As a bit of fun for a Friday morning we thought we’d offer our readers an opportunity to choose their political scumbag of the week, largely because this week has conveniently provided us with a strong field of contenders.

The rules are simple. just read through the following list of political low-lifes, decide which one is biggest scumbag and then use the either the comments facility or twitter* to hurl a bit of pithy but well-merited abuse at them.

*If you tweet in a response you’ll need to include a link to this post for it to be picked up

Sometime during the day – which is likely to more or less when I can be arsed – I’ll tot up the scores and we’ll have ourselves a winner.

So without further ado, lets list the nominees…

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The Mayor of London’s climate change mitigation strategy (launched Monday) rightly recognises that to get to his target of a 60% reduction in carbon emissions in London by 2025, government policy and money will have to play a major part.

But he’s scaled back reductions made through his own programmes to the extent that government policy plus mayoral policy still leave a 5m tonne CO2 gap in what needs to be done.

In particular, the Mayor’s energy efficiency programmes rely on a major injection of government funding beyond 2012.

For example:

• He is relying on attracting £200m of public money to take forward his homes energy efficiency programme.
• He is also reliant on national policy to introduce new measures to help householders and businesses finance energy efficiency improvements.

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I was shocked when I found that eight years of Ken as Mayor and ten years of the current government saw the housing waiting lists double and house prices spiral out of control.

But with Boris now in office and cuts to the budget threatening to wipe out the affordable housing programmes, this bleak story looks set to get even worse.

In my recent report, Coming home to roost, I showed how the policies of two Mayors of London have failed to deliver secure, safe, comfortable housing.

In London, social housing waiting lists have grown by 82% as the stock of homes actually decreased. Right to Buy continued unabated until very recently, with 85,000 homes off the stocks. In the same decade, we only managed to build around 55,000 new homes.

There are now over 330,000 households waiting to be allocated a place that suits their needs – that’s roughly 10% of all the households in the city.
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Meet Tess Culnane, former National Front candidate, long-time Neo Nazi, anti head lice campaigner and the new employee of BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Culnane is the latest and most extreme member of the BNP to be employed at the Greater London Authority, since Barnbrook was elected in 2008.

His other appointments have included Simon Darby (now suspended) Emma Colgate, Rod Gordon, Chris Roberts and Tony Avery. All have been, or remain members of the BNP.

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Today’s Progressive London conference was packed out. And by that I mean packed out. Clearly that means there is a hunger amongst lefties to find ways to hit back at the right and find out what people are doing.

Our session on new media and politics was very enjoyable, and Clifford Singer, Andy Newman, Alex Smith and Helen Gardner all made excellent points, I thought.

But let’s look at the bigger picture here. The problem with Progressive London is that it is billed as a broader left response to Conservatives in London. And while it does bring together a wide tent (too wide in some cases), it ends up merely being Ken Livingstone’s re-election vehicle.
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Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who I have to admit has much better Tory connections than I do, writes that “I gather that Boris is highly unlikely to stand for a second term: he has his eyes on the No.10 prize and would need to get back into Parliament somehow”.

This will fuel speculation about whether it is part of a long softening up exercise, so that a final Boris decision not to run does not come as a political bombshell.

I looked at the case for Boris wanting to get out for Liberal Conspiracy at the time of the Standard interview. The fear is not only the damage that a political defeat in 2012 could do to brand Boris; it is also that being in City Hall until 2016, aged 52, would mean missing a return to the Commons at a 2014/15 General Election, and so a good chance of not being an MP during the next Tory leadership contest.

Boris no doubt relishes the image of a man willing to tear up the political rulebook.

But there are three reasons why I don’t think he will duck out of the 2012 race – and why not running again does not really seem to be as smart as those promoting the “one term strategy” may think.
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Friday last week the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) convened a new panel to talk about policing in the aftermath of the G20 protests fiasco.
We received three accounts of the meeting and are publishing excerpts from each.

Helen Lambert — Police State UK
“Today is all about listening to you – we’re not here to speak for the Met, nor to defend them,” said Victoria Borwick, chair of the MPA’s newly convened Civil Liberties Panel, opening this morning’s open meeting.

The scope of the meeting – an evidence gathering session on public order policing, and more specifically the G20 demonstrations in April – had been unclear to some. Many people had brought questions demanding immediate answers, but instead their concerns have been ‘noted’, with no clear idea if answers will be forthcoming.

It may seem late in the day for a data-gathering session on the policing of G20. Photos, video footage, eyewitness accounts and the Climate Camp Legal report have been publically available for months.

But did this morning achieve anything more than a collective airing of grievances? The reach of the Civil Liberties Panel remains unclear. All this evidence will inform a report on public order policing to be released at the end of this year. The Panel seems largely sympathetic to the experiences of protestors, but the whole MPA has to approve its recommendations. Even the MPA are not involved with day-to-day or disciplinary policing issues, and can only advise on the overall framework of policy. Implementing change is a slow and frustrating process, each stage of representation more distanced than the last.
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While his party leader talks about trying to help the poor and looking out for their concerns, London Mayor Boris Johnson unveils crippling 20% fare-rises for London’s commuters.

A year ago Boris did exactly the same: hiking up transport fares across London and trying to blame Ken even though the previous administration left him with a 5% growth in budgets.

That’s two years in a row he has brutally punished London’s commuters – hitting hardest London’s poor who rely on public transport. In some cases, as Tom points out here, fares have risen by a third.

During that time he has sucked to the City and defended the very bankers who caused the recession, been ‘bought off’ by hedge funds, wasted a huge amount of money scrapping bendy buses, and created a financial black-hole by getting rid of the Western Extension Zone and of course described his £250,000 income from writing as “chicken feed”.

He’s creating his own negative narrative.
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Boris Johnson is threatening to kill some children and worsen the educational outcomes of many more.

The reason for this is straightforward. He intends to remove the western extension zone of the congestion charge, and delay phase three of the low emission zone, which would charge polluting vans more for entering London.

The effects of these will be to increase congestion and emissions of carbon and nitrogen oxide. Such emissions, however, are quite strongly associated with pre-natal health, as a new paper by Janet Currie and Reed Walker demonstrate.

They studied the impact of the introduction of E-Z Pass in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This system allows cars to travel onto toll roads without stopping to pay manually. They therefore greatly reduce congestion and emissions around the toll plazas.
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contribution by Michael Gray

Is David Lammy MP slowly positioning himself to make a bid as the Labour candidate for Mayor of London? Dave Hill thinks he is. I would guess it is a real possibility.

David Lammy, who I’ve heard speak several times, is an intelligent and articulate minister. But he has three problems. He is close to New Labour and consequently has a terrible voting record (cabinet ministers have to toe the line despite personal opinions) and this is unlikely to attract the left-wing grassroots.

Second, he is seen as a lightweight because he has not fleshed out his own agenda and a strong personality. New Labour was always good at keeping peronalities in check.

His third problem is that he lacks name recognition.
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The Boris Keep Your Promise (over rape crisis centres) campaign yesterday ambushed London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Watch Boris squirm as he tries to explain why he hasn’t kept to manifesto commitments, given the money needed is less than his “chicken feed” second salary.
There’s also a report on the Sauce blog (via The F Word)

Unison members at the Greater London Authority (GLA) will be inviting the public to chuck feed at a chicken man representing Boris Johnson during a protest over job cuts. Tuesday’s picnic protest will kick off a series of events leading up to a rally in October.

Regional Officer, Shirley Mills, said: “Boris ‘two jobs’ Johnson described his £250,000 second job as “chicken feed”, while slashing jobs of low-paid workers. Leo Boland, the GLA Chief Executive, is also earning over £205,000, £10,000 more than the Prime Minister. It is disgusting that these two wallow in their huge wages while low paid staff face the axe.”
Protest: 12.20pm on Tuesday (21 July) at Potters Field, City Hall, The Queens Walk, SE1 2AA.

The Conservative Party has been trying furiously in recent years to dispel the notion that it’s a party dominated by and for rich public-school elites. But we know this to be a facade when their own leaders contradict that party line.

There was David Cameron who couldn’t remember how many houses he owned; Anthony Steen MP, who said people were just jealous of his large pad; Michael Gove MP, who made £1,250 an hour. Now London Mayor Boris Johnson says the money from his second salary of £250,000 is just “chicken feed”. The Libdem MP Norman Baker said tonight:

There is nothing wrong with people writing newspaper columns, but this is an enormous amount of money and for Boris Johnson to dismiss it as ‘chicken feed’ shows just how out of touch he and the Conservative party are from the reality of life for millions of Londoners struggling to make ends meet in the depths of a recession.

Mostly right – except that there is something wrong with the London Mayor taking on several side jobs while his own administration is collapsing around him.

Adam at Tory Troll may have dropped a bombshell. He alleges today that: “The London Fire Authority have awarded a £12 million contract to a company that lavished hospitality on it’s Chairman Brian Coleman.”

Through a FOI request he finds that: “The actions of Brian Coleman during a recent Fire Authority meeting were unlawful according to legal papers provided to this blog.” – Coleman is also leader of Barnet Council.
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Tory Assembly Member Brian Coleman refuses to publish his expenses while at the GLA. But will Boris Johnson have the guts to fire him?

Yesterday the full expenses for 24 London Assembly Members were revealed. But one remained – Coleman. He not only refused to publish them but the declared that because Boris asked him to publish them, he wouldn’t! He also said he would not help the “mad, bad and the sad, the bloggers on the internet” by publishing his expenses.
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Whatever happened to London Mayor Boris Johnson’s bicycle?? Apparently he has spent over £4,698 in taxi bills since taking up his position, according to details published yesterday.

That enormous amount includes one bill for £237.50 to travel across two postcodes, from his former home in Furlong Road, N7 to Foxglove Close, N9.
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The news of Ian Clement’s departure and the fraud he perpetrated under the nose of Mayor Boris Johnson has finally reached the national press. Clement was actually ousted two days ago. Keep in mind this is the third deputy and fourth senior aide the London Mayor has lost in a year.

Concerns about Celement were raised as far back as last year and yet the Mayor did nothing until persistent digging by Dave Hill and further echoes by Adam Bienkov and BorisWatch became too great.

Update: Turns out Boris personally approved Clement’s expenses.
(news coverage now below the fold)
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Another day, another disposable deputy wheeled out of the spinning doors at City Hall.

“Ian Clement, Deputy Mayor for Government and External Relations, has resigned from the Greater London Authority (GLA) with immediate effect. He tendered his resignation to the Mayor of London this morning following the discovery of further discrepancies in the use of his corporate credit card. The Mayor has accepted Mr Clement’s resignation. His position will be filled in due course.”

You do have to wonder just what has been going on in Boris Johnson’s administration.

The man walks in dishing out vanity titles to any local big-wig, financial whizz kid, or snake-oil salesman who wants one, and then stands in amazement as they fall down around him. continue reading… »

This is an analysis piece by blogger Political Animal

If the patterns emerging on the map below (apologies for the atrocious reproduction quality) look slightly familiar, it’s probably because, like me, you spent some time last year poring over maps like this or thiswhich showed clearly the inner/outer London divide in voting in the Mayoral elections.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that last week’s European elections produced similar results – voting patterns aren’t likely to change that much in 13 months – but they are evidence of the re-emerging political disconnect between the ‘two Londons’. The dominance of New Labour did much to smooth over that disconnect. It may be the case that its death throes are widening the gap further than ever before.
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A new campaign has launched today, called Boris Keep Your Promise. They say:

There is only one remaining Rape Crisis centre for the whole of London.

That’s one small centre for 3.9 million women. The staff and volunteers who run the centre work with constant danger of closing over their heads and can never be sure that their core funding costs can be met from year to year. During the run-up to his election, Boris Johnson promised, with much PR fanfare, to pay for three new centres and fund the only remaining centre for at least 4 years. That he will fulfill that promise, or even part of it, is now seriously in doubt.

Of course Boris Johnson breaking campaign promises is nothing new but this one matters a lot. Spread the word please! Here’s their website, Facebook group and Twitter page (#boriskeepyourpromise). There is also a fundraising event on 4th June.