Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Evening Standard’s headline writers dutifully lapped up the dubious £500 million headline offered by the Mayor’s press people this evening. So, even the apparently rabidly anti-Livingstone Evening Standard can play the Mayor’s game when it suits. More interestingly the Standard’s map showed one of the cycling superhighways starting off in Ealing, see full story here. Good news indeed.

But, it seems that the Mayor is again trying to tell us what to do with the Uxbridge Road. Having lost the tram battle it looks like he is now going to try to push a cycle superhighway down the Uxbridge Road – at least between Ealing Town Centre and Acton Lane, see map below. I am not sure I would fancy competing with 207 bendies on this route. If these routes are to make sense they need to be a little more imaginative. To separate them from traffic without unnecessarily reducing the capacity of existing roads they need to use side roads and new bridges and tunnels to get across main roads and railways.

On his election website the Mayor lays claim to Crossrail. He says:

Ken achieved what no one else has done in two decades – to get the funding to go ahead with Crossrail.

Unfortunately his claim is rather undermined by this quote from Tony McNulty when he was minister of state for railways and the capital’s transport system. Read this interview in the Independent:

Livingstone raised the minister’s hackles again last week with comments at a trade show in Cannes on how the £10bn Crossrail scheme will be funded. “There is plenty of talk going on – some of it very, very loudly in France – which is not terribly helpful,” McNulty says.

So although the Mayor claims Crossrail as a feather in his cap the minister responsible described his behaviour as “not terribly helpful”.

The go ahead for Crossrail is great for London but the scheme was a no-brainer when Labour came to power and after ten years of a Labour government and 8 years of a Labour Mayor we are not talking quick work here and it seems that the Mayor is not the one to thank. You might however thank changing electoral sentiment in London and the Labour government finally finding a few pennies for the South East to shore up their chances of holding London.

Thanks to Cllr Harry Phibbs from Hammersmith & Fulham who put me onto this story. He has a whole heap of negative Livingstone quotes from London Labour MPs here.

I was a bit surprised to get an e-mail from the managing director of Ethnic Media Group today, see below. I also had Lester Holloway, the new editor of New Nation which is one of EMG’s publications, posting on an old piece I did back in December commenting on the Mayor’s “Get Gilligan” press conference. I was at a loss to know what had stirred them up. Then I saw Andrew Gilligan’s piece in the Standard from yesterday here. I was a bit busy with speaking at council last night to read the paper.

Dear Mr Taylor,

Could you please get in touch by telephone in regards to the publishing of false and inaccurate information.

I have family roots spanning three generations in the Ealing Borough and wish to speak with you.

I await your call.

Thank you.

Wayne Bower
Managing Director
Ethnic Media Group Ltd

I am not sure quite what Bower wants from me. Is he going to send his big brother round to rough me up or something? He can comment here if he wants to share his views.

Just for the record Lester Holloway is an ex-Labour councillor and in his previous job edited the BLINK website where he was effectively the conduit for the Mayor’s publicly funded campaign against Trevor Phillips becoming the chariman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Today’s Times has picked up that the LEZ is not what it seems and that the Mayor has been extremely disingenuous to put the 1,000 deaths figure in his mendacious press release.

The Times says:

The [Mayor’s press] release implied that the zone would help to save the lives of many of the 1,000 people who die prematurely in London each year because of poor air quality.

But Transport for London, the mayor’s transport authority, admitted yesterday that very few lives would be saved. It said that existing European regulations on reducing engine emissions would contribute 65 per cent of the health benefits listed by Mr Livingstone. Another 15 per cent would be the product of existing plans to introduce cleaner buses and taxis. Only a fifth of the improvement in air pollution by 2012 will be attributable to the low emission zone. Air pollution in general will reduce only by about 5 per cent, meaning the zone will improve overall air quality by only 1 per cent.

They quote LibDem candidate Brian Paddick as saying:

To suggest the LEZ will do something about the 1,000 deaths a year caused by pollution is grossly misleading. The most effective way to deal with pollution in London is to get the traffic moving again and reduce the number of lorries on our roads through retail consolidation schemes. This is about improving the mayor’s image, not improving air quality.

The Freight Transport Association’s Gordon Telling, the association’s head of policy for London, said:

This scheme achieves very little that would not have been achieved anyway. This means that Londoners, and lorry operators, are having to pay an enormous price for a trivial improvement in air quality.

Even Nick Fairholme, TfL’s head of the low emission zone, when asked how many lives would be saved by the zone, Mr Fairholme said:

Very few is the honest answer. The benefits are not so much in terms of lives saved. It’s about reduced use of inhalers and reduced hospital admissions.

Don’t forget that the number of reduced hospital admissions for the whole life of the scheme is 86.

The Mayor has got his Teletubbies thing going on his website today and the BBC has fallen for his press release. It is a shame they can’t check the facts.

The Mayor puts this line in a nice prominent position in his press release:

Poor air quality worsens asthma and causes the premature death of an estimated 1,000 people each year in London.

The Mayor’s 265 PRs are not silly. They know that some dumb journalist is going to get the wrong end of the stick and write this is up as Mayor saves 1,000 a year. Sure enough the BBC oblige here in bold in the opening line of their piece this morning:

It is a measure aimed at saving up to 1,000 lives a year.

The Transport for London background documents tell a much more modest story. See Section 4.41, page 35 of this report:

The Defra methodology estimates that the proposed LEZ scheme would prevent between 5200 and 5500 years of lost life expectancy lost across London, that 86 hospital admissions would be avoided and roughly 40 deaths brought forward would be avoided. The CAFE methodology predicts 65 hospital admissions be avoided. The CAFE methodology also expresses years of life lost in an alternative format, as premature deaths, and predicts that the LEZ will lead to 210 fewer premature deaths.

I guess the BBC is voting for Livingstone then.

3:00 pm Update: Their TV commentary here repeats the 1,000 number as if this has anything to do with the scheme.

In the middle of January I did a piece on the Mayor’s 265 person comms machine, see previous posting. You might wonder what they all do. Well some of them read blogs.

I pointed out back then that I had already had evidence of the Livingstone PR machine keeping tabs on me here and here. The first incident was Joy Johnson herself. The Mayor’s Director of Media and Marketing. In 2005/6 she was paid £117,882, the same as the Mayor’s Socialist Action cronies Redmond O’Neill, Neale Coleman and John Ross (according to the The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List). Before her current job she was director of communications for the Labour party. The second incident was a person of unknown gender called Sam Strudwick.

Sam clearly hasn’t got much else to do because he or she has commented on the site twice in the last couple of weeks in the guise of GLA Spokesperson, here and here.

I checked the IP addresses for both comments and they were definitely City Hall ones.