The Guardian’s Comment is free people have kindly published this piece from me tonight. Essentially I point out that it is all very well the Mayor claiming to be competent but three of his biggest “achievements” do rather undermine that claim.
Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone
The BBC published this story today about how Transport for London commissioned Kings College London to do some research into the the Mayor’s Emissions Related Congestion Charging, which intuitively is a mad scheme, and they found out that … it is a mad scheme. Apparently it will increase CO2 emissions.
This whole policy has been a farce from the start.
The consultation cost £1.4 million – mainly the cost of the ads to make the Mayor look green.
The consultation elicited 4,831 responses and cost £1.4 million. That is £290 per response. Good value for money or just another £1 million towards the Mayor’s £100 million self-promotion budget?
The consultation report was suppressed for three months because it came up with the wrong answer. 60% of respondents thought the higher charge would not work.
Click on the image above to see last night’s debate if you have half an hour to spare.
Categories
Competence
The Mayor pretty much used his whole election broadcast tonight to try to make one point – “I am competent, Boris isn’t”. Interestingly he didn’t really point to some of his so-called achievements such as the Congestion Charge. Aside from Crossrail he wasted no time talking about transport (Tubes, buses, DLR, roads, etc), even though this is the biggest part of his direct responsibilities and is an area where he has totally lost control in spite of being the chairman. Apart from the line “more police on the street” the Mayor’s second priority was ignored too. No mention of the 11 kids killed on London’s streets so far this year.
From what I have seen of the TV coverage the Olympic Torch Relay was a total farce with the Olympic torch surrounded at all times by a team of around ten Chinese goons, who were in turn surrounded by a close team of ten or so Met officers in yellow, surrounded again by twenty or thirty Territorial Support Group heavies in their jumpsuits and big boots. Very butch. Not very harmonious.
The whole thing has been utterly odious from the specially chartered jet (how does that fit into the Mayor’s green posturing?) to the sight of Chinese goons on London’s streets and the pathetic turnout at the finale. Just about every frame of TV coverage had a Tibetan flag in it so that at least bought some colour and passion to the whole thing but perhaps not in a way the Chinese authorities would have wanted.
The whole event had the Mayor’s dabs on it. At the start the Mayor’s deputy, Nicky Gavron, handed the torch to Steve Redgrave at Wembley. At the end the London Fire Brigade’s fireboat ‘Fire Dart’ transported Ellen MacArthur, lone yachtswoman, from Canary Wharf to the Dome. You can read more here about it. Lucky it wasn’t needed for any of the actual firefighting for which it was bought by London precept payers. Oh, and don’t forget the £1 million overtime bill for the 2,000 coppers who might have been more gainfully occupied patting down a few knife carrying youths.
It was totally apt that Gavron was involved because her favourite anecdote is that her mother danced for Hitler at the 1936 Olympics who coincidentally is the person who invented the whole Olympic torch ceremony to promote the Nazi regime.
So her mother danced for Hitler and she danced for Hu Jintao. Hu may not be quite another Hitler but Gavron had a choice, unlike her mother.
Categories
Torch farce
According to the BBC and the Telegraph the Olympic Torch Relay is so popular it is going to need 2,000 police to line the route at a cost of £1 million.
I am going to the Tibet rally tomorrow afternoon. Details below (click to enlarge).
So says Tony Benn about Ken Livingstone. This is the kind of endorsement that Livingstone really doesn’t need. Benn has just enjoyed his 83rd birthday.
Click above to see a movie about two little old men wrapped up in scarves and coats.
Categories
Mayor’s crime scam
Today Livingstone launched his crime manifesto, see PDF here. It was rather overshadowed by his gaffe-prone performance on the BBC London television news last night. Follow this link and move the slider to 5:29 to hear Livingstone complain about the media seeming to labour under the motto “if it bleeds, it leads”. Unfortunately for him, and the families of the boys murdered last night, this appearance on TV was sandwiched between the deaths of two teenagers.
In his document the Mayor acknowledges London’s teen murder problem:
The murders of young people are a critical issue we have to bear down upon by a combination of tough policing targeting the possession of knives, in particular, and policies to get young people off the streets by providing them with safe places, like youth facilities, to go outside school hours.
He uses much more space for spurious graphs showing falling crime. The Mayor relies on recorded crime to kid us that London is getting safer. Recorded crime is only a measure of how many crimes the public bother to report AND the police bother to record. I had £996.58 skimmed out of my bank account last April. The bank replaced it without complaint but they didn’t get their cash back from the Sri Lankan petrol forecourt crew that videoed my PIN. This incident didn’t appear in the Mayor’s crime statistics but it is still a crime – it is simply one that the police don’t want to record. Similarly, when it took 2 hours 10 minutes to report my girlfriend’s stolen car in October 2004 the only reason I stuck it out was because I need a crime number for insurance purposes – incidentally the police did find the car in the end. The four people who gave up whilst I was waiting may have decided that their crimes weren’t worth the wait.
Teenage killings are a specific London problem and one that the Mayor has offered no concrete response to because discussing it undermines his “I have licked crime” rhetoric.
According to Channel 4 Dispatches:
27 out of the 52 teenagers who died last year were murdered in London with Lambeth having one of the highest levels of violent crime in the capital.
According to these numbers London, with 12% of the whole UK’s population, has over half the problem. And it is getting worse. 11 kids in less than three months, or one a week in London alone. The Mayor can rail at the media but there is an underlying truth that they are revealing.
News just out that RMT and TSSA are proposing a strike from 6.30pm on Sunday 6th April until the same on Wednesday 9th. These cynical twits know that London Underground will want to get all its trains back to depots so the network will start to collapse on Sunday lunchtime and it will not get back into its stride until lunchtime on Thursday so in effect the strike will last four days.
They don’t mind lashing out at Livingstone who will have his preposterous Olympic torch relay upstaged on the Sunday. I expect to be at the Tibet rally in Argyle Square so I guess I will have to walk home. Thanks Crow, you ugly bugger.
It only emerged today that Livingstone took £20,000, which has never been officially registered with the Electoral Commission, off ASLEF at the last election. In return he has to just shut up I guess when the rail unions decide they want to throw their weight around.
Boris Johnson has pledged to put an end to this nonsense which has seen 16 Tube strikes under Livingstone. Boris says:
Once again under Mayor Livingstone, Londoners will have to face hours of misery on the tube – all because the Labour Mayor hasn’t got a plan to work with the unions.
Ken Livingstone has repeatedly shown himself to be unwilling to deal with the problem of strikes and the deeper issues behind them. He has been in office for eight years; in that time there have been 16 incidents of industrial action, which have led to a disruption of services.
London needs a forceful advocate on behalf of Londoners to work constructively with all the unions to solve this problem. I will be pro-active, and seek to negotiate – in good faith – a no strike deal with the unions. In return, they will have a guarantee of independent arbitration that will rule on pay and working conditions. This is a fair solution that is designed to build bridges with a fresh approach. It would guarantee union members long-term job safety, while ensuring that London is kept moving.
The current Mayor has simply stopped trying to deal with London’s problems. London needs to vote for change on May 1st to find solutions to London’s problems – and to strike out the strikes.
Andrew Gilligan is fast becoming my hero but he might have given me some credit for this story.
As it happens I know that he reads the blog so there is a good chance he saw it here first.
He rightly points out the Mayor’s “truly spectacular failure of negotiation” with regard to Crossrail.
I highlighted the Mayor’s failure of negotiation first when Crossrail was announced in October of last year and again when the Mayor started his Crossrail scare campaign at the end of February.
The Mayor’s deal is particularly bad in the context of the £17.8 billion annual net contribution to the Exchequer made by London (Oxford Economic Forecasting figures for City of London). In return for sending more than the cost of Crossrail to the rest of the country EVERY year, London gets a 10 year project which is majority funded by London itself and only receives a £5.1 billion government grant with unlimited liability for overruns. Livingstone is a terrible negotiator. He was so keen to add Crossrail to his train set he drove a really bad bargain.
Phil Taylor 