So did you vote for Ken Livingstone, at the last London mayoral election? Are you pleased? No doubt many voted for Ken to try to wipe the smile off Tony Blair’s perma-grin face, but a few are now beginning to regret their actions. The average London poll tax payer is now contributing over £220 pounds a year to fund Ken’s baronial circus, on the Thames, with most of it going on the 640 bureaucrats and image consultants he employs to project his avuncular Big Brother image around the capital.
His solution-is-worse-than-the problem congestion charge, currently being swamped by the legal costs of two-finger-saluting defaulters, has severely curtailed trade in the West End, particularly the pre-theatre restaurant trade, and his plans to the increase the usage of those very long and very empty bendy-buses, which dribble continuously past my current client’s offices here in Holborn, will put another additional £200 pounds onto the poll tax payers’ bills, at the very least. So are you still glad you voted for him?
Yes, there’s the rapacious Gordon Brown and his thirst for stamp duty, both on house sales and share transactions, which is draining the carotid arteries of London’s economic golden goose, but if you think you could spend £420 pounds a year, of your own money, better than Big Ken does right now on social engineering, it may be time to start thinking of another lizard to vote for next time. Unfortunately, Mr Schwarzenegger is unavailable. And in case you don’t think £420 smackeroonies is enough to make you think of another candidate, and you still think mayors can make a positive difference to your life after you subtract their cost, watch out for the 25% Tube fare rises in January, accompanied by other inflation-busting bus fare rises.
Now personally I’m not that fussed about the Tube fare rises, as socialised transport is always a financial mess consisting of subsidy, taxes, fares, waste, corruption, constant appeals to a wartime spirit, and a general level of comical inefficiency, but one of our eagle-eyed readers, Harvey Gage, has spotted a more sinister development. This is the Oyster card, a harmless-sounding alternative to buying daily Tube and bus tickets with cash.
Now the aims of this hi-tech card, which you never need take out of your pocket, seem reasonable enough, at first sight. But could we add another possible aim, to be exploited more fully by a future police state?
If you tied up the surveillance cameras on the Tube and the rest of central London, with the Oyster card, then linked the card to the congestion charge system, and made the card the only available means for accessing the remaining state-driven transport ‘services’, you’d have the almost perfect system for keeping tabs on everyone’s movements in and out of the capital.
Who would’ve even thunk it?
And with very large cost reductions, for taking up the Oyster card, many are sure to sign up to it.
Now it’s probably my own acute sense of Orwellian paranoia which makes me agree with Harvey, that there could be more to this than meets the eye-in-the-oyster. But why is it socialists always seem to hanker after policies which march in parallel with the delusional police-state thoughts of evil individualist-hating men? Sorry, just answered my own question, didn’t I? Slap me with a newt.
Do Ken’s minions really get paid £687,500 per year? (= £220 * 4 million ratepayers / 640 staff / 2 [the smallest figure that could allow “most of”])
If so, I’m in the wrong job.
If not, here be outrageous hyperbole.
BTW, how is a traffic-cutting measure that cuts traffic a bad thing?
Well spotted on the oyster card idea.
We are living through the most authortarian, intrusive era in our history since the Second World War and yet 99 pect of the stuff being imposed has absolutely no chance of preventing another 9/11 outrage.
But then it has long been the case that the Left, as personified by that snakeoil salesman, Ken Livingstone, has for a long time been actively hostile to liberty. That is one of the reason why the left loves buses and tubes – it is a statement of their determination to herd us all around like sheep in place of the dreaded symbol of individualism and property ownership, the evil motor car.
There are cards in the US for tollroads that are accepted across multiple states and which deduct the fees automatically from an account you set up.
I rode with a physicist friend from Connecticutt to DC this spring without actually stopping once for a toll both. He just held the transponder card up to the window and the toll booth lights went green.
There are obvious privacy concerns, but for most people the convenience is so great as to outweigh it. It’s also used by accounting departments of companies to make sure the travelling salesmen or other workers actually went where they say they did on the company tab.
There was an awful period when I thought I might be forced to vote for the amphibian, but then nemesis caught up with Jeffrey Archer and he had withdraw from the race.
The toll cards Dale refers to also exist in France, where police cameras are at least a decade behind England (until recently the pesky French constitution wouldn’t allow them outside of the Metro stations on privacy grounds). They are convenient: one can jump the queue for people messing around with change, there’s a monthly statement which can be paid by direct debit. It also makes business travel claims easy to arrange.
The French highways police have found a use for tolls though: they occasionally stop someone coming off the motorway and check the time stamp on the ticket. If the travel time between start and finish implies an average speed greater than the speed limit (about 80 mph), the driver gets prosecuted for speeding.
The consequence is that speed-freaks stop for a coffee or a beer at a service station, breaking up their journeys. This helps avoid that other danger of long-distance driving: falling asleep at the wheel.
To all the morons who voted ‘yes’ in the referendum and then went on to vote for Ken in the election, exactly what great benefits have we seen in London as a result of this exercise in democracy? I have no sympathy for those who voted ‘yes’ in the referendum complaining about their council tax rises, this should merely be the beginning of their justly deserved punishments, the horror is that I who was wise enough to vote ‘no’ have to stump up as well.
What Paul Coulam said.
john b writes:
Do Ken’s minions really get paid £687,500 per year? (= £220 * 4 million ratepayers / 640 staff / 2 [the smallest figure that could allow “most of”])
How about building costs, interest payments on loans for building the plush new Thames-side offices, cleaners, pensions, security, training costs, janitors, advertising bills, taxis for Ken to go to Brighton in, other flagrant restaurant expenses, glossy publications, paying for the web site hosting, paper costs, newsletter costs, photocopier repair costs, toilet paper costs, electricity and other power costs, investment costs for Crapita congestion charge cameras, expenses for all the legions of new London councillors, legal costs for catching up with those thousands of congestion charge defaulters, all those stupid new bendy-buses with nobody on them, the training costs for all those drivers for those stupid bendy-buses with nobody on them, telephone bills, postage, travel, air fares to the US to check out their transportation systems and drink cocktails with, hotel bills, the over-payments to Tube driver unions, recruitment costs, all those extra £31 million style subsidies to Crapita for its failure to implement a cost-effective congestiong charging scheme …. go on john, please just add your own, there’s hundreds more where they came from.
Alternatively you could just read this, or this, or even perhaps this.
BTW, how is a traffic-cutting measure that cuts traffic a bad thing?
I suppose that depends on whether you own a central London business, which is now losing money and you’re about to start laying off staff, or whether you and your children live on a rat run, on the edge of the ring, or whether the scheme is actually costing more money than it’s raising making the whole thing worse than pointless, or whether you’ve cancelled other transport schemes, because you’re having to bail out Crapita because the congestion charge is proving such a fiscal failure, or whether you’re a central London resident who’s sick of the inconvenience of claiming the costs back, or even worse a resident just outside the ring who’s sick of incurring five quid charges every other day, for using roads your taxes have already paid for (many times over), or whether you’re stuffed onto tubes which were already over-full before the congestion charge got going … I better stop there before the byte police come after me.
You may also want to read this, or this, or possibly even this.
I’m not even against a congestion charge, myself, in principle. There’s nothing wrong with road-charging to regulate supply and demand. It’s just the shambles of a way it’s been organised by this socialist idiot and his friends in Crapita.
“BTW, how is a traffic-cutting measure that cuts traffic a bad thing?”
Try this; Instead of “traffic-cutting”, think “commerce-cutting.” Traffic is a very good proxy for retail commerce of all kinds.
There’s nothing wrong with road-charging to regulate supply and demand.
This is an idea that I’ve seen repeatedly on British political sites, and I can’t make it make sense. Transportation isn’t a finite resource, in practical terms. It’s the sort of thing that, if you run out of it, you make more. It’s not a selfish using-up of anything, it’s capital moving around where it needs to go. Road traffic benefits everyone.
Because road traffic is the lifeblood of an economy. It’s customers going to shops and employees going to jobs and goods flowing in and out of stores and factories and airports. There are surely very few road trips that only affect the person making the trip.
Yeah, there’s a sort of superficial sense to charging people most who use the roads most, but really it’s more like…scolding your brain or your liver for overusing your blood supply, in hopes that it’ll slow down and give the spleen a chance.
“Road traffic benefits everyone.”
mmmm.. yeah, including the kids who grow up asthmatic, or are killed by cars on the busy roads round where they live… in fact though, f**k the kids, what about me? I’m sick of breathing stinking-ass air every damn day. I’ve moved further out of town now, & it’s a bit better, but still, the contrast is very noticeable when you return from just about anywhere else, & it definitely makes me feel a lot unhealthier.
As to the congestion charge hurting business… I work within the congestion charge zone. Although i’ve seen less cars on the street, I can’t say i’ve noticed any businesses being less busy, let alone closing down.
& Johnathan, there may just be other reasons for wanting to ban the motor car than sheer hate of individualism. I’m all for individualism, but not if it makes me choke/makes it hard for me to get around my own city.
Well if you’re into conspiracy theories it’s worth bearing in mind that the ‘Oyster’ scheme’s ‘contactless smartcard’ allows for individuals to be tracked in the London Underground – one of the few places in London where your location cannot already be pinpointed using the cell phone network, assuming you carry a mobile phone.
On a more optimistic note: Mapping the movements of individuals through London’s transport network via something like ‘Oyster’ will theoretically allow for more efficient infrastructure improvements to be made in future because it gives planners a great deal of information about the most popular routes and the most common journeys throughout the network, the likes of which has never been available before.
Then again, we all know what Hayek had to say about planners.
“Unfortunately, Mr Schwarzenegger is unavailable.”
Are you daft? Arnold is definitely not a man you want running anything. I heard him on a radio interview on Monday (his first radio interview since declaring he was a candidate) and it he had exactly 5 or 6 phrases that he trotted out for every question. Plus, add to that that he’s counting on actor Rob Lowe (who?) and Warren Buffett (a limousine liberal who thinks that because he can afford a tripling of property taxes, everyone else can, too) to help him manage the state.
As one of the City fellas working on the financing of Kenny’s bag of tricks, I would like to thank the council tax paying man on the street voting this MUPPET into power. There’s no business truly like government business, which proves the fact that there is actually a FREE lunch, government lunch that is and it is us City boys who gracefully ate it. And the dessert went down well too.
Now, we all hope here that Kenny’s scheme to win London Olympics 2012 or whenever will go through – that would allow me to make payments on my new 30 footer…
Ta ta, Kenny-boy!
Can we have A’s comment printed as a double-crown poster and distributed across London for next year’s election as a public service, a bit of education in the nature of the political system? It would go down equally well in socialist and conservative areas.
(Would the Electoral Commission allow it?)
A_t writes:
“mmmm.. yeah, including the kids who grow up asthmatic, or are killed by cars on the busy roads round where they live… in fact though, f**k the kids, what about me? I’m sick of breathing stinking-ass air every damn day”
Ah, the old faithfuls – always the best, eh? “What about the children?!?”
As a matter of fact, London’s air is less polluted than it was in the 1950s and recent developments in petrol engines ensure that it will continue to improve. The same, of course, cannot be said for the Left’s beloved buses, as anyone who breathes in the particulate-rich diesel filth pumped out by so many of Livingstone’s finest will testify.
Asthma, meanwhile, is as common in the country as the city, so don’t try and palm us off with that old cobblers. No one knows what causes childhood asthma – though quite a few vested interests like to pretend they do.
The entire congestion charging scam was politically motivated. Figures clearly show that traffic volumes in inner London had been declining for years. What caused the congestion in London wasn’t the number of cars on the roads but the proliferation of Left-inspired traffic measures such as bus lanes, one-way street schemes and the like which forced the declining number of cars onto smaller amounts of road space.
The control-freak Left created the problem and then invented the ‘solution’.
A_t has a point about nasty air.
My body is my private property, you may not poison it without permission. So how do you manage clearly health damaging pollution from an individualist/property rights perspective?
Kit Taylor writes:
“My body is my private property, you may not poison it without permission. So how do you manage clearly health damaging pollution from an individualist/property rights perspective?”
It’s a nonsense proposition. If you choose to live in a city, you put yourself in the way of all manner of compromises to your health. Why start with cars? Why not pick any one of the hundred and one other sources of pollution in a city?
The reason, of course, is because the anti-private transport lobby simply uses the question of pollution as a convenient peg on which to hang its collectivist beliefs.
Does anyone seriously believe the Leftists and eco-loonies would not seek to constrain private transport even if it produced absolutely no pollution at all?
Kit,
“My body is my private property, you may not poison it without permission. So how do you manage clearly health damaging pollution from an individualist/property rights perspective?”
Well, that pretty much puts the kybosh on any intentions I may have to exhale.
This is a technology that concerns me rather more than Panopticon. Where Panopticon is readily understandable and somewhat disconcerting, this is the kind of thing to be adopted by stealth. Where Panopticon requires a large infrastructure, this requires very little. Where Panopticon produces mountains of data that requires huge amounts of analysis for tracking, this produces only tracking.
Tracking complete paths through a transit system is very valuable for planners. However, it can be done anonymously and cheaply. My local system (BART) uses throw-away cards for entry and exit. They have been analyzing the results for years. Generally speaking, ‘who’ is far less important than ‘what path’ and ‘when’.
With reference to Dale’s and Antoine’s comments above; I’ve just moved to Stavanger in Norway and there is a similar system of toll cards here.
You pay a road toll whenever you enter a district or Kommune. You either pay cash at the toll barrier or you buy a transponder card and drive straight through without having to stop. A green light shows that your payment has been accepted. Amber means you’re running out of credit. Since I’m currently using a company pool car, I don’t have to worry about the cost but I don’t think it’s too excessive (by Norwegian standards anyway). If you don’t have a transponder or the card has run out of cash, the traffic light will wink red, a camera takes a picture of the car and they catch up with you later.
There is a privacy issue with this system, but if you really don’t want to be monitored then all you have to do is pay cash because the manual barriers – here at least – have no camera. Personally, I have to admit that the convenience of the card outweighs any privacy issues.
A writes:
Now, we all hope here that Kenny’s scheme to win London Olympics 2012 or whenever will go through – that would allow me to make payments on my new 30 footer…
If what you say is God’s honest, then thank you for giving us this remarkable insight into the murky twilight of ‘World of Ken’! 🙂
And good luck with the 30 footer. I’ll see you at the tying up point, at the White Angel, in Henley. I’ll be the one drinking the Pimms.
“Does anyone seriously believe the Leftists and eco-loonies would not seek to constrain private transport even if it produced absolutely no pollution at all?”
Yep.
You may fashion anyone left-of centre into loons in your head, but in fact most of them are pretty reasonable people. I’ve resisted owning a car ’til recently, for both cost & ecological reasons, & I for one would be a lot happier if they were hydrogen-powered etc. I love the freedom a car affords me, but equally realise that it’s not possible for everyone to indulge in this freedom simultaneously, at least in bigger cities.
Of course, if you think the entire ecological argument stems from hatred of humankind, despite any amount of documented damage/scientific evidence, well… hate to say it, but you sound rather less rational & capable of change than the “lefties and eco-loonies” you berate so smugly.
congestion charging is a great idea !!! If it was administered correctly….. I have worked for CRAPITA on the congestion charging project and have never seen such and underhanded organisation as this. Feeding false figures and stats to TFL to show they are performing to targets when they are not and to top it all closing at 00.30 hrs when it should be a 24 hours operation!!!! TFL allowed them to keep the contract after finding out!!! SHOULD A COMPANY WHO ACTS AS DISHONESTLY AS THIS BE ALLOWED TO KEEP THE CONTRACT? NO….. I believe Crapita and Ken need to look up the meaning of integrity and honesty and adhere to them.
Typical call handler gets 10,000-11.500 PA
Call Centre Manager gets 40,000-50,000 +benifits
is it any wonder Kens run over budget and the money that was ear marked for upgrades and improvements to London Transport is eaten up by the millions this scheme has gone over budget.