Livingstone planning to hand London's transport system to the RMT

Ken Livingstone's campaign is being propped up by the transport unions, last month the TSSA agreed to give the Livingstone campaign £25,000.  They are also looking to merge with the RMT to create a transport "super union".

"So what?" you might ask.

Many of us have suspected that the unions would demand some payback for their financial support it looks Livingstone is planning to give them some.

Val Shawcross with members of the militant RMT union

The person on the left of this picture (holding the poster) is Val Shawcross AM, Livingstone's nominee for Chair of Transport for London.  The people holding the banners are members and supporters of the RMT, the union threatening to strike during the Olympic and Paralympic games despite the offer of a £500 bonus just for turning up to work.

This is the same union that has attempted to cripple London through politically motivated strikes a number of times over the last few years.  They want to get rid of Boris and replaced with people more "sympathetic to their views" and more happy to be their mouthpieces at City Hall.

Bankers and footballers

The row over RBS chief, Stephen Hester's bonus is fascinating.  The public are clearly disgusted that the boss of a bank bailed out with our money is getting a huge salary and bonus, especially while many people are feeling seriously squeezed.  Labour, despite being in charge when he was recruited and his contract set, are making the most of this with opportunistic attack on the government's "inactivity".

Very few people in political life feel comfortable challenging this wave of public anger, there are no votes to be gained in defending big money bankers.  Yet I didn't enter politics to take the easy path.

A wealthy banker

I have met a lot of talented people in the banking industry, that said I have met just as many in the civil service, armed forces, teaching, medical professions, publishing industry etc.  I know a lot of people who would get to the top of whatever profession they were in, yet it seems to be people in financial services that earn the mega-bucks.

Them and footballers.

I think that top end bankers and footballers get paid much more than they need or deserve.  Their salaries have become divorced from their skills and/or experience and are driven by a highly competitive environment and use of their wage levels as a quasi marketing device.  That said I cannot see how any one bank or club could unilaterally change this.

Let's take the football analogy a bit further.  Imagine that far from one of the top teams in the world Manchester United turned out to be a basket case and huge amounts of public money are used to keep the team afloat, Sir Alex is fired and the public calls for his knighthood to be stripped.  In order for us to have any chance of getting our money back we need Man U. to win the Premiership, FA Cup and Champions League.

Some very wealthy footballers

How would we go about resurrecting the newly nationalised team?  Would we persuade Roberto Mancini to take over at the club, paying him more than he currently gets at City and let him buy players from other top teams and keep Rooney, Giggs etc?

Or would insist the new manager is paid no more than the Prime Minister and impose a tight salary cap on the players mid season even if it is in breach of their contracts?

The second option would be a good way to assuage our anger but I don't imagine any of us would realistically expect to win any silverware or get our money back.  I am not suggesting for a second that this is fair but it is the reality.

We need to ask ourselves what we want from RBS.  Do we want it to make money and repay the nation's huge investment or do we want it to go out of business?  It would seem a terrible waste to have spent all that money preventing it from going under a few years ago only to force it to do so now, and take our money with it.

Mayor's Budget Speech

Here is the full text of the speech the Mayor gave today. I don't usually give a full transcript but I think this is well worth a read.

Value for money and freezing the precept

Good morning

This administration has been dedicated to delivering value for Londoners’ money, and to leading the city to a strong economic recovery.  You must remember that in the last four years we have not only been dealing with the deepest recession for 50 years.  We have had to overturn and reform a culture of waste in City Hall.

I might mention the £37,000 spent on first class tickets to Havana, the £10,000 spent on a subscription to the Morning Star. These were just the symptoms of a regime that could casually spend £34 million on architects drawings and consultancy for a west London tram that had no chance of happening. A regime that was happy to squander tens if not hundreds of millions on LDA projects, some of which verged on the dodgy.

We have delivered sound finance to London government, with a 25% reduction in managers at TFL, which now has 3,500 fewer staff and which will have vacated 23 buildings by March. We have secured £2 billion in savings already, and those savings would have been unthinkable under the previous administration. This budget delivers a further £1.5 billion of savings. And it is those savings that have allowed us to concentrate scarcer resources on the priorities of Londoners.

We promised a 24 hour freedom pass – and we delivered it and will protect it. We promised a booze ban on public transport, we delivered it and with the help of hundreds of extra crime fighters we have made the tube network the safest in Europe and brought bus crime down by 30%. I scrapped the vindictive £25 charge on family cars, and I kept my promise and listened to what Londoners really thought of the western extension zone of the Congestion Charge. I promised the world’s best cycle hire scheme, and it has been so successful that there are demands for it to be extended to other areas.

We didn’t rage pointlessly at the Train Operating Companies – we persuaded them to take Oyster on the overground, with the result that millions of Londoners not only have that convenience but cheaper Oyster fares. It is under this administration that the east London line was completed, on time and on budget – and it was this administration that drove forward its second phase, to Clapham junction, to finish London’s first orbital railway.

We were the first administration to introduce a roadworks permit scheme, which now has 27 of the 33 boroughs signed up to and the rest shortly to come on board. This is now beginning to control the number of roadworks. They are now down a quarter on the TLRN from their peak. And when we get lane rental the war on roadworks will have a new and formidable weapon.

Transport investment

This budget builds on our success in securing – despite the tightest spending round in generations – funding to deliver, in full, Crossrail and the Tube upgrades. When we arrived in City Hall we found a creaking public transport system that had suffered from decades of under-investment. It was obvious that the PPP contracts were not delivering upgrades and were wasting hundreds of millions of pounds. It was this administration that ended that madness – and will allow us to ensure that we save Londoners hundreds of millions of pounds, and deliver the upgrades on time and on budget and in a way that suits the needs of the London travelling public.

We know that TFL staff are dealing with antiquated assets and that when a 1920s signal box goes wrong at Edgware road it can disrupt 250,000 journeys. The hole punch signalling technology at Earl’s Court and the 40 percent of the Tube’s rolling stock past its expected lifespan.

If the upgrades didn’t happen these assets would fail more frequently, resulting in a 30% reduction in capacity. Londoners will be asking, as they make their decision, what will be cut by those who call for a £1.2 billion reduction in TfL’s revenue. Perhaps it’s the Bank station congestion relief work, or the upgrades on the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines. Or perhaps the sub-surface lines. Or congestion relief works at Victoria, Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street stations. Or cutting the Safer Transport Teams and the bus network. Which would it be? I know we will be rehearsing these arguments over and over again and I understand the politics of it.

As has my predecessor who has made the same promise in 2000, 2004 and 2008 and yet has never actually delivered on that promise.

Policing & Crime

Turning now to the MPS budget. It is the first priority of the Mayor to keep Londoners safe and I believe in keeping numbers high, that is why I am re-balancing the precept towards the police to maintain those numbers.

And of course again I understand the politically motivated but frankly false claims made by some about “police cuts”. There will be around 1,000 more fully warranted police officers on London’s streets at the end of this term than I inherited. That along with more than doubling the number of specials from 2,500 to over 5,000 and single patrolling has meant that there will be one million more visible police patrols at the end of this term than at the beginning.

All of this has meant an overall reduction in crime over this Mayoral term of over 10%. Youth violence is down over 15%, robberies down almost 17%.

Remember back in 2007 the numbers of teenage homicides. Just one is one too many but programmes like Operation Blunt 2, which has taken 11,000 knives off the streets and Time for Action have had a genuine effect on the number of violent teenage deaths, with the number halved.

This budget builds on the successes of this term and there will be NO police cuts while I am Mayor.

We will keep numbers at what I believe to be a safe level, which is around 32,000. Safer Neighbourhood Teams are sacrosanct under me. They will all retain their structure of at least 2 PCs and 3 PCSOs overseen by a sergeant.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to all of those who served on the MPA the past 12 years. And to Kit Malthouse for his excellent chairing of that body and now leading the MOPC through difficult negotiations to deliver this excellent budget for the Met.

LFEPA 

LFEPA has had real success over the last 4 years with the fire brigade engaging much more with the community, increasing the number of home fire safety visits by over 80% and the incidences of arsons has halved.

This budget builds on the success delivering more savings to a total of £48 million during this Mayoral term. 

This year saw some of the busiest nights in the Fire Brigade’s recent history and I pay tribute to all of London’s fire fighters for managing the situation with their usual professionalism and incredible bravery. The London Fire Brigade has been an exemplar of the public sector doing more for less and sensible investment for long-term savings.

In this budget we are using £4.469 million in ear-marked reserves to buy-out outdated terms and conditions, which will save £1.362 million every year hereafter. Under this Mayor there will be absolutely no reduction in fire cover and we will continue to make London a safer city.

City Hall (LDA + HCA) 

The last year has seen the LDA and the HCA successfully integrated into the GLA. My budget cements that ensuring full delivery of their programmes. I promised that I would deliver 50,000 new affordable homes – the most in any single Mayoral term. And despite the terrible economic conditions of the past few years by May there will be. And during the next investment round, over 2011 - 2015, we will deliver a record breaking 55,000 affordable homes, which will not only house London’s workers but will also create 100,000 jobs. 

The apprenticeships programme has succeeded well beyond our expectations, surpassing our original targets with 40,000 already underway. The budget gives us the means to deliver our new target of 100,000 by the end of this year.

This budget allows us to complete the delivery of £216 million to regenerate the capital coming from my Regeneration and Outer London Funds and the Growing Places Fund. Together, these are helping to give our high streets a real boost. Some traders in Orpington and Bromley have seen a significant increase in footfall and sales following investment from round one of the Outer London Fund. And I know we all look forward to the delivery of round 2, which will see 23 projects across 18 boroughs.

This budget allows these investments without any extra borrowing – again showing how this administration’s careful stewardship of the public finances will not burden future generations in debt – in stark contrast to the former Labour government.

Olympics 

Last but not least this budget delivers, through the new Mayoral Development Corporation, a true legacy for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, on time and on budget. And this budget delivers the legacy that had been promised. There will be 10,000 new homes – 40 percent of them family sized – and 10,000 permanent jobs in addition to all those already created by Westfield and other regenerated parts of east London.

We are carrying forward a £30m programme in grass roots sport - with more to come - to deliver a sporting and health legacy. For young and older Londoners; and I thank Kate Hoey for everything she is doing on this.

Growing the economy 

This is a budget that builds on this administration’s achievements over the last 45 months. It delivers the promises I made four years ago and is a budget to grow London’s economy. London has a fantastic future.

We are in the right time zone, speak the right language, and unlike virtually any other city in western Europe we have a young and growing population. But that dynamic and growing city needs investment if it is to compete. We need new river crossings. We need to extend and improve the tube network. We need to continue to improve reliability, and to end the scandal of overcrowding on a scale that would not be tolerated for the carriage of livestock.

We have a choice.

We could go for a short-term political swindle that will cut more than a billion from our investments – and which would simply drive fares even higher in the future. Or we can keep going with our programme of driving down crime, investing in transport, and growing the London economy.

We can go back to the politics of waste and division and posturing. Or we can get on with the work of improving the lives of Londoners.

I want to get on with that work, and I commend this budget to the assembly.

Livingstone's fares claims blown out of the water

The "promise" to cut TFL fares by 7% is a key plank of Livingstone's election bid.  I have never believed that he would deliver on this because he has a track record of saying one thing before an election, then doing something completely different afterwards.  But I'm a Conservative and you'd expect me to say that.

But Channel 4 News has a well respected and independent FactCheck site which has looked at Livingstone's claims that he could cut fares but not services and determined that they are "fiction".  If this was a peripheral issue it would be damaging enough but his well publicised fares announcement is the core element of his pitch and the number have been proven not to stack up.

Another example of Livingstone's crass hypocrisy

Londoners are too lazy to work claims Mayor, he went on to say "In seven years I have only been served coffee once by a born and bred Londoner". The year was 2007 and the Mayor in question was Ken Livingstone.

Funny how a few years later and no longer in office he has slammed the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, for saying "I don't want to stigmatise young people because many of them do have the aptitude, but we need to face up to these issues. In some cases it can come down to the fact that the jobs are there and people need to have the energy to go out and get them." he went on "London is a fantastic creator of jobs but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country,".

Whether you agree with the point or not, you cannot fail to notice the breathtaking hypocrisy of Livingstone.

I spent this afternoon with a Seetec "Welfare to Work" provider in Bexley and before Christmas I visited CDG in Bromley who do a similar thing.  Speaking to them both at length it is clear to me that worklessness isn't just about the economic downturn or educational attainment, it has a lot to do with the motivation, flexibility and tenacity of the applicant.

Both Boris and Livingstone were articulating that fact, the difference is one of them also articulated a huge amount of hypocrisy at the same time.

Hat tip to Boris Backer

BT, better on the internet than on the phone

If you have a problem with BT @BTCare is the place to go.

Last week, for no fathomable reason, we started to receive someone else’s phone calls on our home land-line, it seems that BT had either metaphorically or literally got their wires crossed. My wife rang up BT to ask them to sort it out.

They managed to stop the wayward calls in just a few hours but in doing so also stopped all other calls as well. She rang them again (on a mobile phone) to ask them to sort this new problem out and got some of the worst phone based customer service either she or I can remember. The person at the BT end was uninterested and failed to properly address our concerns and when asked to put us through to someone more senior diverted the call to a "how was our service" survey.  Neither of us was happy at all.

I decided to tweet about the situation to BT's twitter account and got a much better response, it still took three days to repair the line but at least the service was a bit more professional.

I take two things from this, first is the irony that a telecoms company has such poor telephone customer service and secondly, don't complain in private. If you have a problem with BT, and I suspect this is true of other utility companies too, complain in public on their twitter account, it seems to focus their minds.

Luke Bozier's defection is interesting, Labour's reaction is fascinating

Luke Bozier isn't famous, he isn't at the top of the Labour party and he isn't part of Miliband's top team.  He is an entrepreneur, former Tony Blair adviser and author of the Labour Business Report.  Outside political circles, and even inside, he isn't a big name but he is exactly the kind of person that the Labour party need to keep if they are to have any chance of forming a government any time soon.

But he's gone.  In this post he explains why he has left the Labour party and joined the Conservatives.

People changing their minds about a political party shouldn't be big news, political campaigning is all about getting people to look at you afresh and perhaps change their mind about you.  It is also important that in response to falling support you look at what is driving your supporters into the arms of another.

Labour's instinctive reaction is to say "sod you, we never liked you anyway".  Neil Kinnock spoke over the weekend about the "cowards" in the Labour party who were critical of Ed Miliband and there has been a wave of on-line abuse directed at Luke Bozier.  What is noticeably lacking is a big wave of self awareness.

Instead of say "good riddance", Labour should be asking "what have we done wrong?" but that's not their style, as I said here, they feel it's better to be ideologically pure than actually try to improve the country.

Labour's message is fundamentally flawed

I've just caught up with Ed Miliband's interview on the Andrew Marr show where he tried to explain Labour's newly found position.

Ed Miliband on Andrew Marr show

He said that after the next election, if Labour win, they couldn't guarantee that they would reverse any of the spending cuts that the Coalition have made.  "We will inherit a difficult financial position" says Ed, "which is why  no unfunded promises that can be made" sensible stuff.  He then undermines it completely by then stating that the government is getting it wrong at the moment, cutting too much, too fast and should change their policy on public spending cuts.

Has he not noticed that we are living through tough economic times, far worse than the situation that will be met after 2015.  So if spending cuts can't be reversed in a more benign 2015 how can he claim that spending cuts need to be reversed now?

Taking a stand and making a difference

I'm really pleased to hear that Pauline Pearce, who famously stood up to rioters in Hackney in August is doing more for her community by joining the advisory group for a Hackney free school.  I can't help but think that the passion that she showed in that video will serve the students of the school well.

Make film making cheaper

David Cameron has called for the UK film industry to be more bold and take on the might of the Hollywood studios and announced that film funding will be focussed towards achieving that goal.

The film industry is incredibly important to London's economy as very few films don't involve a London based company somewhere along the way.  I have long been envious of the amount of exposure that New York gets from the film's that are set there, so many of it's buildings and roads have become iconic through their use in film.  Unfortunately London isn't easy to film in and consequently hasn't had as much movie exposure as NY.

To get the blockbusters made here in the UK we must continue to encourage new entrants and smaller players in the film industry too.  One simple idea that could help the emerging end of the market is the cost of getting a film classified.  Putting a film through the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) cost the same for film with a budget of £100 million as it does for one with only £100,000.

If the BBFC could operate a sliding scale to help smaller films get to market it would be another small step towards building a vibrant and profitable film industry in the UK.

Clegg on Europe

The Indi is running a story about a potential "rift" between Clegg and Cameron over Europe and the veto.  This is such a non-story, Clegg's position on Europe is well known.  Cameron's position on Europe has been made clear and is much more in tune with the wishes of the British people.

David Cameron is the Prime Minister and his position is both right and popular.  Nick Clegg is not Prime Minister and his position is wrong and unpopular.  Bets please on whose views will win out.

I think the Cabinet Room is the best place for Cabinet meetings

I can completely see the point of a ministerial visit to the 2012 Games venues, I think it's great that the PM and other to members of government used the high-speed Olympic Javelin shuttle from St Pancras to Stratford to celebrate 200 days to games time.

But I still can't see the need to have Cabinet meetings all around the country.

I used to do a lot of business travelling, lots of meetings in lots of places, you get to see the train or plane, a taxi, the inside of a meeting room, a taxi and then a train or plane.  You get to see very little of the places where the meetings are whether it be Lewisham, Liverpool or Lima.

If the point of these visits is to see the place, then just go for a visit and be shown around.  If the point is to have a Cabinet meeting then just do it in the Cabinet Room in Whitehall, I just can't see how mixing the two can work.

Margin Call - Film Review

Can bankers be loveable? While this film by first time writer/director J.C. Chandor doesn't exactly try to make them lovable it goes a long way to explaining their behaviour and present them as human.  The film is billed as a thriller, but those craving a fast paced adrenalin ride will be disappointed, it is a drama and is the more powerful because of it.

Margin Call starts and ends with the mass sacking of traders on a banking sales floor and is not so loosely based on events at Lehman Brothers in 2008.  We cut to Kevin Spacey, Head of Sales at the bank, in his glass walled corner office crying as former colleagues with boxes of personal items are led from the building by security.  He is crying because his dog is dying.

Following events over a fraught 48 hours the film studies the motivations and limitations of the key players in potentially catastrophic financial collapse.  They jockey for position, look to allocate blame and cover their own arses, speculate as to who will survive the maelstrom that they know is coming and is of their own making and despite the fact that they are people we have been trained to hate we care about what happens to them.

The cast is top draw with Paul Bettany and Jeremy Irons providing a strong British contingent, with Bettany deserving particular praise.  Kevin Spacey and Stanley Tucci giving performances every bit as good as you would expect, Zachary Quinto of Heroes and Simon Baker star of The Mentalist making a comfortable transition from small to large screen and Demi Moore showing she is more than capable of playing a role stripped of glamour, full of character.

Although Margin call is is his first feature length film J.C. Chandor has directed a number of music videos and this show in the style of the film.  It has a muted colour palette, grey suits, pale faces, dark nights, neutral corporate office décor, yet it is never visually boring and the director has an eye for light and shadow.

The film was shot on a tight budget as potential funders wanted this to be a morality tale, good guys and bad guys, the bad guys getting the complacence and the good guys winning out in the end.  J.C. Chandor stuck to his guns and kept every one of the characters complicated, doesn't artificially punish those who we know went unpunished, refuses to let the viewer off the hook and throws our own culpability back at us.  While watching this may not be comfortable it is compelling.

This could so easily have been a told-you-so film full of whipping boys but it is better than that.  It helps you understand what happened in the sub-prime mortgage collapse and understand the people who made it happen.  Well worth watching.

Margin Call - Cert 15 - On general release from 13th January

Iranian sabre rattling more about their internal fears?

The Iranian leadership is turning up the heat at the moment.  First there was the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil route, which led Philip Hammond to issue a strongly worded warning last week.  Today I read that the Iranian government have issued a death sentence to someone they describe as "an American spy" knowing that the USA won't take it lying down.

So we ask ourselves "what are they trying to achieve?", I'm pretty sure that they don't want to start a war, and neither do we or the Americans.  So I'm drawn to the idea that it is more to do with an internal show of strength.

The Arab Spring must have sent a shock wave through the Old Guard in Tehran, and with the blogging community very active in Iran (Persian is the second most popular language for blogging) and elections in the near future it is probably useful having a powerful enemy to "protect" your people from.

Let's see how this pans out once the elections are over.

Labour more happy being a party of protest

I found the survey results here on LabourList.org very interesting.  When asked what the top political event for the Labour party of 2011 was the November strikes cam out top by quite some margin.

Source: www.LabourList.org

A number of things struck me.  Firstly it wasn't a Labour party event, it was a union event, indeed Ed Miliband  didn't back the strikes. To be fair he didn't really oppose them either, he was a it on the fence.  Secondly it beat things like the Euro crisis, the August looting and phone hacking all of which I feel confident sit higher in people's minds than the (rather lacklustre) strike.

I have long felt that the Labour "movement" feel much more comfortable with opposition than government.  Being in government means that ideas are tested against reality, it involves making decisions and implementing them rather than just talking and belly-button gazing.  It involves being criticised rather than being critical.  In short it is less fun.

Looks like Labour members are more happy being a mix of debating society and protest group than a credible alternative government.  I'm happy with that.

Why no one believes Livingstone on fares

#Kensfares

Ken might believe what he says about transport fares but the feedback that I get is that very few other people do. He has too much history of saying one thing before an election and doing something else afterwards to have any credibility on this issue.

If we want London to stay at the forefront of world cities we have to have a decent transport system, decades of under-investment have to be compensated for.  No one likes fare rises or service disruption but we would like it less if we started to lose out to international competitors when it comes to tourism income, inward investment or economic development.

In a world where bags need packing...

Cracking video made by Bromley District Scouts.

175 young people and Leaders from Bromley Scouts raised £11,000 by packing shopping bags in Sainsbury’s in Bromley in the week before Christmas. The money raised will be used to support the work of three local charities Demelza House Children’s Hospice, Guys & St Thomas’s HNT Cancer Charity, and Deaf Access, a charity based in South St Bromley.

Huge congratulations to everyone involved.

Stephen Lawrence - Justice a long time coming

I find it hard to believe that Stephen Lawrence was murdered almost 20 years ago.  I find it hard to believe that the investigation into his murder was so badly hampered by racism and ineptitude that Stephen's murderers walked free and I now find it hard to believe that they have finally been brought to justice.

But justice has now, at last, been done and I hope that despite the appalling delay the verdict will bring some degree of comfort to Doreen and Neville Lawrence and Stephen's family and fiends.