Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

After last week’s denials on the Today programme it looks like the Mayor will have to answer questions from the Electoral Commission on the behaviour of GLA staff during the 2004 elections. The Times reports that it has seen e-mails that show at least one GLA staffer worked on the 2004 campaign during office hours. It says:

Ken Livingstone’s campaign instructed public servants to write articles in support of his last reelection as Mayor of London in a breach of rules forbidding political abuse of taxpayers’ cash.

Documents passed to The Times prove that staff paid for by public money were told to carry out campaign work during office hours. One e-mail to the mayor’s former senior adviser on Asian affairs, Atma Singh, sent at 9.30am, explicitly asks that he write two articles in support of Mr Livingstone by noon that day.

The evidence directly contradicts the Mayor of London’s claim last week that senior public officials could not and did not carry out such work during the 2004 campaign. He said officials could engage in political activity “as long as they obey the law, which is that they can’t publicly campaign, which is they can’t make a speech for me or write an article for me”.

Asked if an investigation would find that no one had used office time to prepare articles in pursuit of his campaign, he replied: “Absolutely right.”

Yet on May 27, 2004, Mr Singh received an e-mail from the campaign office of the Ken4London based in the headquarters of the London Labour Party. It said: “We are still waiting for your article for the Asian Post . . . and the East Muslim News (400-500 words on Why should Muslims vote for Ken Livinsgtone? – this is urgent, publication date June 1st). Both required 12 noon today.”

Mr Singh also told The Times that he spent up to 90 per cent of his days during the campaign working for Mr Livingstone’s reelection, in contravention of electoral rules.

The e-mail, along with others, is being handed over to the Electoral Commission today as part of a formal complaint against Mr Livingstone.

At last the Mayor is doing something that he is paid to do. Demanding more civility on public transport.

We have not seen much on this topic from Livingstone in the past eight years so it is interesting to see the Mayor respond to Boris Johnson’s call for greater civility – he raised this issue at his campaign launch on September 3rd, see previous posting.

Too often politicians are wary of taking on board this kind of issue. They worry that the people they chastise will not vote for them. Maybe the Mayor has calculated that on average the people who mess the place up will either not be registered to vote or will not bother to vote anyway whilst the rest of us far outnumber the idiots. If so he is right.

See the Mayor’s little movie here. The movie does not show teenagers bad mouthing drivers when they challenge them to show their free passes so it is a little fanciful.

After his “worst week” the Mayor flew off to Davos in Switzerland to hob-nob on the public purse with world leaders. Strangely this fact is not mentioned on the Mayor’s home page. He does not like to highlight his international travel because it does rather undermine his green stance.

The list of public figures published by the World Economic Forum includes his name along with only three other world mayors. I wonder what business Livingstone might be doing with the mayors of Milan, Tehran and Dalian (China). I guess Michael Bloomberg is actually running his city. Still you have got to admire the guy’s chutzpah going off on a massive beano when he is fighting for his political life.

Still at least in Davos the Mayor doesn’t have to read his bad notices back home in the Times, Telegraph and Standard.

The Mayor was on the Today programme this morning defending himself from reasonably robust questioning by James Naughtie. Click here to hear it. The Mayor pretty much said that he was justified in spending public money to discredit Trevor Phillips and that it was OK for his staff in politically restricted posts to campaign for him in their own time. As for the LDA scandal, well, shit happens seems to be the line.

The Mayor’s interview was preceded by a hard-hitting investigative piece by Angus Stickler and an interview with Labour MP Kate Hoey, click here.

The Harry’s Place blog also covers the Today piece here.

For some time certain people have been suggesting that the Evening Standard was a lone voice in raising these issues and was therefore irrelevant. The BBC coverage today pretty much picks up all the Standard’s points so I think we can say they are pretty mainstream – it is just a shame that it has taken the BBC six weeks to get on the case, story written up here. In reality the BBC has picked it up sporadically but today is the first concerted effort on this set of stories.

Yesterday BBC London News was all over the Emodi/Jasper/Walters thing also, video here.

Martin Bright on his New Statesman blog is still going at Ken following up his Dispatches show in Monday, see here.

According to the Standard the Mayor reckons he is having a hard week. No sympathy here mate.

In August of last year, shortly after TfL published its annual report, I had a look at TfL’s finances and ConservativeHome were kind enough to publish the results here.

At the time I really could not understand the numbers for the Docklands Light Railway so I did not talk about them. I pointed out that TfL loses 30p every time someone takes a bus and loses 55p every time someone takes a Tube. It now appears that the equivalent number for DLR is £1.28. Aaaagh! Click on the table below to enlarge it.

The picture is similar to the rest of TfL. Although fares have increased rapidly costs have increased even faster ensuring that ever greater amounts of subsidy are required. There are almost 2 billion bus journeys a year in London and a billion Tube journeys so the DLR is relatively small beer weighing in at 60 million journeys. Luckily it is not much bigger as they made a loss of £78.5 million.

As I pointed out in August the buses are losing £617 million a year and the Tube £553 million. What is true of all three modes of transport is that their costs are too high and the Mayor does not collect fares from all of the passengers. Note that the Mayor only has to collect £2.15 per journey to make the thing break even. Even better he might bear down harder on costs and make the thing affordable whilst still covering its costs.

You might ask why am I bringing this up now. Well, I first wrote to the Mayor on 2nd August to get these figures and it has taken the best part of six months to get a proper response. It took almost 3 weeks for the Mayor’s office to forward my letter to TfL. It took almost 2 months to get a rubbish response out of TfL and over 3 months to get a decent response today. The Mayor is also chairman of TfL so it is not as if he is not the right person to write to. I can only assume that he is being difficult.

Whilst I enjoyed this evening’s Dispatches programme and its dissection of the Mayor’s time in office you can see why it was relatively short on numbers – the Mayor goes to some lengths to conceal them.

If you want to read TfL’s original document click here.

Even the Observer is laying into the Mayor this morning with an editorial and a piece about malpractice during the 2004 election. Nick Cohen, who has spoken out against the Mayor, from a left perspective, a number of times previously summarises things nicely.

20:20 Update: One of the Mayor’s 265 comms staff has had to come in on a Sunday to do this rebuttal. It tries to undermine the source of the story without denying the substance of the story.

Apparently Ken Livingstone’s Socialist Action cell at City Hall is new to the Sunday Times which prints this piece this morning.

Anyone Googling members of the Mayor’s team such as Redmond O’Neill, Neale Coleman and John Ross (according to the The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List all three were paid £117,882K last year) would have come across Socialist Action. The most amusing commentaries on their behaviour is provided by the Weekly Worker, a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for instance. Pretty turgid but typical of wild lefties falling out with each other – Leninists duffing up the Trotskyists again.

Weekly Worker was particularly down on Anne Kane, another SA bunny, the lady the Mayor paid £29K of public money (search for Kane) to trash Trevor Phillips.

The Telegraph has picked up the whole Dispatches/Phillips/Kane thing too.