amongst the Tories that they would never get any London-wide seats – strangely the loss of Brent & Harrow was part of the reason why they became available. The first two places go to very able Tory mayoral hopefuls Andrew Boff and Victoria Borwick. The third place goes to Bexley councillor Gareth Bacon who is also their cabinet member for environment. No doubt all three will be somewhat surprised to have new jobs.

With only four of the Tory old guard returning to the assembly the new Mayor will have a largely new team assembly members to support and challenge him.

Labour gained a seat but the LibDems were the big losers, losing two seats. The other losers were the One London (ex-UKIP) pair who have left the assembly.

The full assembly results are here.

The bad news from last night is that the odious Richard Barnbrook got an assembly seat for the BNP. The BNP nudged over the 5% hurdle, polling 5.33% of the London-wide vote.

It is a shame that more of the disaffected voters who voted for them didn’t vote for UKIP – at least a UKIP member would have been given a hearing and would be able to represent the views of those that feel that the major parties aren’t for them. The BNP will be ignored with their weird mixture of views which combine pretty much naked racism and socialism. I am not a UKIP supporter – I am probably at the other end of the right spectrum but would ten times rather give UKIP house room than the BNP.

Forgive me for being a bit smug but I managed to pre-empt Mayor Livingstone’s competence offensive in a small way yesterday.

The Guardian’s Comment is free published this piece from me last night which demolishes three of the Mayor’s claimed achievements, namely Crossrail, the Congestion Charge and increased police numbers. Today the Mayor did a comment piece in the Guardian claiming a competence he simply cannot sustain and got the aptly named Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, to underline his point, reported in the Evening Standard here.

Apparently Balls said:

But I can tell you we never came across a tougher negotiator at the Treasury than Ken Livingstone. In my seven or eight years at the Treasury, particularly on the Tube, we knew Ken was the person who was going to fight his corner hardest.

In my Comment is free piece I said:

The mayor keeps trying to make out he is the only person who can safely deliver Crossrail because it is such a risky project. Who made it risky? Who negotiated it? Livingstone. He was so desperate to get control of it, he wrote a blank cheque with Londoners’ money. He managed, he says, to limit our liability with the Olympic project, but there is no such limit of liability with Crossrail. Don’t forget the context – London remits £17.8 billion net to the Exchequer every year and we only get £5bn back over 10 years for Crossrail. We have to provide the other £11bn of the total £16bn and if it all goes wrong, we have to make up the difference.

It sounds like Balls got the upper hand over Livingstone in his last job if you ask me.