Boris Watch

We’ve said before that the rules of debendification are simple - Boris has to ditch one of his frequently stated commitments:

1. Phase out bendy buses
2. Pursue value for money at TfL
3. Reduce congestion

We’ve also assumed that he’ll debendify regardless of the evidence, because he’s stuck up a gum tree by his own campaign spin and related Gilligoonery.  So it has come to pass, Boris has come clean, which means we move onto phase two.

The cost of the new operator contracts, though higher than the existing ones, will help Mayor Johnson claim that the “value-for-money” approach he has required from TfL has paid off. Waiting for existing bendy contracts to approach their expiry date rather than renegotiating them all immediately has resulted in more competitive tendering which has driven the price down, Dave Hill’s London Blog understands.

Now, various things to note here:

1. Debendification officially costs money and we’ll soon know how much.  Therefore any talk about value-for-money goes out of the window, straight off.  Any future mentions of this somehow promoting value-for-money are spin if the *total cost of debendified routes is higher than the total cost of the same bendified routes*.  Which they are.  Therefore I’ll be running a name-and-shame campaign against journalists who swallow this.
2. Waiting until the expiry date - Boris deserves no credit at all for implementing the wrong policy in the right way.  It’s still the wrong policy, and it’s still his policy and it’s still his decision to retain it.  We’ve seen a worrying tendency to hide when the going gets tough, which again we’ll watch for here.
3. I suspect the initial finger in the air figure from London Travelwatch of £12-13m a year extra was too high.  As I’ve said, in the absence of any other figures at all from TfL, that was all we had to go on.  Boris has never offered us any figures at all other than the £8m for replacing bendies with conductored Routemasters (which was obviously rubbish) and the subsequent £100m teased out of him during the campaign, which wasn’t specific enough and doesn’t resemble the policy subsequently adopted.  The actual price depends on variable like oil price, cost of vehicles, cost of staff etc. as well as the competitive environment in the bus industry.  All of these are currently moving in Boris’s favour, as it happens.  The proper comparisons come with both the bendy option and other recent contract awards, of which I have a large database of past information to compare against.
4. It results in a worst bus service.  The proof is this - Boris is choosing to spend money and roadspace debendifying partly to satisfy the Bendy Jihad but mainly to be able to spin himself as a Man Who Delivers.  This is with one eye on his future career, one eye on today’s headlines and no eyes at all on the legacy for London’s transport system.  The result is that, instead of doing something sensible like investing what he has available in increasing frequency and capacity on a conventional bus route, he’s increasing frequency on the ex-bendy routes but keeping the capacity the same.  There are obvious problems here if this attracts more people, as happened when Virgin Trains tried it on the Cross-Country routes, where it resulted in massive overcrowding.  However, again the economic situation particularly in central London means that Boris can partly rely on the recession to get him out of it.

The consequences:

Firstly, we now know we can’t accept everything the Mayor says as true - we’ve seen enough examples of his key personal defects - trying to please everyone, trying to have his cake and eat it, stubborness and refusal to accept evidence.  We now see another one - spin.  Because you can’t actually have your cake and eat it, Boris is increasingly solving the incoherencies in his transport policies by telling Group A (e.g. anti-bendy fanatics) that he’s doing what they want (which he will be) and telling Group B (e.g bus users) a load of spin.  This means we need to identify the spin at source, as it identifies the people Boris regards as second class citizens who don’t deserve to be told the truth.  Applying this technique to past decisions reveals that Group B includes:

• cyclists and cyclist pressure groups
• council tenants
• public transport users
• public transport pressure groups
• environmental campaigners

while Group A includes

• wealthy west London residents
• 4×4 drivers
• Conservative borough leaders
• Andrew Gilligan and the Bendy Jihadists
• taxi drivers

It’s a powerful technique.  Look to see it used more often round here.  Just from that, it does appear that Boris is actually a Tory.  Fancy that.

Tags:   bendy · bus · debendification · spinNo Comments.

Somebody at City Hall loves me - or is just doing their job, whatever - and has finally put Anthony Browne’s employment details onto the Mayor’s website.

There are a couple of amusing bits in the Job description…

6. To help promote the Mayor’s diversity policies.

9. To realise the benefits of London’s diversity by promoting and enabling equality of opportunities, and promoting the diverse needs and aspirations of London’s communities.

When I first read 9, I imagined that it was some kind of admonishment - “realise the damn benefits, Anthony” - but that was too optimistic. Anthony “Political Correctness “makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated“” Browne is the official promoter of diversity in London. His teeth must be being grated to the nerves.

On the other hand, it is possible that Browne‘s changed his views. He might no longer feel that “the only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism“, he might have a more *ahem* nuanced argument about Muslims that “want to conquer the west“ and he might have lost his scepticism regarding ethnic diversity. I wouldn’t mind; in fact, I’d be rather pleased.

However, it would be nice to hear whether he has and, indeed, why. Not only because he’s been such a fierce critic of multiculturalism, but because it would be futile to have a Policy Director that disagrees with his own policies.

Tags:   Anthony Browne · Diversity · transparency · Website5 Comments

Behold the power of Boris Watch - no sooner had I snarked that the crime maps weren’t updated for October yet than they were, er, updated for October, at least for the original pre-Boris site (the Boris site is still stuck at September).  Key point for me is that homicide number - 11 in the month, up from 8 the previous month, but the trend is still reducing to moving average of 12 a month over a five month period (since the peak of 17 in May is now out of the figures - unless there’s a particularly bad month in December or January it’ll drop to nearer 10 when the July peak moves out).  That’s now tracking about 40% lower than in late 2003/2004 and 9% lower year-on-year.

As for the rest, the usual headline figures (theft, knife crime, gun crime) are still falling in with the exception of rape, which is sharply up, although whether this is better reporting or an underlying serious issue (more serious than the perennially important issue of violence against women, that is) is unclear from the bare statistics, as usual.  How are those rape crisis centres coming on, anyway?

The next thing to watch out for is a rise in robbery due to the economic situation - this is a fairly well known effect of recessions, with more people out of work and greater opportunity and incentive to thieve.  With that in mind, I note that suburban Redbridge, Havering, Barking & Dagenham, Hillingdon, Harrow and Richmond have seen fairly sharp rises in robberies over the month, from admittedly low bases. In the city proper, Westminster, Camden, Southwark and Tower Hamlets have also seen increases.  However, of those, Harrow and Richmond are the only boroughs I can find with rising theft over the last 12 months.

I may have to start doing some proper continuous analysis of robbery figures as the recession bites.  Anyone able to give me a lesson in those spiffing online analysis tools Alex used with the BNP data?

Tags: 3 Comments

Sir Ian Blair has gone, and good riddance.  He’s had a go at Boris on the way out, though, which is kind of funny.  Remember them standing up and talking about knife crime at one of those increasingly rare Boris Meets The Press moments?  Actually, do you remember knife crime at all?

Anyway, I suspect the Mayor is off the Blair Christmas Card list:

“One of your close colleagues apparently said that you wanted a boring commissioner next.

“I’m going to tell you, were that to be the case, you will be disappointed because no one can reach this position by being boring and no one can occupy it without attracting controversy.

“Whoever comes next will need you to understand that they need your support, not uncritical but unequivocal, as is the case at every other police authority between the chief and the chair.

The close colleague, one assumes, is Kit ‘Fly Me To Sheerness’ Malthouse.

Traditional snide observation - Boris’s crime mapping website hasn’t been updated for October yet, with December four days away.  That’s even later than usual.  Not forgotten about it, have we?  Budget cuts biting hard?  Even the existing pre-Boris effort hasn’t been updated.  Quite how Londoners are supposed to make decisions about safety and police priorities based on two month old data snapshots isn’t entirely clear.

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Our Mayor is, at least, notionally, in favour of fair trade - the London Assembly recently passed a motion in favour.  Here are the voting statistics and some interesting facts:

1. The motion received 11 votes in favour  (Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green), 10 votes against (Conservative and BNP)
2. The following boroughs are expected to apply for Fairtrade status:  Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Haringey and Merton.
Nine boroughs have not yet achieved Fairtrade status and are not expected to apply:  Barnet, Bexley, Bromley, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster.

A quick check to confirm what we all thought.  As an added bonus, I’ve put on any borough affiliations with Boris’s deputy Mayors:

Expected to apply (largest party first):

• Barking & Dagenham - Labour
• Brent - Lib Dem/Conservative
• Haringey - Labour
• Merton - Conservative (minority)

Not fans:

• Barnet - Conservative
• Bexley - Conservative (Ian Clement)
• Harrow - Conservative
• Havering - Conservative
• Hillingdon - Conservative (Richard Barnes)
• Kensington & Chelsea - Conservative
• Wandsworth - Conservative
• Westminster - Conservative (Kit Malthouse/Sir Simon Milton)

So just how genuine is the Mayor’s approval of fair trade, when his party, Assemblymen and chief lieutenants are overwhelmingly opposed?

Tags: 6 Comments

Well, after all the hints and suggestions that a third way of adapting the congestion charge Western Extension Zone (perhaps by reducing the operating hours), Boris is scrapping the whole thing, from 2010.  This, coupled with the cuts to TfL projects and the inability to find a measly £15m for the London Overground Clapham Junction extension, should put paid to any suggestion that Boris is interested in public transport (we’d already concluded that) but also proves that the green posing, Isobel Dedring notwithstanding, is just hogwash - the awful warning at the last TfL Board meeting of his absurd talk about the motor car being the great emancipator of women shows the reality behind the careful public spin - in a choice between the environment and the car, the car wins.  If the people of Kensington want the freedom to guzzle gas, pollute the air and clog up the streets, they get it.  If the people of Peckham want better public transport connections, they can get stuffed.  Boris is a Tory, serving the interests of Tories.  Who’d have guessed?

With the great timing of all these things, the TfL RSS feed is spamming me with more borough-specific change-a-few-words press releases, about the £168m in borough funding schemes.  Funny how there’s more money for that, too.

Tags: 17 Comments

Via uk.transport.london, the latest on the Dagenham Dock DLR extension and Thames Gateway Bridge projects.  Hazel Blears (one of the New Labour ministers Boris seems to be spending a lot of time with) is apparently getting involved in the issues around the Thames Gateway thrown up by Boris’s summary execution of the schemes, mainly around there now being no transport infrastructure improvement for the future inhabitants of the area.

Now, this could be spin, or it could be a clever game by Boris to shame the Government into forking out or it could be the umpteenth example of Boris’s habit of agreeing with everyone he meets and then doing what he wants regardless (see Boris Airport etc.).  Or, of course, it could be a realisation by both sides that a compromise is required.  This latter theory could explain why the reaction of central government was rather muted at the time.  See what you make of this:

Joe Montgomery, director general of regions and communities at the communities department, said that Blears and Johnson had met this week and agreed on the need for both the projects and were working together on a way to fund them. He said: “We all have an interest in the development of East London and beyond, and both the mayor and TfL are alive to the nature of opportunities on the schemes. But we can’t promise anything at this time.”

So, a very dim glimmer, but at least central government are taking an interest.  Also, since the workings of the Boris/New Labour partnership are something that’s fascinated me from the start, it’s something else to keep an eye on.

Tags: 1 Comment

Because he has the time and leisure to do this, at least in part thanks to being gainfully employed as the producer of the website of one Boris Johnson.  If you have a website and want to join in demonstrating to Mr. Gilligan how the internet works, please do link to Tim’s piece.  Thanks.  We now return you to the usual cut-and-paste sniping at Boris, or whatever Gilligan thinks we do here.

Tags:   gilligan sockpuppet bloggerheads10 Comments

A few months ago I noted that Boris had, rather obliquely, admitted that he was going to stop holding and funding the Capitalwoman conference. Lis Ssenjovu has an update…

“After not getting a response on the status of Capitalwoman (despite multiple emails and messages) I wrote to my MP Diane Abbott. She responded as follows:

‘Unfortunately the new Mayor, Boris Johnson, has cancelled this event, which would explain why you have not been updated on it recently.’”

Cancelling the event without even an announcement and ignoring requests for information, let alone proposing an alternative, shows that Boris’s “ongoing engagement” is hardly a priority.

Last month it was revealed that, while it’s Time For Action on youth crime, any strategy for combating violence against women could be eased onto the back burner. To ensure that Boris’s pledge regarding rape crisis centres isn’t forgotten, the London Feminist Network have created a sample letter to send him. Here’s an extract…

“In the light of what we know of the extent of violence against women in our society - including the fact that in the UK over 45% of women have experienced some form of domestic violence, sexual violence or stalking, and it is conservatively estimated that 80,000 women suffer rape every year – this lack of provision is a scandalous indictment of our society’s failure to care for women’s safety and wellbeing.

…

I understand that you are currently developing a strategy to address all forms of violence against women in London. I would appreciate information as to the aims and reach of this strategy, and an indication of the timescale for its implementation. I would also appreciate information on the timescale for the provision of the four new rape crisis centres.”

If you’re a member then we do encourage you to send one (and, hell, if you’re not then you could write your own. Go nuts.)

Tags:   agendas · broken promises · Capital Woman · crime · Rape · Rape Crisis Centres2 Comments

I hate blogs that just post links to the mainstream media.  Anyway, from today’s Independent on Sunday:

In his maiden green speech, which aides are billing as “extremely substantial” and “a milestone event”, London’s Mayor – who used to denounce “eco-moralists” for spouting “mumbo-jumbo”– is to announce his intention to make the city the eco-capital of the world.

The man who compared fear of global warming to a “Stone Age religion”, and poured scorn on renewable energy, has decided that he wants to make the capital “the world’s leading city in delivering carbon reductions and capturing the benefits of the new energy economy”.

Isabel Dedring, take a bow.  Yet again, the rule is confirmed - ‘don’t believe any of the journalism Boris wrote for right-wing newspapers and magazines represented anything other than the exigencies of his own personal ambition’.

Tags:   green borisNo Comments.