Boris Watch

Nick Boles is a key link between the Policy Exchange think tank and Boris Johnson’s mayoralty.  Nick Boles has done the decent thing and admitted he put Boris up to appointing Lewis, which is another bit of evidence (along with the Routemaster competition*) of Policy Exchange being able to put its ideas into practice via Boris with very little scrutiny:

Yesterday Boles admitted that he had encouraged Johnson to recruit Lewis and said the appointment was made “in a bit of a rush”. He added: “I am willing to take responsibility for encouraging Boris to make this appointment. I don’t defend the appointment. I am happy to take my share of the flak.”

Flak on its way, Nick - you screwed up badly here.  Now, will Boris follow his example and take responsibility for allowing unelected aides brought in from a think tank to do his thinking for him?  Out with it, man.

* Oh, and taking the anti-racism message out of Rise, probably.  Sounds like their work, particularly since Boris didn’t know.

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Andrew Gilligoon, wetting himself about the sketch-a-Routemaster announcement:

“…what TfL tended to do when a route went from Routemasters to bendies was to reduce the frequency - so it should be easy enough to increase the frequency right back again.”

How true is this?  First off, only three routes went RM->bendy, the others were either double deckers or new/much modified routes where you can’t directly compare them.  The magic three are:

• 12 - current peak frequency every five minutes
• 38 - current peak frequency every three minutes (busiest route in London)
• 73 - current peak frequency every three-four minutes

The 12 was restructured at bendy conversion time, with one part becoming more frequent, another part less, another part scrapped entirely.  It thus can’t be compared directly even though it’s kept the same number.

The 38 - with a bus running every 180 seconds with 100 people per bus it’s going to require a new 72-seat Routemaster every 130 seconds to keep the same capacity.  Apparently it ran every *two* minutes in the 1930s, long before Routemasters, but the frequency dropped until 2002 when it was increased (with RMs) because of, er, the congestion charge, which Gilligan opposes.  In other words, TfL first put the frequency up, then reduced it slightly when it went bendy a couple of years later due to the extra capacity provided.

The 73 is the one that had an ASA complaint upheld about TfL’s advertising, although the ASA actually accepted that capacity increased 25% with bendies, even though frequency was reduced.  They also accepted that Routemasters load slower than bendies if there are more than 10 people boarding.

So, far from TfL ‘tending’ to reduce frequency, the only route that went Routemaster->bendy with a reduction in frequency was the 73 which nevertheless has 25% more capacity.  Gilligan is tending to talk rubbish again.

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I have no wish to distract you again from Tom’s superb post on the problems of the Routemaster, but this little nugget is worth extracting from the ether.

What’s everybody’s favourite erotic cinema director/Assembly member doing posting invective on an eighteen year old’s book review?

Cllr Richard Barnbrook

“Burke…you are full of the self indulgent introspective lefty rubbish where you talk about getting “a better view of ourselves”. This is typical lefty behaviour which dwells on your own emotions and you don’t give a hoot about anyone else.
You speak of innocence yet is is the lefty liberals who ban Christmas celebrations incase minorities are offended. It is people like you who destroy the innocence of children with your equality agenda….so shove off, because I understand your real sinister motive which you disguise with your gift wrapped words.”

(H/t Impotent Fury)

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With loud denouncements of the bemused onlookers, Iain Dale has thrown his hat into the ring .

“There’s nothing the left hate more than a black person who does well in the Tory party.”

That’s a pretty audacious assertion, Iain. You’ll need some strong material to substantiate it, won’t you?

“They look at successful black or Asian Tories and shake their heads in bewilderment at how such itelligent people can’t see what they perceive as the real truth.”

You can substantiate this thesis, can’t you, Iain?

“Yasmin Alibhai-Brown gave the game away a couple of weeks ago when she referred to black Tories as “Uncle Toms”. It may have been an appalling thing to say, but she was merely giving voice to a widely held view on the left. If you’re black and you’re a Tory, you’ve sold out.”

Oh…you can’t.

I heard that Robert Kilroy-Silk thinks that Arabs are “suicide bombers, limb-amputators [and] women repressors”. Do all right-wingers think the same?

Update: The Tory Troll is stockpiling reports from the Sunday papers.

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OK, OK, so you thought the big news is Ray Lewis.  You were wrong, buses are much more interesting:

A leading investment bank, Deutsche Bank, warned that the Routemaster revival would come at a price. Passengers would have to stomach an 11% increase in fares because the estimated annual cost of running the network, already subsidised at £500m a year by the taxpayer, would rise by £117.8m, mainly due to the hiring of around 3,000 extra staff to man the Routemasters.

3000 people would be 1000-1500 neo-Routemasters, depending how intensively you used them.  This is a ‘bus for London’, not just a bendy replacement, after all.  An 11% rise is from 90p to £1, or, for your current Income Support discount user, a modest 122% price rise thanks to Boris, although fortunately this won’t kick in until 2012 onwards, when heaven knows what the price of oil will be.

Elsewhere, Peter ‘Help Me I’m Trapped’ Hendy lets one slip:

He said the last bendy bus would be taken off London’s roads in 2015, when the contract for the 435 from Marylebone to Lewisham expired.

453 actually, Peter, along with the 436.  2015 is when they’d expire if TfL extended them by the usual two years good contract reward, so evidently he’s expecting them to be well run up to 2013 as bendies.  Boris Watch executive summary - bendy bus contracts will be extended during the next Mayoral term, says TfL Commissioner.

The article also quotes Stephen Glaister as a ‘former board member at Transport for London’, confirming what we said here, that Boris heaved him over the side in his bonfire of anyone on the TfL Board who wasn’t a Tory or businessman.  He’s just a well-respected academic specialing in transport policy and transport economics, particularly in London, so obviously he had to go.  He might point out something unfortunate, mightn’t he?

One final thought - Boris is keen on consultations; he’s promised to have one on the Western Extension of the Congestion Charge, after all.  So where’s the consultation on bendy bus withdrawal?  Naturally, as with the Western Extension it would have to be those affected, those who actually *use* the buses.  I think another email to TfL and the Mayor’s Office would be in order here, if only to find whether democracy is considered a rare and precious thing for car drivers in Kensington rather than bus users in Clapton.

Tags:   routemaster tfl bendy hendy glaister9 Comments

Ooh, London Connections linked to us. Welcome, I’m a long time fan.

Anyway, in the long-running saga of bendy bus routes and contracts, the uk.transport.london newsgroup has turned its giant collective transport fact-collecting braindump on the subject and has some corrections for me. Their distilled wisdom appears to be:

25 and 73 have been extended from 2009 to 2011 (I’d love to know when this was done, incidentally). This leaves 12, 38, 507 and 521 as the routes possibly stopping being bendy next year, only the 12 and 38 of which aren’t going to cause colossal problems - the 521 in particular runs every *three* minutes in the peak from Waterloo through the City, out to London Bridge and return. Possibly that’s the one that isn’t going to go double-decker.

People don’t like going upstairs on double-deckers (fear of crime? pointless on short journeys?) so the result will be crush loading downstairs.

Using new untried vehicles in large number risks high costs and potential unreliability.

Bendy use on routes 436 and 453 will extend to 2015 if the two year good performance extensions are awarded.

If they try and force single-entry buses on any of the really high-capacity routes expiring next year they’re going to come a cropper - the public who have to use them will be outraged and clamouring for the bendies back. A childish part of me wants them to try and fail, but the grown-up part wants them to see sense and not inconvenience a large number of people. What’s for sure, if they do it, we here at Boris Watch will make sure people know that the Conservative’s favourite think tank Policy Exchange and Andrew Gilligan are responsible.

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One thing I’m pretty sure of about Lewis is that he thinks of himself as a tough guy (he may *actually* be a tough guy, even if he does apparently live in Milton Keynes) who doesn’t mind making waves and ‘rubbing people up the wrong way’. Given that, and his previous career (such as we can be sure about, anyway) working with kids in some of the most deprived areas of London and in the Prison Service, it seems rather strange that it took 24 hours of really rather mild journalistic pressure (a few questions, basically, inviting comment on some allegations which may or may not be true) from the fearsome likes of Dave ‘Hatchet’ Hill and Jon ‘Slasher’ Snow before he was hollering Uncle and sliding out from underneath. Hardly ‘hounded from office’, is it? Why not stick your jaw out and invite them to take their best shot? After all, you are innocent, as Boris told us. Show some backbone, man.

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Honestly readers, you’re too good to us. More specifically, Wireman, who previously provided the “Are you sure?” footage for us to put on YouTube, has come good again. This time he’s sent me the Boris/Ray Lewis clippings from most of today’s newspapers!

If you’d like to see them, click to read more, below.

[Read more →]

Tags:   newspapers · Ray Lewis5 Comments

A police team has been established specifically to combat knife crime in London. The force is comprised of 75 officers, who will “build on the co-ordinated activity already being carried out under borough-wide Blunt 2 operations and will work in the areas of London worst affected by knife crime“. The GLA press release links to a piece that boasts of 1,214 arrests after 26,777 searches.

In the article, however, Boris speaks of “Ray Lewis…leading a huge drive to get kids off the streets and into activities which raise their aspirations and help turn their lives around“. As he stresses the importance of “addressing the symptoms and the root causes of crime and violence“, Boris should be clear on the changes that will be made following Lewis’s departure, and shouldn’t merely wield the might of the Met.

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From the Telegraph:

It since emerged that the Bishop of Barking wrote to the mayor less than two weeks after he appointed Mr Lewis warning him that he was no longer authorised to serve as a minister, and inviting him to get in contact to discuss the matter. The letter was never passed on to the mayor.

Well, that’s interesting.  Are his highly paid transition team in the habit of not telling Boris about potentially damaging information received from respected members of the community?

Elsewhere, as anticipated yesterday, the wiggle room in the JP story is that he applied but never practiced:

“If you are fully paid-up members of the ‘hair splitters’ convention it will have made a difference to you whether or not I was appointed or recommended for appointment.

“I’ve passed all the interviews for it. I’ve had a letter confirming that I have been recommended for appointment to the board.”

I think ‘Fully Paid Up Members Of The Hair Splitters Convention’ would be a good Boris Watch tag line.  It doesn’t matter to me if he thinks you can pretend you’re a JP if you haven’t sat - what’s interesting is that Boris evidently took whatever he said to mean ’sat in judgement on ne’er-do-wells’ and it was realising that he hadn’t, in fact, done this that finally broke Boris’ confidence (or, in fact, dented it slightly - it only made it ‘harder’ to give him the backing required).

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