Ealing Borough Senior Citizens Action Group hosted a visit to the Borough by Deputy Mayor, Nicky Gavron, today. Although EBSCAG, as they call themselves, profess to be non-political they had the Labour deputy London mayor talking about London issues and Labour councillor Ranjit Dheer talking about local issues so it was definitely Labour in broadcast mode. Gavron was half an hour late so people were already getting restive when Gavron kicked off.
Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone
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Mayor cheating again
Today the Mayor has launched a new electioneering website and a set of online ads – which I saw first on Iain Dale’s blog. The artwork for the new site/ads owes much to the artwork for the Low Emission Zone ads that went with the £1.9 million LEZ consultation and another million or so of ads to announce the start of the scheme.
Here is the Mayor’s artwork:
Here is the LEZ artwork:
London’s taxpayers have spent £ millions building up this lovely Teletubbies green and blue branding and getting it established in people’s minds and the Mayor is simply stealing it for his campaign. This is passing off, plain and simple.
We shouldn’t be surprised as his race and police advisor, suspended but still paid from the public purse, is electioneering on the Mayor’s behalf in EMG’s Voice “newspaper” – see Evening Standard piece here.
These guys are just bandits.
After my story last week about how the Mayor had suppressed the emissions related congestion charging consultation report, see here, and the POLITICALBETTING.COM story about how TfL has leaned on Ipsos MORI not to publish the details of the polling done in the same exercise Andrew Gilligan reveals tonight that the Mayor has a some form in this area already.
It appears that he is a serial poll cheat.
This comes as no surprise to Ealing after the Tram consultation shenanigans.
This morning ConservativeHome took this piece from me on the Congestion Charge.
Read how the Mayor has taken £1.2 billion off Londoners in 5 years and, well, just spent it all on out of control set-up and running costs. All gone. Yep, all of it. None left, not a bean. When Peter Hendy and the Mayor say that it is contributing £120 million towards the buses or cycling or walking they are telling three fibs that add up to one big lie. The three fibs are:
- they ignore capital costs
- they ignore indirect costs (ie they assume the charge is run out of a garage)
- they ignore the first year’s losses.
If these guys were businessmen they would have been sacked about four years ago on this performance.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the London Mayor’s congestion charging scheme.
Tomorrow I will be showing how the Mayor’s Congestion Charge has cost Londoners £1.2 billion in five years of operation whilst achieving nothing.
And if you thought any of the cash would be left over for good works …
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More dirty emissions
It appears that not only was the suppressed consultation on emissions related congestion charging not what the Mayor wanted to hear but it also seems that the polling data he used in its place was dodgy too.
The POLITICALBETTING.COM blog ran this story yesterday about how the polling data published by the Mayor in December (see previous posting) is going to be reviewed by a body called the British Polling Council. Ipsos MORI have enough to be ashamed about given the way they wrote the management summary of the consultation, see previous posting.
On Tuesday the consultation results from November were published. Tory AM Angie Bray formally asked for these twice last year, in November and December, but she was stonewalled each time. The consultation showed that 60% of Londoners thought that the scheme would not work.
Ealing people will remember that the Mayor pulled the same stunt with the West London Tram. A very expensive consultation exercise came up with the wrong result so the Mayor spent even more cash on some market research that delivered the answer that the Mayor wanted to hear. Maybe there are some bodies buried there too?
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Jasper suspended
News is emerging this morning that the Mayor’s sleeze-mired police and race advisor, Lee Jasper, has been suspended from City Hall. Jasper’s story is that he has voluntarily submitted himself to a police enquiry – he could have done that three months ago before proof emerged that he had meddled in LDA operational matters and six of his projects had been referred to the police for investigation. The Mayor’s office has produced this press release which is full of the usual bluster.
The Boris campaign sounds pretty narked:
This is an outrageous attempt to avoid scrutiny. It was only 12 hours ago that the Mayor informed us that he had full confidence in Mr Jasper. What has changed his mind? Mr Jasper has been suspended – presumably on full pay – until after the election, in the hope that the full facts will not come out. It is clear that the Mayor’s handling of City Hall is descending into sleaze, chaos, and now cover-up. Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted or trousered by cronies of the Mayor. And we now have the police called in to investigate the Mayor’s chief police adviser. It is time to clean up City Hall, and time London had a change from this tired, stale, incompetent and increasingly decadent regime. How can the Mayor possibly focus on crime, housing and transport when he is mired in maladministration?
If you are a regular reader you will know that I have been fulminating about the £1.4 million cost of the Mayor’s bogus consultation on his ideas around emissions related congestion charging since last autumn.
It was only today, thanks to Gary Dunion, Chief Press Officer of the Green Party funnily enough, that I finally got hold of the report, follow this link.
This expensive piece of work from Ipsos MORI takes 104 pages to try to hide the following central facts.
When asked “Do you think the proposed discount would be effective as an incentive to use a lower CO2 emitting car?” 57% said it would be ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ effective as an incentive as against 39% respondents who said the low CO2 discount would be ‘very’ or ‘a little’ effective as an incentive to use a lower CO2 emitting car. In other words most Londoners think that the Mayor is wrong.
When asked “Do you think the proposed higher charge would be an effective incentive to use a lower CO2 emitting car?” 60% said it would not be effective as against just 38% who thought it would be an effective incentive to use a lower CO2 emitting car. Ooops, the Mayor is even more wrong.
No wonder the Mayor and his Green allies have been hiding this report. The authors tried to use a truly shocking form of words in the management summary to hide the truth:
A very wide range of views was expressed during the course of the consultation, and it is apparent that opinions are divided on the issue of the proposed scheme. While over half of respondents thought that the proposals would have at least some effect as an incentive to use a lower CO2 emitting car, through use of a higher charge and discount, these are divided between those who say it will be “very” effective, “a little” effective and “not very” effective. Around one in three consider the scheme will be “not at all” effective.
Note they have taken those who thought the scheme would be “not very” effective and made them in favour of the scheme. They also call 41% “around one in three”. Ipsos MORI should be ashamed of themselves as should TfL, the Mayor and the Green Party.
Gary, do the Green Party really want to associate themselves with this rubbish?
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?
Today the Mayor did a big song and dance with the Green party over signing some spurious document to do with his introduction of Emissions Related Congestion Charging.
Apparently this will come into force on 27th October when 4x4s and other large vehicles will have to pay £25 to enter the Congestion Charge zone and small cars will get in for free.
This announcement is the final admission that the Congestion Charge has failed and that the Mayor is trying to rebrand it as a CO2 charge.
Bizarrely the contrived signing ceremony involved the Mayor and his invisible deputy Nicky Gavron and also Green AM Jenny Jones and the leader of her party Sian Berry. It does seem strange that one of the Mayor’s opponents in the mayoral race wants to big him up like this. Given that she founded the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s I guess she could not resist. The whole exercise does underscore that she is not a serious contender and that the Green Party and the Mayor intend to encourage Greens to give the Mayor their second preference votes.
What is really outrageous about this announcement is that the Mayor spent £1.4 million on a consultation on this in the autumn of last year and has so far refused to publish the results. The Mayor has not yet published the consultation report in spite of repeated questions from Tory AM Angie Bray. She asked for the results in November and December but she was stonewalled each time.
Today the Mayoral press machine went to town on the headline that the Mayor is to invest £500 million in walking and biking. Before you fall off your seat remember that this is over ten years – one way of making the number seem bigger than it is. Boris Johnson’s campaign team came right back and complained that the Mayor was was playing catch up and that his ideas were not ambitious enough.
Boris is right. We do need to change people’s behaviour and we do need to be more ambitious. You can only spend money once and Transport for London is burning £1.6 billion a year on the current account. Rather more of this needs to be directed at walking and cycling and away from other modes.
The £500 million sounds like a rather modest sum when you compare it with the bus subsidy over ten years £6.2 billion or the Tube subsidy over ten years £5.5 billion or the DLR subsidy over ten years £800 million. None of the later numbers include capital spending which would make the comparison even more grotesque. It looks like the two Green assembly members have sold themselves somewhat cheaply. The Mayor could not have got his budget through without them.
The picture of the Mayor and the rather cheap Jenny Jones on their Post Office issue bikes made me laugh.
Phil Taylor 