What can the Tories learn from Boris's fare dilemma?

HJ

And we're told that the danger is of deflation...

I've just been looking at the increases in my domestic bills over the last year:

Council tax - up 5%
Gas/elec - up around 40%
Property insurance - up 19%
Petrol - up 20%
TV licence - don't know offhand, but at least 3%.

John Haynes

Although I now live in Somerset, I am a Londoner and lived in the City for most of my life. However, I have also lived in places immediately outside London such as High Wycombe and in comparison with the cost of public transport in the latter, London fares are brilliant value for money and always have been.

If you thought about it logically, raising the fares beyond inflation and ring fencing a proportion of that rise for investment in the infrastructure would over a couple of decades produce a brilliant transport system worthy of a global Capital City.

To me, doing this is far more important than a third runway at Heathrow, in fact Heathrow should be wound down and a new airport developed elsewhere. Better public transport is the key to London's prosperity and the chance to live a better lifestyle there but, it costs money. For all the moans, try living in a semi-rural area, the public transport, if it exists is infrequent and very expensive because they don't have the volume.

Battle 2807

Oh dear, yes. Do read Boris' article and then the comments following it. It will give you some idea of the mountain the tories are going to have to climb.
There seems to be no understanding from the commentators that THE MONEY HAS RUN OUT. They believe that by voting Labour, none of these bad things will happen.
I despair, really I do.

Luke

This is all about boris not extending the congestion zone, but not wanting to scale back livingstone's transport network.

THX1138

You couldn't make it up Boris defends his outrageous hike in fares in a newspaper that has just dropped it's price to nothing to attract more customers.

On another point Boris has allegedly tried to parachute the Standard's former editor Veronica Wadley into a cushty Arts Quango job in LDN even though she had no background in the arts. The appointment is alleged to be in exchange for her help in last years mayoral election.

Crime keeps going up with a rash of stabbing & shootings in my part of North LDN , Bendy busses still on the streets, CC charge going up, cronyism in city hall looks like nothing has changed since Ken's day

Nicholas

Lovely propaganda opportunity for the lefties, who never miss the chance to have a pop at Boris and the Tories, q.v. some of the comments above.

General Zod

The election was 17 months ago. Just how quickly did you think Boris was going to be able to have a fleet of new Routemasters designed, tested, qualified and built to replace the moving roadblocks?

Fergus Pickering

THX, where were you educated? Did they forget to teach you the difference between its and it's? And I'll buy somebody in an Arts post with no background in 'the Arts'. 'The Arts'my bottom! Go Boris!

Dom

"On another point Boris has allegedly tried to parachute the Standard's former editor Veronica Wadley into a cushty Arts Quango job in LDN even though she had no background in the arts."

Or, for those interested in the facts, rather than propaganda Ms Wadley was invited to apply for the post, exactly on the basis that she WAS qualified. Then stymied for not being left leaning enough.

Liz Brown

This is a foretaste of what is to come, in order to pay off the massive debts incurred by Liebore and their willful throwing away of taxpayers money, regardless of outcome

TGF UKIP

I suspect most of us who live in England don't give a toss what happens in your dreadful alien hellhole. We just resent having imposed on us and being made to pay for your trendy mores and your self-indulgent Olympic Games.

Beer Moth

"To be fair, we shouldn't be too surprised at these kinds of hikes. This is a recession, after all....."

I would have thought that recessions, with all the downward pressure on prices we are assured they generate, are the precise periods, during which we should expect to see no hikes at all?

Peter From Maidstone

Beer Moth, I am no economist but it seems reasonable to assume that in a recession there is less taxable activity and therefore tax rates might need to be increased to maintain a certain tax income - of course that assumes it is a good thing to tax everything that moves and provide all services centrally.

JohnAnt

Four in ten travellers on TfL do not pay anything for their fares - this includes incapacity benefits recipients, who are classed in with the genuinely disabled, and it includes all over sixty, regardless of wealth, income or employment status. It now also includes kids who travel at whim whenever and wherever they feel like.
This cannot continue. For a steadily shrinking group of (younger) workers to go through the daily hell of congested tube commuting, and subsidise others gallivanting carefree around the transport system completely free, is not only patently unfair and socially divisive, but it is also unsustainable as a way of financing the underground and managing its daily load. (That the system is vastly overpriced in the first place is the result of the enormous salaries and benefits the RMT union has wangled out of the two successive Mayors.)
My suggestions:
1) Free travel for schoolchildren for their travel to and from school only, and only at those times, and only on the bus, not on the tube.
2) Discounts of between 20 and 50% for over sixty-fives or better still, over-seventies, and for and benefits recipients.
3) Free travel on buses only for over-65s and for the disabled and those on jobseekers' allowance.
4) Keep bus travel disproportionately cheap - at the £1 per ticket level.
5) Build up a fleet of rail replacement buses to face a strike by the RMT, but this time, sack them all and don't cave in to them.

AAE

Well said JohnAnt - and is Boris going to do anything about the unnecessarily high number of executives in TFL who earn more than the Prime Minister? But on the wider point, just as 60% of fare-payers in London pay for the free travel of the other 40%, so the total income tax of 28 million workers doesn't even cover the welfare costs of those who don't work. Genuinely sick people aside, it isn't "fair" that the "many" who work should subsidise the lives (including TVs, computers, cars, all household appliances) of the "few" who won't. The amount of money wasted in such cynical maintenance of the "vulnerable" (made deliberately more so by lack of education which doesn't equip people for an independent life) is gross gerrymandering on a colossal scale, made worse by the ever increasing stock of fiscally draining public servants. "Equality"? "We're all in this together"? None of them could run a sweet shop.

Moraymint

Battle 2087

Yes, that's the fundamental point: in all its guises, whichever way you look at it, at local and national government levels, the state has run out of money; always the end result of a Labour government.

Only this time, Gordon Brown has masterminded the mother-of-all insolvency crises for this country which has yet to even begin to unfold.

And still our political elite is faffing about trying to kid themselves and us that a little bit of nipping here, and tucking there, should sort things out.

If the looming socio-economic crisis in this country wasn't such an alarming prospect, it would be fun to watch our political class cavorting around the handbag.

As it is, with each passing day, the prospects for the nation look much worse.

Hey Latvia, hang on, we're right behind you.

Verity

TGI UKIP - Agreed. London's a Third World garbage tip. Who has the mildest interest in what the people inhabitating it pay for their fares?

As to that memorial to Tony Blair's ego, the Olympics, the transport fares Londoners currently pay will pale beside the debt they and their children and grandchildren will be paying off over the ensuing 60 years or so. I believe Montreal took two generations to clear its Olympic debt. Has Barcelona cleared its debt yet? And for what?

Verity

The Montreal Olympics were in 1976 and I believe they only finished paying for them about three years ago.

Londoners must be insane to agree to have this monstrosity visited on them and their children. For the pleasure of a decade's worth of disruptive constructive work and a hundred thousand or so visitors and participants sluiced into an already over-populated city. All for the dubious pleasure of watching some drug fuelled athletes pumping grotesquely misshapen muscles around a ring or jumping over poles.

I ask you. For what?? (Other than Tony Blair's ego, that is. He will get a special round of hysterical applause ... "And a big thank you to the man who made all this happen ... ladies and gentlemen, the ego of the universe, Tony Blair!!!!!"