Today’s announcement of a ballot by bus drivers to strike, possibly during the Olympics is, of course, not going to lead to a strike – instead it’s a negotiating tactic designed to force Boris to intervene (he’d rather not, presumably, since the bus companies that employ the drivers are private companies).  That much is clear from [...]]]>

Today’s announcement of a ballot by bus drivers to strike, possibly during the Olympics is, of course, not going to lead to a strike – instead it’s a negotiating tactic designed to force Boris to intervene (he’d rather not, presumably, since the bus companies that employ the drivers are private companies).  That much is clear from the Unite union’s statement:

Unite has urged the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson to demand that London’s bus operators end their silence and agree an Olympic payment for over 20,000 bus workers who are days away from voting on industrial action.

Unite has given seven days notice to 21 London bus operators of its intention to ballot bus workers for industrial action.

The failure of Boris Johnson to intervene and the bus operators’ refusal to meet with Unite means strike action could take place up to and during the Olympic Games, if there is no resolution.

Now, we know Boris doesn’t want to get involved, he’s never shown any interest in industrial relations, so what will he do?  On current second term form, sick it off onto someone else, probably Isabel Dedring, the new head of TfL as well as Deputy Mayor for Transport, who is probably the most powerful figure in London’s transport industry now.  Not bad.

…same as the old boss, obviously, and still banging the same old drum.  Truly it’s once more round the merry-go-round for us:

Yes, Boris Island/Peninsula is still going.  Apparently it’s now being pushed as part of Boris’s entirely nebulous and imaginary push for growth and jobs.  There are a couple of issues with [...]]]>

…same as the old boss, obviously, and still banging the same old drum.  Truly it’s once more round the merry-go-round for us:

Yes, Boris Island/Peninsula is still going.  Apparently it’s now being pushed as part of Boris’s entirely nebulous and imaginary push for growth and jobs.  There are a couple of issues with this:

1. you can’t build an airport in four years, so if all Boris is going to do to tackle unemployment of 10% and rising is promise things he can’t deliver he’s going to disappoint people
2. you don’t boost jobs and growth in London by moving west London’s major employer (and the country’s largest single site employer) to Kent

Additionally, of course, all the other objections are still valid:

1. the landing path from the east is over a ship full of bombs
2. it’s prone to fog
3. it’s prone to birdstrikes
4. it’s prone to climate change induced flooding
5. there’s a huge ecosystem of technology and other companies in the Thames Valley because Heathrow is there
6. the airlines won’t move unless you close Heathrow
7. the Government can’t tell Heathrow’s Spanish owners what to do with their airport without a hefty cheque accompanying it.
8. the air traffic control service have said it’s the worst place to put an airport, and that the proposers hadn’t bothered to consult them

The whole airport project was just about understandable as an appeal to west London voters over the third runway and aircraft noise. That’s not an issue any more, with re-election off the agenda.  It’s therefore tempting to conclude that it’s now either about pure Boris vanity, positioning against the increasingly gaffe-prone Prime Minister he wants to succeed or just Boris being the voice of the last person to put a stupid idea in his head, as usual.

On that last point it’s also interesting to note that both of the main airport boosters are moving on; Daniel Moylan is moving from chairing TfL while Boris is away with the fairies (i.e. all the time) to the London Legacy Development Corporation (replacing Baroness Ford) while Kit Malthouse, assuming they can work out the difficult ‘following the rules’ bit of appointing his successor, is leaving (being demoted from a job created especially for him) from his Deputy Mayor for Police/Crime/Dangerous Dogs to a business role.  It’s tempting to suggest that both of them are now in position to act as even stronger airport pushers than before.  I’m sure Malthouse will sternly advocate that the airport will be good for business while Moylan will blather about building an neo-Georgian new town on Heathrow.  Same faces, different roles, same rubbish.

Another quick one – Boris promised, in something of a heated Stonewall hustings, an ‘LGBT Manifesto’.  He’s not produced one.  See Pink News for details.

While Mr Johnson did not answer PinkNews readers’ questions, eagle eyed viewers may have noticed paid advertisements for his campaign booked by the Conservative Party appearing on PinkNews.co.uk, directing [...]]]>

Another quick one – Boris promised, in something of a heated Stonewall hustings, an ‘LGBT Manifesto’.  He’s not produced one.  See Pink News for details.

While Mr Johnson did not answer PinkNews readers’ questions, eagle eyed viewers may have noticed paid advertisements for his campaign booked by the Conservative Party appearing on PinkNews.co.uk, directing readers to his own campaign website.

Oh dear.

Political Scrapbook has obtained emails from City Hall (how? Hopefully not hacking, chaps) that give a bit of insight into the mad few hours when the Back Boris campaign stole the official public MayorOfLondon account before giving it back.  Guto Harri appears to have been mixed up in it, unsurprisingly.

Harri warned staff: “I would also [...]]]>

Political Scrapbook has obtained emails from City Hall (how? Hopefully not hacking, chaps) that give a bit of insight into the mad few hours when the Back Boris campaign stole the official public MayorOfLondon account before giving it back.  Guto Harri appears to have been mixed up in it, unsurprisingly.

Harri warned staff: “I would also like to make clear that you should all avoid any involvement” with the account “for your own protection.”

Si, senore.  How very Sicilian. More here.

Boris likes us to think he’s tackling air quality. He isn’t, for a million reasons (gluing pollution to the roads, pretending it’s all from Europe, scrapping the WEZ, pushing back the LEZ Phase 3 to please ‘White Van Man’ in the Sun…).  Tackling air pollution would mean detail and decisions, neither of which are in [...]]]>

Boris likes us to think he’s tackling air quality. He isn’t, for a million reasons (gluing pollution to the roads, pretending it’s all from Europe, scrapping the WEZ, pushing back the LEZ Phase 3 to please ‘White Van Man’ in the Sun…).  Tackling air pollution would mean detail and decisions, neither of which are in Boris’s game plan.

There’s now, conveniently before the election, a set of documents that Simon Birkett of Clean Air London has been chasing for three years that show how Boris and the Labour Government traded over the subject.  Go and read them, I’m knackered.  They’ve even made the Guardian, look.

According to the papers, Lord Hunt wrote to Johnson urging him to “keep the congestion charge and other initiatives”. But the mayor responded by saying that the rise in traffic levels that would have resulted from cancellation of the congestion zone “was unlikely to materially affect air quality”.

My dad knows Lord Hunt, oddly enough, in a professional capacity.

Boris was down in Chiswick for the eighty millionth time today – I strolled down to see what he was doing, having picked up whispers on the Twitter grapevine (rumoured to be the favoured information source for  out-of-favour journalists to find out what Boris is doing on the campaign trail, indeed).  He had his Battle [...]]]>

Boris was down in Chiswick for the eighty millionth time today – I strolled down to see what he was doing, having picked up whispers on the Twitter grapevine (rumoured to be the favoured information source for  out-of-favour journalists to find out what Boris is doing on the campaign trail, indeed).  He had his Battle Bus parked, engine running, by Marks & Spencer and was talking to a man holding  a TV camera surrounded by a small crowd about 1/3 of whom appeared to be Conservatives in big blue rosettes and the rest idly interested locals, many taking photographs.

Anyway, I had a very specific question to ask, rather than a photo op, so I marched in without asking permission (there were none of the rumoured ‘heavies’ around) and asked him pretty much straight out why he came to office with a Piccadilly Line upgrade date of 2014 and was seeking re-election in Chiswick, where we’ve been waiting for our Piccadilly stop forever, with the date pushed out to 2025 and why are we paying higher and higher fares for the same crowded service?

He recognised me this time, as we were about 400 yards from our previous encounter, although as usual when surprised he lost the ability to string enough words together to describe what was in front of him (I modestly suggested ‘expert’ would describe me).  The result was that he spent a few moments fruitlessly waving his hands at the cameraman trying to explain who I was, without success.  As to the substantive point I, of course, got no answer – in fact I’m increasingly of the opinion that Boris genuinely knows virtually nothing of what’s going on at TfL – he just repeated the mantra ‘it’s important not to cut’ as if reading off a script.  It’s not as if my argument doesn’t have an obvious counter, in fact I deliberately asked the question leaving the counter open (he should have said ‘I inherited an upgrade programme under Tube Lines that TfL assessed to be unworkable and we have been making tough choices to get the project into a deliverable form Londoners can trust’ or something).  Nothing, just the mantra and repeated attempts to turn the conversation into a discussion of Ken’s fare cuts.  That of course made it easy – I just kept asking him why we’re being asked to pay more for a delivery delayed 11 years.  No answer.

Up close Boris looks about ten years older than he is.  Grey faced, too (that may just have been me) and, as ever, monstrously unattractive in the flesh.  I’ve never understood the Boris charm, as you’ll know, but seeing him now I’m wondering if anyone else does, really, beyond the BORIS IS A LEGERND 15 year olds and people who haven’t seen him since he was last on Top Gear.  Certainly Twitter didn’t have a lot of ‘Met Boris in Chiswick what a gent’ going on, and the crowd was, as I’ve said, smallish.  Didn’t feel like a mainstream candidate which either means they’re super confident or the campaign is as big a trainwreck as some of us have suspected for a while.

Anyway, not getting an answer I went and bullied the three people standing waiting at the bus stop – the bus, R-registered, was parked  with its hazard warning lights on and engine idling, right opposite the Chiswick High Road air quality station.  I took in a good lungful of the fumes coming out of the back, marched up to them and demanded they turn the engine off, which to their credit they did.  There wasn’t even a driver in it.

So, that’s Boris’s detailed knowledge of the reasons for his high fare policy blown apart and his commitment to air quality demonstrated not to extend even as far as his own campaign bus.  TfL have a campaign against people who leave their vehicles idling while parked.  Perhaps we should point this in their direction?

P.S. The Battle Bus (photo below taken by @Mr_Pukeko) turns out to have an interesting history for such a knackered old heap – it was originally registered in 1997 as 97-D-356 [PDF] with Dublin Bus and spent its career in Ireland until 2010 when it was registered R271LHK, which it carries today under the ownership of something called the HATS group, in Wimbledon.  It would appear possibly from this antique vintage that it might not be LEZ compliant and thus Team Boris are driving it around London at the cost of a couple of hundred quid a day into TfL coffers and a substantial amount of air pollution.  Why on earth does Boris associate himself with such a thing?  Did someone just ask for an ‘Olympian’ (which is what it is, albeit a Volvo one – Scandinavian airports, anyone?) and didn’t check it for condition?

So, who are the HATS Group?  Their website appears to be a badly proof-read company called Health And Transport Services based in Wimbledon, south west London.  This bit is a bit of a giveaway, mind:

Additionally, we are acutely aware of the financial constraints under which the public sector is now expected to operate. In the current climate, and in the undoubtedly trying times which are set to follow, we will operate in partnership with our public sector partners to assist them in their continued ambition for cost savings. We believe in the implementation of continued and sustainable efficiency gains whilst ensuring that service levels either improve or remain commensurate. This philosophy has enabled Cost Pressure Improvements and cash releases to take place on a regular basis.

Outsource sharks, then.  In fact they are the trading name of a company called ‘Olympic South Limited‘ who quite apart from anything else are going to find a visit from the Olympic brandname polizei with subversive naming behaviour like that.  They’re based in Kingston.  More to the point, the name is instantly familiar to readers of Private Eye after they were awarded a lucrative contract to transport disabled school pupils by Tory Croydon council, which was subsequently stripped from them in messy circumstances that included resignations:

Olympic South Ltd did hold the largest coach and minibus contract with Croydon Council, worth £5.2 million over four years.

The firm has now been reduced to providing a handful of taxi routes after the contracts were re-tendered following an inquiry into how they were awarded.

Wimbledon-based Olympic South was appointed as the main provider of the council’s Passenger Transport Service when the service was outsourced to save £250,000 in August 2009.

So, another triumph for the outsourcing agenda furthered by the election of, well, politicians like Boris who believe the ‘efficient private sector’ hype but don’t do the detail.  How lovely and cosy.  It’s also yet another (essentially) cab company found in proximity to the Boris campaign, after Addison Lee, of the famous bus lane and cyclist self-immolation the other day.  They gave Boris £25k in 2008. Who paid for the Battle Bus?

The name Henry Bilinski crops up a lot in connection with this, and that’s unique enough to be worth Googling. We find him mentioned in, of all places, the Daily Mail in 2007, in connection with (Tory) RBKC closing a day centre to which David Cameron’s disabled son Ivan was driven by OSL:

In a speech last year, the Conservative leader hailed the couple as unsung heroes, saying: “They’re not just drivers, they’re carers, helpers and friends to all those whose lives they make easier.”

…

The Ingrams claim they were summoned to a meeting last month by their employer, Olympic South London (OSL), which is contracted to provide ambulance drivers for Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust.

They say they were told by OSL’s finance manager Henry Bilinski to expect to be made redundant shortly.

David Cameron, Leader of the Opposition, praising the efforts of dedicated care staff, who are then sacked. That would never happen with him as PM, surely?

Finally it’s also interesting to note that all but one of Bilinski’s Directorships are in companies set up since the 2010 election, all named with variations on Boris’s bus supplier HATS and many, in my judgement, in a good position to gain from the outsourcing of public services, particularly NHS ambulance but also school disabled pupil transport services.  How also very cosy.  They are:

• HATS (H2S) formerly HATS (SEN) who are therefore probably ‘Home to School’ for disabled children
• HATS (PRIVATE HIRE) formerly HATS (PCO) who would be minicabs. PCO is Public Carriage Office, of course, prop. Boris Johnson
• HATS (PTS) who might be ‘Passenger Transport Services’ – bus company?
• HATS (CONSULTANTS) 
• HATS (ACCIDENT MANAGEMENT)

t’s interesting how the disabled are seen by the right as simultaneously scroungers out for your taxes and a good source of public sector cash for thrusting entrepreneurs, isn’t it?  How cosy.

Boris Johnson was a no-show on the BBC One TV show Sunday Politics today. Kit Malthouse appeared in his stead, claiming that the BBC had known since March that the Mayor would not be appearing, due to a long-standing engagement.

What was this “long-standing engagement” which prevented the Mayor from being questioned on [...]]]>

Boris Johnson was a no-show on the BBC One TV show Sunday Politics today. Kit Malthouse appeared in his stead, claiming that the BBC had known since March that the Mayor would not be appearing, due to a long-standing engagement.

What was this “long-standing engagement” which prevented the Mayor from being questioned on his record and broken promises by Tim Donovan, just four days before the London Mayoral election?

You can run but you can’t hide, Boris:

Boris was electioneering in Wimbledon, in the outer London Borough of Merton, followed by the Bentalls Centre in the outer London Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames.

I do believe the minstrels from Monty Python and the Holy Grail have a message for Boris:

♫ Brave Sir Boris ran away, bravely ran away, away.

When scrutiny did rear its head he bravely turned his tail and fled.

Yes, Brave Sir Boris turned about and gallantly he chickened out. ♫

City Hall incumbent, Boris Johnson, failed to attend this week’s London Mayoral hustings (organised by the Fawcett Society) at the London School of Economics; he evidently considered the Evening Boris Standard’s readers’ panel to be of far greater importance than a hustings entitled What About Women In London?

The sole female Conservative [...]]]>

City Hall incumbent, Boris Johnson, failed to attend this week’s London Mayoral hustings (organised by the Fawcett Society) at the London School of Economics; he evidently considered the Evening Boris Standard’s readers’ panel to be of far greater importance than a hustings entitled What About Women In London?

The sole female Conservative Assembly Member, Victoria Borwick, was Boris’s stand-in, and her comments on cyclist safety in London caused outrage and shock amongst the audience.

In response to an audience question about a number of junctions on the TfL road network which have seen recent cyclist deaths, Borwick replied [73:10]:

Well, certainly, let’s go to the bicycling first. You’re quite right, TfL are going back to re-examine a number of junctions, regrettably, after some deaths, and every death in London is one too many.

But you know, on the other side, as I wobble along on my “Boris” bike, I take care and I have to say to all of you [gasps of shock, jeers from the audience and cries of "Shame!" from both audience and other members of the panel] I don’t go on the inside of lorries because I know how dangerous it is and we know – I mean, frankly, we’ve all seen these terrible deaths of people squashed and it is really horrible and I’m very pleased…[interruption]

Brian Paddick: So it’s their fault, is it, the cyclists’ fault?

Victoria Borwick: No, and I’m saying to you that it is absolutely horrible and we all need to take care, we all need to respect each other on the road. I know that riding a bike is dangerous, therefore, we need to make the roads safer and we need to look at what we can do in order…I know this is going to be unpopular but we do have to respect each other out there.

In the same week that 10,000 cyclists turned out to campaign for safer streets for cycling, telling Londoners that riding a bike is dangerous and attempting to shift blame for cyclist fatalities to the victims merely proves that Boris Johnson’s superficial Cycling Revolution has been a huge con trick and any cyclist wishing for a truly cycle-friendly London would do well to cast their vote elsewhere on 3 May.

Conservative Boris Johnson is the only London Mayoral candidate committed to raising public transport fares by 2% above inflation for every year of the Mayor’s next four-year term.

Can you guess which London Mayoral candidate said the following during an ITV London Tonight debate between Brian Paddick, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson on [...]]]>

Conservative Boris Johnson is the only London Mayoral candidate committed to raising public transport fares by 2% above inflation for every year of the Mayor’s next four-year term.

Can you guess which London Mayoral candidate said the following during an ITV London Tonight debate between Brian Paddick, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson on 17 April 2008?

The cost of travel for many people in London is extremely high and I think it is scandalous for the Mayor to sit here and tell the people of London there is absolutely nothing he can do.

Yes, it was “Honest” Boris Johnson, who also made the following claim in the same debate:

 I would certainly not allow the congestion charge to go up above £8 which the Mayor promised not to let happen before the last election, and then broke his promise as usual.

Once he was Mayor, Boris Johnson conveniently forgot this pledge and raised the charge by 25%, from £8.00 to £10.00.

Did Boris Johnson lower the extremely high cost of public transport once he got into office?

Since being elected Mayor of London in  May 2008, Boris Johnson has raised the bus fare by 50%.

Two days ago, I attended a Mayoral hustings at which Boris Johnson was represented by Conservative former-Mayoral candidate Steve Norris. Speaking about the benefits of the Freedom Pass, Norris boasted how wonderful it was that, as a Freedom Pass holder,  he could get on a bus at 7am and go off to earn shed-loads of money.

He then proceeded to agree with the other candidates’ representatives that putting up bus fares affects the poorest people in London.

If Boris’s Conservative proxy is earning “shed-loads of money” (unlike the vast majority of pensioners in London) he might, perhaps,  like to make a contribution to TfL’s coffers by paying his fare instead of bragging about his riches. Weasel words about the cost of bus fares are particularly sickening when the Tory Mayor he was representing has put up the bus fare by 50% and intends to keep putting it up every year if he is re-elected.

The daily cost of travel by Oyster, especially in Outer London, has also rocketed under four years of Boris Johnson’s Mayoralty. If you think a 50% rise in the bus fare is bad, the rise in the Oyster daily cap for travel in Zones 2-6 is utterly shocking.

The daily Oyster cap for off-peak travel in Zones 2-6 was £4.80 when Boris Johnson was elected in May 2008 – it is now £8.50, an increase of 77%.

The daily Oyster cap for peak travel in Zones 2-6 was £8.40 when Boris Johnson was elected in May 2008 – it is now £15.80, an increase of 88%.

For part-time workers (who are mainly women) these massive rises are especially financially crippling. Boris Johnson also introduced a evening peak premium for using the Underground, Overground, DLR or National Rail between 4pm and 7pm, so even if a part-time worker attempts to save money on fares by using Oyster pay-as-you-go after 9:30am, they are penalised if they work after 4pm.

Boris Johnson’s election team continues its bumbling adventures in social media by demonstrating the same utter incompetence with which it attempted to hijack the GLA’s @MayorOfLondon twitter account.

The Mayor’s team recently opened an account with Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo  but instead of making any attempt to interact or post anything of particular interest [...]]]>

Boris Johnson’s election team continues its bumbling adventures in social media by demonstrating the same utter incompetence with which it attempted to hijack the GLA’s @MayorOfLondon twitter account.

The Mayor’s team recently opened an account with Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo  but instead of making any attempt to interact or post anything of particular interest to the Chinese, the account has merely copied and pasted posts directly from the @MayorOfLondon twitter account (some of which are merely re-tweets of users who don’t even exist on Sina Weibo), with no regard to the different typography and symbols used.

The Daily Dot reports

Johnson’s account has accumulated more than 50,000 fans, as followers are called on Weibo, and many of them are similarly confused and annoyed. Since he began Weibo-ing on April 12, the vast majority of the mayor’s posts are in English.

They’re letting him know. One recent reply to his confusing Twitter paste pretty much typifies the sentiment of his followers: “Hey old man, can you speak a little Chinese? We’re Chinese people, on Chinese soil.” (“老爷爷~你能不能说点中文，咋们是中国人啊 在中国国土里.”)

Old man Johnson hasn’t yet responded to that person’s concerns, in English or in Chinese.

Just shout loudly enough in a posh, English accent and those foreign types’ll certainly understand, won’t they! Why should the internet be any different?

Johnson’s usual attitude to China and the Chinese (as long as he isn’t trying to suck up to them just before an election) is summed up in an article he once wrote for his chickenfeed Telegraph column:

Let me assert this as powerfully as I can: we do not need to fear the Chinese. China will not dominate the globe. We do not need to teach babies Mandarin. Our Sinophobia is misplaced. Even with 1.3 billion people, and fast export-led growth, the Chinese have an economy smaller than Italy’s, but that is not really the point. World domination – superpowerdom – is all about hard power and soft power, military might and cultural impact.

Well, compared with the old British Empire, and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase. Far from spreading overseas, as the English language has spread, and Hollywood has spread, Chinese culture seems to stay firmly in China.

Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, though there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech.

There are Chinatowns and takeaways all over the world, but in Britain the culinary impact of China is dwarfed by the subcontinent. The turnover for Chinese restaurants is about £282 million, compared with £2 billion for Indian restaurants. It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with the umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I’ll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff.

The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it. And how many people do you know who can speak even a sentence of Chinese? If global domination means anything, it must mean the spread of culture, language and mores, in the way of the Romans, the British, and the Americans. The Chinese aren’t even out of the paddock.

As for military might – hard power – our fears are again overdone. The Chinese may have 2.5 million men in uniform, but of the long-range missiles you need to be a global power Beijing can wield only 20, which would make for a pretty brief fireworks display if they came up against the Americans.

Hur, hur, not much cop at anything, really, are they? None of this, however, appears to have prevented Johnson from telling the Chinese that he wishes for greater economic and trade co-operation and people-to-people exchanges.  The latter continues to be a major problem for Chinese citizens wishing to visit the UK as tourists as the UK is not part of the Schengen Area of 26 Member States.

A Schengen Visa allows Chinese tourists to enter those European countries which are signatory to the freedom of movement agreement but a separate visa is required for the UK:

The UK is not party to that agreement and a separate visa is required, necessitating a personal visit to one of 12 application centres in China. Application forms are 10 pages long and have only just become available in Mandarin.

UK luxury retailers are pressing the government to tackle visa bottlenecks for Chinese tourists, claiming bureaucracy is causing shoppers to shun London stores in favour of centres such as Paris and Milan, reports the Financial Times.

Retail spending in the UK from Chinese visitors topped £350m last year, according to Global Blue, a financial services company, but retailers including Harrods, Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason argue this could be far higher if the UK visa process was simplified.

At a meeting promoting tourism at City Hall last year, the Mayor had a special message for the Chinese:

We certainly want to see more Chinese people coming to London than they do to Paris.

After making a pathetic attempt at electioneering on Chinese social media, rubbishing China’s many achievements and ensuring it’s as difficult as possible for Chinese tourists to come to the UK, I’m not sure many Chinese will be tempted to come to London on Boris Johnson’s recommendation.