Medway campaign poster on Boris fantasy island

The debate over airport expansion in London has rightly concentrated on the plan for a third runway at Heathrow and its potentially damaging environmental consequences. However, for the citizens of east London, a more immediate concern is the noise and nuisance caused by flights into City Airport following Newham council’s decision to give planning permission for an increase of flights from 80,000 to 120,000 a year. So I was pleased to move a motion at last week’s Mayor’s Question Time which called on Boris Johnson to show leadership on the issue by initiating a review of the impact of flights into City Airport. The motion received cross-party support and was passed unanimously by the London Assembly.

The depth of local feeling on this issue was made clear at the Mayor’s “Environment Question Time” event in Ilford in January, where I was on the platform as chair of the London Assembly’s environment committee. During contributions from the floor, speaker after speaker complained about the disturbance suffered by those living under the City Airport flight path. In reply, Boris told the audience that he felt their pain, but unfortunately there was nothing he could do about it. The planning authority in this case was Newham council and he had no powers to intervene.

But Boris’ expressions of regret were the purest hypocrisy. Under his predecessor, there was a clear and robust policy on City Airport expansion. Ken Livingstone’s administration had urged Newham council to reject City Airport’s application for an increase in flights on the grounds of environmental impact and noise. If the council did not agree to this, the Mayor’s position was that the government should call in the application and convene a public inquiry, and that the Government Office for London should prohibit Newham from granting planning permission pending a decision by the Secretary of State.

One of Boris’ early decisions as Mayor was to overturn this policy. In July 2008, in a letter to Newham council, he paid tribute to “the contribution London City Airport makes to London’s world city status, and the benefits the airport offers to the City and Canary Wharf”. In light of that, he continued: “I offer support for the expansion sought by London City Airport…. I shall therefore be writing separately to the Government Office for London, withdrawing earlier objections, and confirming my support for the current proposals.”

So while Boris was bidding for popular support by opposing airport expansion at Heathrow, he was giving it the green light in east London. To cap it all, Doug Oakervee, the architect of the Mayor’s plan for a new airport in the Thames Estuary, has declared himself unavailable to defend that proposal before the environment committee, suggesting that Boris’ fantasy island is dead in the water. The Mayor’s lack of any coherent strategic policy towards airport expansion in London is plain to see.

Published in Tribune, 5 March 2010

The Policy Exchange report, entitled At a Rate of Knots, asserts that the current Transport for London (TfL) subsidy to Thames Clippers amounts to a mere 14p per passenger journey compared with 33p for buses. This struck me as an unbelievable claim, since an earlier report by the London Assembly, London’s Forgotten Highway, had quoted a TfL figure of 69p. So I tabled a question about it to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

The Mayor replied that the most recent monthly figure from TfL is 56p per passenger journey, four times the level of public subsidy claimed by Policy Exchange. He explained the discrepancy between the two figures on the basis that it was “likely that the Policy Exchange figure has been arrived at by dividing the TfL contract payment over the whole of the Thames Clipper operation, i.e. both the supported and the commercial elements”.

In other words, Policy Exchange got their sums wrong.

I take the view that there is much scope for the Thames to play a greater role as a transport highway – but as a means of moving freight rather than passengers. This would have a positive environmental impact by reducing the number of HGVs passing through London. However, if the case is to be made for increased public subsidies to underpin a large-scale expansion of passenger transport on the Thames, it requires more than a dodgy dossier based on faulty arithmetic.

This morning I joined activists from the World Development Movement who were protesting outside the Department for International Development against plans to channel climate change aid to Bangladesh through the World Bank.

I welcome the UK government’s offer of bilateral aid to Bangladesh for climate change adaptation, but like the Bangladesh government I fail to see the need for a multilateral organisation like the World Bank to control the Multi Donor Trust Fund for Climate Change (MDTF) that the UK proposes should administer the aid.

The strings the World Bank may attach to the aid are clearly a concern for the Bangladesh government – and rightly so, given the Bank’s record of insisting on the adoption of neo-liberal policies as a condition for economic assistance to developing countries. And the exhorbitant fees charged by the World Bank for administering the fund would divert money away from the basic task of dealing with the consequences of global warming.

Bangladesh already has Trust Fund of its own and is in the process of setting up a management team for it. The Bangladesh government proposes that the MDTF should be managed by the same unit. While there is no objection to the World Bank acting as a technical consultant on behalf of the donors, the administration of the aid should be in the hands of a national unit.

It is important that these concerns are addressed at the donor conference currently under way in Dhaka and that we show full confidence the civilian government elected in Bangladesh. So it is a big yes to bilateral aid but a no to control by the World Bank.

Well, apart from breaking pledges he made to the London electorate in May 2008 that he would chair both the MPA and LWaRB, it shows that when the going gets tough Boris will leave it to others to get things going on major issues like crime and policing or building London a new waste management infrastructure.

Boris promised to chair the MPA as part of his scaremongering election campaign about crime in the capital, which was in fact falling overall and continues to fall. Nevertheless, last year faith hate offences in London were up by 46.7%, homophobic offences by 26.9%, rape by 24.2%, gun crime by 12.6%, residential burglary by 5.9% and personal robbery by 5.7%. So Boris can hardly claim to have got crime sorted during his brief stint as MPA chair.

With the new Waste and Recycling Board, it is crucial that it makes an impact now and doesn’t miss the golden opportunity to adopt new low carbon technology. But again Boris is walking away when needed.

By contrast, chairing London United is not a job Londoners elected him to undertake. But it is far easier position for Boris to entertain himself with, involving a lot of promotional events but not much actual hard work or attention to detail.

This is what we have come to expect from Boris. His is a mayoralty that gives precedence to photo ops and self-advertisement, but when push comes to shove on the big issues that affect Londoners, the Mayor is nowhere to be seen.

Nor was it clear what he was doing there. Telling the world how London shows the way with retrofitting public buildings and promoting electric cars is all very well, but Boris can take little credit for the former policy, which was launched under the previous Mayor. As for electric cars, it is not at all clear that the Mayor is in a position to lead on this, given that the vast majority of charge points will have to be on suburban roads controlled by local authorities and not on the TfL red routes where we rightly have little off-street parking. And Boris fails to explain what the source of supply for the electricity will be. Is it to be from renewable energy sources or from the sources we are already using? If the latter, then even if electic cars would reduce noise and air pollution they would contribute little to reducing our carbon emissions.

And whilst Boris is preaching to the world about London’s achievements, we should not lose sight of the fact that, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recently published European Green City Index, we are only a middle ranking city when it comes to greenery – in 11th place, just behind Paris. That’s the reality: in the European cities league table we occupy an equivalent position to Fulham or Sunderland in the Premier League, not Chelsea or Man United. Quite honestly only the host city Copenhagen, which comes out top of the Green City Index, is entitled to go preaching to the rest of the world on what cities can do to reduce their residents’ combined carbon footprint.

While he has a look at the tables in the Green City Index and London’s position in them, Boris should also take time out to reconsider his neo-Malthusian views on population growth as a cause of potential environmental catastrophe. (“We are replicating too fast,”, he tells his Telegraph readers, “hurtling towards nine billion souls on the planet like bacteria multiplying on a Petri dish.”) While the Evening Standard has highlighted how this does not fit very well with Boris himself having four kids (which of course is a personal choice), a more fundamental criticism is that the perspective of disaster caused by rising population has been discounted on numerous occasions before in history.

As I wrote about advocates of neo-Malthusianism in an earlier post:

“What they do not want to admit is that the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less, the magic number consistent with stable population, and that it’s expected to fall below this level between 2020 and 2050. (See the recent article in the Economist.) That’s not surprising as poor countries are going through the same demographic transitions that rich ones went through, but at an earlier stage in their development and much more quickly.

“As for environmental damage, the poorest people in the world like the Bangladeshis are producing at most 0.3 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita annually, whereas a US citizen produces 20 tonnes. So, while it’s clear that if the poor countries recreate the same consumption patterns as the US we will certainly have some problems to deal with in the future, at present that is a distant prospect. It is the environmental damage caused by the developed countries that is the immediate challenge.”

Boris’s time in Copenhagen would have been better occupied advocating that cities should be party to any agreement, given that 75 per cent of the CO2 emissions originate from cities and the human race has reach a point now that 50 per cent of it now lives in these huge urban centres. Particularly now that nation states have proved unable to agree amongst themselves on the way forward after the Kyoto agreement, Boris should be calling for cities to step into the breach. Now that would be some leadership!