Phil Taylor

The biggest whopper the Mayor tells is that the Londoner only costs £3 million per annum. This figure does not include all of the so-called advertising revenue that the Londoner gets from forcing all the parts of the Mayor’s empire to use the Londoner for advertising.

The latest issue comprised 20 pages. There was absolutely no display advertising from any non-GLA body. There were four and a half pages of display ads from captive GLA customers such as TfL, LDA and the Met. Pants on fire.

The Mayor is required to report periodically to the GLA under Section 45 of the 1999 GLA Act. It is part of his duty to be accountable to the public. You can read these reports on the Mayor’s website but he is not quick to widely publish these even though he spends £3 million a year telling you inane rubbish like the location of old football grounds.

You might think that he could have published his latest report, dated 22nd March, in his April edition of the Londoner. But no, if he did that you might get bored because the Mayor thinks that Londoners have the same attention span as his newts.

Some of the detail you will find in his report include:

• £24,000 for a risk assessment looking at the transportation of nuclear waste through London
• £4,000 to Southwark Cathedral to defray their costs in objecting to a lap dancing club in Tooley Street
• £74,000 for a capital waste facts website http://www.capitalwastefacts.com/
• £50,000 to the Black Londoners Forum
• £180,000 to the National Assembly Against Racism

He might think these are good uses for our money but we might not. Either way he does not want to give us the information so that we can have a debate.

The front page story in April’s issue is “Free Tube travel for under elevens”. You may think that this is a good thing. Many parents can afford to pay their childrens’ fares so maybe this benefit is not well targeted. But who said the Mayor was responsible for child poverty anyway? He is not. He is well outside his brief here. The lie here is what is not said. The article fails to mention that this measure will cost £1 million per annum. Small beer you may say in an overall budget set for next year at an eye watering £3 billion. On the other hand a real journalist would give you the information so that you could weigh for yourself the benefit against the cost. The Mayor does not trust your judgment so he just tries to tell you that all his baubles cost you nothing.

My copy of the Mayor’s one-sided, £3 million a year Londoner arrived on Monday 20th. Apparently this is the April issue. I guess if the Mayor consistently delivers these early every month then he can justify, to himself at least, that he is not using our money to try to influence the local elections and put out a May issue at the end of April.

Londoner Lie No 1 – the US Embassy are being unreasonable in not paying the Congestion Charge. The Mayor does not say in his article that their refusal to pay coincided with the Mayor putting up the charge by 60% from £5 to £8 last July. He contends that the CC is a charge for a service not a tax. The embassy is exempt from taxation under the Treaty of Vienna. I think if you can arbitrarily raise a charge by 60% then you are a state organ taxing something not a business charging a reasonable fee for something.

The £3 million a year we pay for the Londoner allows the Mayor to tell his lies and half truths, unchallenged, at our expense.