Ken Livingstone talking nonsense again

So Ken has swanned over using his increased council tax take for a trip to India - and he has the gall to go on about climate change.

His latest "great idea", reported on BBC London TV news is to ban airlines flying between London and Paris, and London and Brussels because "you'd be mad" to fly now that the high speed rail link has been opened. Like any budding petty dictator, Livingstone wants to ban the flights.

Of course for starters he hasn't the power to do this, so he's talking out of his arse about "wanting to do it".

However, secondly he is wrong. You're not necessarily mad to fly instead of catching the train. For starters, some people live or work closer to the airports than the railway stations. Heathrow may be a lot more convenient for some west of London than finding your way by rail to St. Pancras. London City Airport is more convenient for some as well. More importantly, one very good reason both BA and Air France fly London-Paris is that the airlines pick up passengers to feed onto long haul flights. You can fly quite cheaply from London-Paris-Africa or Asia for example. However, like many politicians (it isn't just the left) Ken automatically knows what best about something he really knows little about.

Thirdly, what would be the effect of "banning flights"? The price of rail travel would increase, dramatically. It would be a monopoly, then the drones and complaints about the privately run railway ripping people off would also come from Ken. Airlines add competitive pressure, something that Ken has shown no interest in with his London transport policy.

Finally, his own idea fails to reflect that the market itself is already delivering part of what he says. BMI stopped flying London-Paris two years ago because of the competition from Eurostar rail services, Easyjet and Ryanair have also abandoned such routes after having a go at them. Air France has reduced its schedule because it gets higher value from selling those precious Heathrow landing rights to its airline partners like Delta and Continental, than keeping them for this route.

Flights between London and Paris/Brussels have been in decline for a few years, this is likely to accelerate - for good economically rational reasons. People are responding to their best interests, and airlines are responding to this - none need Ken to push them around.

Boris not Ken

It was announced in the past hour that Boris Johnson, Conservative MP for Henley, former editor of The Spectator and basically a witty toff who is best being a TV presenter, sometimes brilliant, sometimes a cringeworthy clown, has been selected to be the Conservative candidate for the Mayoralty of London.

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Unlike in NZ, the Mayor of London has wide ranging powers, these include setting the budget for the Greater London Authority (GLA) , the Metropolitan Police, Fire Brigade, Transport for London, London Development Agency. These roles are being extended to include planning powers, strategic policy on waste, culture and sport (!), climate change and board appointments for GLA bodies. In other words, a helluva lot.

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Ken Livingstone is a Marxist who does deals with foreign wanna dictators, eagerly wastes Londoners money and essentially despises the productive and well off, treating the GLA as a vehicle to apply socialism to London as best he can. He sees himself as knowing what's best for Londoners in housing, business and transport - he hates the private car, but has little interest in dealing with the chronic overcrowding on public transport, he hates traffic congestion but runs the congestion charge more as a penalty system than traffic management - he wants more housing, but wants to specify and dictate what he wants - he wants less crime, but doesn't want to confront the public housing ghettos that both breed crime and destroy property values.

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In short, he should go, and sadly Boris is the best alternative. Boris's thoughts so far are somewhat encouraging. He wants to be tougher on crime, closer to a New York model to be intolerant of small offences that add to fear of crime and insecurity. He wants to change the way buses are funded so that companies who run them are incentivised to give good service and generate fares, not just operate a route. Beyond that he is seeking ideas, and wants to spend the money collected for the GLA more efficiently. So I have a few ideas:

1. Pay the Police based on how local residents perceive safety for themselves and their property, which means tackling all crime that matters to people - assault, vandalism and theft. A zero tolerance approach may take a lot of courage, but it could change much of London.

2. Get out of the way of housing, and don't encourage more public housing ghettos. Much valuable land is taken up by appalling council housing operations that have essentially abandoned families in environments of squalor, it is time to seriously confront this and consider options for selling or demolishing them, and opening up more land for construction.

3. Be courageous on transport. The buses can run at a profit if you get rid of politically correct concessions and charge people more to use them at peak times. The tube could have significant investment in it if it cost significantly more to use at peak times (pricing the tourists onto off peaks). Make operating and maintaining London streets a separate corporate activity and demand a comprehensive study into best practice maintenance and traffic management, which by the way probably wont reside in anything done by UK local authorities including TfL - Ken virtually ignores street management. Open up investment into new roads in London to the private sector, you might be amazed at how and where some new toll highways might make a huge difference to traffic in London - if Crossrail can be a multi-billion pound tunnel, you can do the same to complete ring routes.

4. Treat waste management on an objective cost/benefit basis. Encourage recycling to be a privatised activity and waste collection to be on a competitive cost recovery basis.

5. Don't do anything on culture and sport, cheerlead the Olympics, but people don't need politicians to help them to play, just stay out of their way.

Boris for Mayor of London?

I am pleased Boris Johnson is going to have a stab at being the Mayor of London. Not least because his profile gives him a chance of unseating the angry Marxist embarrassment known as Ken Livingstone. Boris is far from perfect, frequently amusing, but is bound to be better than Ken.

I have no idea what Boris would bring, other than a healthy dose of skepticism about Nanny State. After all when criticising Jamie Oliver he said "I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn't they push pies through the railings. I would ban sweets from school - but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much" later describing Jamie Oliver as a "national saint" and "messiah" given David Cameron's glorification of him.

I want a few things from a Johnson mayoralty - but what it boils down to is less government, less spending and more accountability.

Tfl incompetence

On Sunday my girlfriend and I were driving to Norfolk, with a rental car (and don't give me "take the train" finger pointing, as the car was full with possessions as she is moving there for five days a week for work reasons), and to undertake this journey should be straightforward. We live not too far from the A406 North Circular road (around 40% of a circular route) which is 3 lanes in each direction over much of its length.

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It was a wet day and a busy one, with a considerable amount of holiday traffic - including some tube replacement buses - and so you might wonder why Tfl authorised its contractors to close to one lane each way the underpass (under a railway line) between New Southgate and Colney Hatch lane. Why were the second lanes closed (the road already narrows from 3 to 2 lanes each way because this is the beginning of an awful gap in the A406)?

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Very simple. Contractors were scraping unauthorised posters from the walls of the road underpass.

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Were they doing this on a roadway? No, in fact there are very wide footpaths where the workers were working. Traffic passed beside them quite safely (as pedestrians can walk through this underpass).

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Were they doing work in the road median? No! The only reason the central lanes were closed was to create a space for the contractors' vehicles to be parked!! Parked!!

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The resulting tailback added 20-25 minutes to a journey of about a mile eastbound, it was easily a 2 mile tailback westbound.

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So for some inexplicable reason, TfL authorised the contractors to close lanes in the middle of the day so that some cleaning activity could be carried out. Now, let's just assume for the sake of argument that it wasn't just to park the trucks somewhere (there is an adjacent service station and vehicles could have been parked less than 100m further away on the road without closing both lanes), and there is work in the middle of the road...

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Why isn't this work carried out at night? Dare I say, in Australia and New Zealand such work on a major arterial route which halves the capacity of the route would be carried out in the wee small hours. Yes you pay people more, but this is nothing compared to the cost in lost time, fuel and the safety risk of traffic slowing from 50mph to a stop-start crawl - something that clearly doesn't seem to matter to Tfl. Heaven help you if you catch the Northern line replacement buses that were stuck in the jam in the other direction.

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I can put it down to either:

- Sheer incompetence either driven by failure to appraise whether it is cheaper for London to pay to do this work at night or to do it on the cheap, and create huge traffic jams;

- An obsession with public transport and little interest in highway management, and little interest in minimising congestion through better traffic management.

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Tfl should be split in two - one body dedicated to managing public transport franchises and another dedicated to managing London's highway network. The latter should have a hypothecated stream of funding prioritised to road maintenance, with specific output goals of minimising incident or planned congestion, and maximising the efficient and safe operation of the network. To do this means a major political change in the Mayoralty and the Greater London Assembly. London has one of the worst urban highway networks in the Western world, the north circular (A406) is incomplete and erratic, the south circular (A205) is a circular by signpost only, it is about time that London's road network was properly managed and funded. London's road users already pay enough to use it!

Ken Livingstone rips off developing country and Londoners

It is truly bizarre that one of the world's financial capitals is led by a leftwing nutter who worships Castro (leader of a dilapidated health care system, not that the UN is told the truth by the Cuban government), welcomed leaders of the IRA at the height of the bombings and now is having an affair with the latest leftwing bully, Hugo Chavez.

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So Ken has signed a deal to buy oil (presumably diesel) from the Venezuelan state owned oil company at 20% below market prices, which will be onsold to the numerous London bus companies in exchange for those companies halving fares for welfare recipients.

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This is truly the case of the poor of a poor country paying for the poor of a rich country.

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So what does this really mean? Some think it is great, but when you look into it, London and Venezuela both lose.

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On paper, it is a £32 million a year saving in fuel. London wins, Venezuela loses - welfare recipients in London are almost certainly a lot better off than the Venezuelan poor. What a socialist Ken is, ripping off poor countries to pay for his own poor.

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However this deal isn't just about saving money. By halving bus fares for welfare recipients, there is a loss in revenue. The £1 standard fare (using Oyster cards) goes to 50p, to travel anywhere within Greater London (very very cheap), but this is for 250,000 people. Hockney council estimates that the fare loss will cost £25 million, and the Mayor's office claims maximum benefits of £16 million, so at best London gains £7 million or at worst loses £9 million. Hmmm

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but there is more. Venezuela isn't doing this out of socialist solidarity alone. The Greater London Authority is to provide free consultancy advice to Venezuelan cities on "transport, protection of the environment, development of tourism, and town planning". After all, Caracas and London share so much. That advice isn't free of course, it means opening a GLA office in Caracas - yes the Greater London Authority will have a branch in South America. One estimate of that cost is £45 million. It better be less than £7 million clearly!

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Even more peculiar, Livingstone goes on:

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"At the same time it is a good deal for Venezuela. That country has started on the road of using its oil riches for the benefit of the majority of its population, which lives in cites, prioritising areas such as improving health care and the environment, public transport, better housing and town planning. This will gradually transform the quality of life for the majority Venezuela’s population, including replacing slums with modern towns and cities served by first class public services. London has invaluable expertise to contribute in this field and this will save Venezuela millions of dollars."

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Would you take advice from officials from Greater London Authority or another city or specialist experts on health care, public transport and housing? Remember GLA has no role in health care, some role for the environment, a marginal role in housing and planning (though a major role in public transport). Notice how effective London has been in replacing slums?

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So come on David Cameron - find a sane man to stand for Mayor, I've had enough of Ken Jong Il.