The Labour group on the London Assembly today expressed horror as the Mayor slashed almost half a million pounds from his environmental budget. The cuts come on the same day Boris tried to shake-off his negative environmental image in a speech to the Environment Agency.

Labour’s environment spokesman, Murad Qureshi, said: "On the very same day Boris tries to re-invent himself as pro-green and pro-environment, the reality at City Hall is true blue. He has decimated the environmental department and slashed their budget. Boris’ anti-climate change views are well known, he is a Johnny come lately to environmental matters. It wasn’t so long ago he was siding with George W Bush on Kyoto and likening belief in climate change to a stone-age religion. His actions in office suggest he hasn’t changed his mind – whatever he says to the Environment Agency today.

"It appears Boris can only see projects in terms of the cost on a balance sheet. He can see the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. How does he expect us to believe he has any real vision for London when he can only see as far as the next budget cut and until he wanted to get elected in London was a borderline climate change denier. Londoners will see through his cynical Damascene conversion."

It remains a continuing scandal that, nearly six years after it was first introduced, many embassies in London are still refusing to pay the Congestion Charge. Their justification for this stance – that the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations frees them from the obligation to pay taxes – is an entirely spurious argument, since the CC clearly qualifies as a user charge rather than a tax. Refusing to pay it is no different from refusing to pay the charge for driving across a toll bridge, for example, and no embassy anywhere is claiming they are exempt from that.

The precise cost of this Congestion Charge evasion to Londoners was unclear, so I tabled a question at Mayor’s Question Time in November asking for a breakdown of the amounts owed by the various London embassies. The report (Word document here) supplied by Transport for London contains some shocking statistics.

Top of the non-payment league is the US embassy. Its diplomats have driven through the Congestion Charge Zone 26,165 times without paying. The embassy owes £209,320 in unpaid charges and a staggering £2,735,245 in unpaid fines.

The total figures for money owed by payment-dodging embassies are even more eye-watering. Altogether, diplomatic staff have made 220,540 journeys through the CCZ without paying, resulting in £1,764,320 in unpaid charges and £23,120,389 in unpaid fines.

This situation is totally unacceptable. It is not for embassies to pick and choose which rules they obey and which they don’t. While we are belt-tightening during these difficult economic times, Londoners are having to carry these skinflint diplomats on their backs.

The Mayor needs to stand up to these freeloaders, and insist that they begin paying the Congestion Charge and clear their outstanding debts. It’s not on to have such large sums of money being lost to TfL, particularly at a time when fares are being increased above inflation by the Mayor and transport projects cut.

(See also reports in the Guardian and the Times.)

The London Assembly has called for Twenty20 cricket to be included as a showcase sport at the 2012 Olympic Games.

The text of the motion, which was proposed by Murad Qureshi and seconded by Navin Shah, is as follows:

“The London Assembly urges the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games to work with International Cricket Council and International Olympic Committee to include Twenty20 cricket as a showcase sport at the 2012 Olympics.”

See London Assembly press release, 19 November 2008

Last night’s landslide victory for President Barack Hussein Obama was not only a victory for people of colour but also for people with foreign-sounding names.

Obama had faced ugly innuendos from some Republican campaigners who used his middle name to associate him with Islam – as if that automatically disqualified him from the presidency. It was indeed this very whispering campaign by senior Republicans – “Well, you know that Obama is a Muslim” – which led Colin Powell to intervene during the election. While some answered factually by stating that Obama is actually a Christian, for Colin Powell the response should have been – what if he is a Muslim? And thank god for such principled interventions.

We should applaud the American people for seeing through all that, and coming out in their millions to vote for Obama and for change in the USA. It has restored my faith in the human race and, although I’m not generally an admirer of the Sun, today’s front-page headline – “one giant leap for mankind” – summed it up exactly. Maybe it’s time for me to go back to NYC for the first time since the 11th of September 2001.