Filed under: Life Under Boris
At Mayor’s Question Time at City Hall yesterday I questioned Boris Johnson on the issue of air quality and its impact on public health, which is a major issue for Londoners and one that the Mayor has a clear responsibility to consider in his decision making.
Due to poor air quality in the capital we have more than 1,000 accelerated deaths annually – almost five times the number of fatalities resulting from road accidents in London – and 1,000 extra respiratory hospital admissions. At the last meeting of the London Assembly’s Environment Committee we heard from Dr Frank Kelly of King’s College that poor air quality may also be responsible for a reduction of 17 per cent in some children’s lung growth by the time they hit their teens.
In reply to my question, Boris listed his discussions with central government and the PM about the development of an electric car infrastructure in London and with Mandy at BERR about subsidy schemes for replacing the oldest and most polluting light goods vehicles – which in all likelihood will take him beyond even the extended deadline for compliance with the EU air quality directive. While Boris busies himself with grand schemes like these, which will have an impact only in the longer term, he fails to address the immediate problem that London has the worst air pollution in the UK and among the worst in Europe.
In the here and now, Boris’s decision to halt the further rollout of the Low Emission Zone to cover light goods vehicles tells us all we need to know about his concerns about air quality and its implications for Londoners’ health. It was hardly surprising that he announced this shameful decision on the day that the chaos caused by the heaviest snowstorm for many years dominated the media, in an evident attempt to bury the news in the snow.
February 26, 2009
One of the first things Boris Johnson did in May, as the new mayor of London, was to ban the drinking of alcohol on public transport, particularly on the Underground. Previously this had not been an issue much raised by Londoners in my experience, but the ban – and along with it the authority of the mayor – may well come up against its biggest challenge on New Year’s Eve when free travel will be offered on the tubes and buses of London for all the revellers.
It’s a time of year which attracts and encourages a lot of drinking including in public and often on our transport system. So how is Boris going to enforce his ban? Extra police cells could be appropriate, as I suggested in jest at the last Mayor’s Question Time on the 17th of December. Maybe we have time enough for an one-evening amnesty to be put in place. Now this could be a real test of Boris’s mettle and his libertarian credentials, both at the same time!
December 24, 2008
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.)
November 20, 2008
One principle Boris Johnson has consistently applied since his election as mayor last May has been to keep interviews with the media to a minimum. Anyone who witnessed his inept performance on the Politics Show on Sunday (YouTube video here), as he tried to bluff his way through pointed questions about his role in removing Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair, could only conclude that interviews with the mayor are likely to become an even rarer commodity in future.
Johnson repeated his ludicrous claim that Sir Ian had voluntarily decided to stand down rather than being forced out – an assertion reportedly dismissed by Blair himself in the succinct phrase “absolute s***”. The reality, to further quote Sir Ian’s reported remarks, is that Johnson “made it absolutely clear that he was determined to bring about a change of leadership, and in the circumstances I had no choice but to comply”.
At least in the Politics Show interview Boris spared us the equally bogus claim that he consulted widely before his final meeting with the commissioner that resulted in the latter’s resignation. In fact, there is no evidence that the mayor’s “consultation” extended very much beyond Tory Assembly member Kit Malthouse, his deputy mayor for policing – and now earning an additional salary as “full-time” vice-chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority.
Indeed, if the Daily Mail is to be believed (see “Cameron kept in the dark on Boris’s one-man coup to oust Met chief Blair”, 4 October), Johnson didn’t even see fit to discuss this highly controversial and potentially politically damaging decision with the leader of his own party.
Moreover, the timing of Sir Ian’s dismissal – a matter of days before Johnson was due to chair his first meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority – was clearly intended to present the MPA with a fait accompli and pre-empt any debate by its members over Sir Ian’s future. As Len Duvall, Johnson’s predecessor as MPA chair, observed, it seems that Boris “simply appointed himself judge, jury and executioner”.
Despite being repeatedly asked for an explanation by Politics Show interviewer Jon Sopel, Johnson refused to offer any justification for ousting Sir Ian. In his speech to the Tory party conference, however, he gave us an insight into his reasoning. Echoing the language of Melanie Phillips and other hard-right commentators who have long campaigned for the removal of a man who represents the “political correctness” (i.e. support for anti-racist initiatives and multiculturalism) they so despise, Boris condemned the development of a so-called “grievance culture” among members of minority communities in the Met on Sir Ian’s watch.
One particularly revealing moment in the Sopel interview was when Johnson was confronted with the central charge that by forcing Sir Ian from his post he is guilty of politicising the job of Metropolitan police commissioner. Hasn’t a precedent been set, he was asked, whereby future commissioners will be hired and fired dependent on their political acceptability to whichever party occupies the office of mayor?
“Balderdash, codswallop, tripe, codswallop, absolute codswallop”, was Boris’s blustering response to a charge he described as “on the wilder shores of fantasy”. Presented with a statement by the chief constable of West Yorkshire, Sir Norman Bettison, that he has decided not to apply for the post of Met commissioner because he will not accept “political interference” from the mayor, Johnson was left shifting uncomfortably in his seat and clearly fuming that anyone should have the nerve to question his judgement.
The accuracy of the charge of political interference has only been underlined by Johnson’s proposal that the appointment of a permanent replacement for Sir Ian should be delayed until after the next general election – in the optimistic expectation of a victory for his own party – so as to ensure that the new Metropolitan police commissioner will be someone who meets with the political approval of an incoming Tory home secretary.
Along with other members of the Labour Group on the London Assembly I hold the view that the Met cannot be allowed to drift without clear leadership until May 2010, or whenever the general election takes place, and that the appointment of Sir Ian’s successor must, as with previous appointments to the post, be made exclusively on merit, not on the basis of party politics. I am confident that Jacqui Smith – and it is the home secretary, not the mayor of London, who has the constitutional authority to appoint the Metropolitan police commissioner – will reject Boris’s irresponsible and politically-motivated delaying tactics.
During the mayoral election campaign Johnson’s right-wing cheerleaders at the Evening Standard portrayed Ken Livingstone as an arrogant individual, corrupted by power, out of control, and unaccountable to anyone but a small group of overpaid political cronies. This malicious caricature of his predecessor’s administration increasingly appears to be an uncannily accurate description of the regime over which Boris himself now presides at City Hall. The role of Labour’s London Assembly members in reining in the mayor and his advisors, and making them accountable to the people of London, will clearly be vital over the next few years.
October 6, 2008
In his column this week in the Telegraph, the Mayor raises the thorny question that most political campaigners face when delivering election literature and one that clearly plays on his mind – how to avoid the dog on the other side of the letterbox.
My experience, for what it’s worth, is that the bark bears no relationship to size. Indeed, it’s the smaller dogs that cause more noise than their larger counterparts. Furthermore, they seem to be able to detect someone walking up to the door much better than bigger, lazier dogs. Personally, I’ve always been concerned by the number of dogs kept confined in flats and houses – for, while we consider ourselves an animal-loving country, the cruellest thing we do with them is keep them locked up all day. Thus it’s not surprising that many dogs get over-excited when someone approaches the property or knocks on the door.
The interesting thing is that Boris Johnson raises the issue at all in his august column, showing I suggest a wimpish response to a dilemma most postal workers have to deal with on a daily basis in their occupation. So I suggest that the postal workers of the UK send in their pearls of wisdom on this issue to the trembling Mayor here at City Hall before he goes off on another election campaign, reduced to a nervous wreck at the prospect of meeting another dog on his travels.
October 2, 2008
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