The Tory Troll points out this morning that Boris has broken another of his campaign promises.
Like all his carefully learned campaign lines, I lost count of the number of times I heard Boris assure us that "from day one" he would ensure that "every pound spent" by the GLA was put online for public inspection, as part of his new "transparent" administration.
There’s been negligible progress on this pledge so far. It took considerably more days than "one" for him to get around to publishing the salaries of his personally appointed, most senior staff, but now we find that a substantial number of "interim" staff will never have their pay publicised (see the last sentence of page 9 of this PDF).
That doesn’t sound much like ensuring that "every pound spent" is put online for public scrutiny, does it?
Naming no names, one of the fourteen advisers listed was among those I exposed as an astroturfer on the Stop Boris blog during the election campaign. I was looking forward to finding out just how well rewarded he would be for his complete failure at his job (his job being to pose as a member of the public and successfully conceal his true identity), but it looks like I shouldn’t have taken Boris’s promise of transparency at face value. Which rather makes me wonder quite which campaign promises I should take at face value.
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I’m sorry Mr Stop Boris, it will take many months to unravel the nonsense that the last mayor created.
You must have more patience.
What are you talking about, Chunters? What does Boris concealing the amount of public money he is paying his cronies – er, I mean, “transition team” – after pledging to make every pound spent transparently available on the web site, have to do with the previous Mayor?
Don’t worry, Mr Stop-Boris, Chunters is a troll.
In the meantime, we should try and think of alternative means for finding out the pay of the advisers. If a lot of concerned citizens posed the question (in a similar time period) they might alter their intentions.
[...] Mr Stop Boris has already detailed Boris’s failure to fulfil his promise and release details of the pay of his entire staff, but we didn’t wish to be purely negative. The Mayor, after all, can only listen to us if we make the effort to talk to him. [...]