please empty your brain below
I can't imagine any other politician having been brave enough top introduce the congestion charge.
Bus travel has been transformed for the better - and is now growing in use fast whereas over the whole of the rest of the country it's declining.
Same goes for cycle use.
There are more police thane ever on the streets, and crime is down significantly.
Boris maybe amusing but leaving him in charge of a city as big as London would be an utter disaster.
I have to disagree with Geoff. I don't think Ken has handled crime well (just look at the teenage stabbings in the capital last year) and I'm not overly keen on the bendy buses, which don't seem to handle London's labyrinthine streets well. I also think the tube could be better managed. I say give Boris a chance. At the very least I think it'll be worth the change.
Politics - you can't live with it, but you can't live without it.
Ken has made significant and decisive actions regularly since taking charge - you may not like all of them but he can't be accused of being inactive or not sticking to his manifesto promises.
& re. the tube management - Ken was the most prominent opponent of the PPP, it's hardly his fault it hasn't worked out. He has though finally managed to persuade Gordon to sign off Crossrail and he's made big improvements to the Overground already since taking over.
As Geoff suggests, this is tabloid crap. Murder rates for teenage boys have hovered between 20-40 per year since the 1960s, and continue to do so.
(also re bendies and London streets, have these people ever actually been to London and/or seen a bendy? They've got smaller front and rear overhangs than regular buses, and I've never seen one have problems negiotiating London's streets at all...)
anyway london crime figures should go down. i need a safe london
I hope all your readers will have the sense to vote Ken, rather than making a petulant anti-Ken protest vote in favour of someone wholly unsuited for the job...
Look forward to normal service resuming next week (hopefully with a new mayor)!
http://www.johannhari.com/index.php
(An ineresting postscript on that page in which Hari enlarges on his view on Livingstone's meeting with Qaradawi...
Compare the zero victims of Ken’s bad decision to talk to Qaradawi with the large numbers of real people who will be penalized if Boris wins. The poorest people in this city will have far less access to affordable housing; tens of thousands of workers for the London Authority who are currently paid the London living wage – £7.80 an hour – will soon see this scraped back to the minimum wage; we will all have fewer police to protect us when he makes “big savings” in their budget to pass on as tax cuts for the rich; and the victims of a destabilised climate will pay for one of the great world cities having a mayor who has mocked Kyoto and cheered on George Bush’s decision to kick it into the trash can.
And a good piece from Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian's G2 about Gilligan's partisan smears for The London Evening Daily Mail's campaign to get a non-Londoner Tory elected as Mayor of this city.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/...s&
feed=politics
1) House prices outside of London will increase rapidly as people migrate en masse from the metropolis.
2) BoZo's calamatous cock-ups and corruption will ensure Cameron loses the next general election.
3) BoDoh's bumbling response to any future terrorist incident, whilst at first embarrassing and upsetting, will soon appear comical, and Londoners will be united in their time of need by their contempt for this useless fop.
4) The massive destruction wrought by the second Great Fire, after SloBo presides over swingeing cuts to the fire service, will allow the next Mayor to embark on a massive programme of public works, so that London will be completely transformed by 2020, a city of skyscraping wonders, ready to serve as the planet's capital in the C21st as New York did in the C20th.
5) Ken Livingstone will be a shoe-in for a celebrity cameo in the next series of Doctor Who.
You've got it all wrong pop artist. If we worked together, we'd be invincible
Just think, the return of the Routemaster, no overspending or unnecessary expenditure, Value for everything, no blogging from work by all those GLA employees (assuring that a decent amount of work got done ina day). Enforced regular cultural visits for all, healthy eating, hospitals and schools working properly...
Scary thought isn't it?
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