‘Budget savings’ and ‘efficiencies’ - New Conservative speak for CUTS! CUTS! CUTS!

Anyone interested in public services will have felt a chill down their spine today with George Osbourne’s announcement that any council that delivers 2.5% rises or less in Council Tax will have it frozen for those two years. He said he expected councils to find this money with ’savings’ in the budget.

As we can now see from Boris Johnson’s administration, as well as general Tory bullshit over the years, any time a Conservative mentions savings, or ‘efficiencies’ it basically means cutting public services and funding.

The reason I say this is partially because governments of either political wing aren’t stupid, and if they felt they could save money by doing something you can bet your bottom dollar they would. Think about it, in government all the departments are wrangling and arguing with the Treasury, trying to get their own pet project off the ground, which requires a chunk of Treasury cash. The pie is only so big and can only be cut so many ways.

Do you really think in a situation like this politicians would be spending their money on needless things? It just doesn’t happen. Sure, some things are brought in with the intention of being good, and turn out to be crap, and these get cut later on when this becomes clear, but in general ’savings’ aren’t just hanging round waiting to be made, they come at the expense of funding and therefore at the expense of frontline services.

For instance, in Bradford the council delivered one of the lowest council tax rises in Yorkshire, around 2.5%. However, to do this they slashed the Mayoral budget among other things, leaving the position without the funding to operate like it used to. Other cuts have been made as well in other areas as far as I’m aware. In fact, it does seem to have been happening for a while. They too seem to have referred to the cuts as ’savings’, check the first paragraph of the editorial here, which quotes the council.

One of the reasons the Tories are doing so well at the moment though, is that they’ve convinced the public they’re not like the traditional Tories of old, they’re ‘new’ and improved, with David Cameron and George Osbourne showing the public this new breed of Tories care about public services. How could a man who sums up his priorities in three letters (NHS in case you were wondering, unless you’re talking about foreign policy in which case it’s ‘Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Afghanistan’, is there anything this guy doesn’t do that Tony Blair didn’t do first, and better?) advocate cutting services?

For the answer to this I’d guess the best thing we can do is go to the testing ground of New Conservative policy and see what Boris Johnson has been doing in the months since becoming Mayor of London. In the campaign leading up to the London election Gordon Brown accused him of wanting to make cuts to the police budget after he said that he felt there were real ‘efficiencies’ to be made there. Boris Johnson stood up in the House of Commons and insisted the Prime Minister return to the House to rectify his ‘mistake’, as Boris actually wanted to do the ‘exact opposite’. Conservativehome have it on their site if you do a Google search for Boris Johnson, Point of Order.

So now the Johnson administration is bedding in (finally), what situation does the police find itself in? Well Team Boris has announced £12 million worth of cuts across the Greater London Assembly, with the police getting a below inflation rise in funding, which is in real terms a cut. And his Deputy (one the ones who hasn’t resigned or been sacked yet) Kit Malthouse has said that police numbers may have to fall, and the other Deputy Mayor Simon Milton (the power behind the throne) has said the same thing.

So let’s get this straight. Boris explicitly said, recorded on Hansard, that he wanted to do ‘the exact opposite’ of cutting the police budget, namely, increasing it and specifically getting more police officers. Yet within a year of becoming Mayor of London they’ve cut the police budget and are paving the way for cuts in the numbers of police officers, which is exactly what Gordon Brown said he’d do. People claim Brown constantly misrepresents people like Johnson when they say things like ‘I want to make efficiencies’, but Brown isn’t stupid, he knows how a Tory thinks and acts when given the chance, even if the press get taken in.

Let’s hope the public don’t get fooled as well.

Prince of Darkness - BEGONE! Tim Parker resigns!

Oh happy day! (Oh happy days!), Ohh…happy day (Oh happy day!)!

Tim Parker, commonly referred to as The Prince of Darkness because of his reputation as a mass firer of staff, has resigned from being Boris Johnson’s Deputy Mayor, after they both realised that *gasp* many of the decisions involved in being Mayor of London really had to be taken by the Mayor himself.

It’s never the original accusations that get you in the end, it’s the lies

Well surprise surprise, Ray Lewis has resigned, the day after Mayor of London Boris Johnson defended him fully and denounced the allegations as a conspiracy because he had the guts to go work for Boris Johnson.

However, it’s not the accusations that made his position untenable, but the lies he’s been telling. The key moment came when the Ministry of Justice issued a statement (and I imagine Jack Straw was quite gleeful about it) saying that, contrary to what he says, Ray Lewis has never been a Justice of the Peace. Lewis tried to clarify his comments by saying he’d been ‘considered’, but by that point the game was up.

There is something familiar about Boris’ reaction to the Ray Lewis investigation

Ray Lewis is being investigated over claims of fraud and possible sexual ‘misconduct’, but in the meantime will keep his job as unelected Deputy Mayor for Mayor Boris Johnson, who denounced the charges as a witch hunt driven by the political correctness lobby (somehow led by the Church of England, hmm…).

What struck me as familiar though, and it’s something Dave Hill also spotted, is the similarity of the response to Ken Livingstone’s when Lee Jasper was facing his own allegations about improper conduct, giving money to causes he was affiliated with and so on. In fact, the ‘it’s a smear’ defense was used by Livingstone, and also by Lewis, which is astonishing when you think of how Boris Johnson really hammered at Livingstone (or as he unwittingly called him 26,574 times, ‘Leavingsoon’) for how he wouldn’t drop Jasper and insisted he was innocent.

As much as we’d like to see Boris sink, I think his adviser is more an idiot than a racist.

Again and again we see things nowadays where comments will be willfully interpreted as proof of someones racism or sexism when nothing of the sort was intended. The other day is was Andy Burnham taking the piss out of David Davis and Shami Chakrabati, now it’s an advisor of Boris Johnson being pestered about something someone else had written to the extent of ‘if Boris becomes Mayor, black people will emigrate from London’, and giving a curt reply along the lines of ‘well let them if they don’t like it’.

Now I understand that it may not have been the most sensitive thing to say, but I see no actual evidence of racism in this comment. It’s obviously more that the guy is being asked a stupid question and is batting it aside with disdane.

Did people properly understand the London voting system - and my first prediction for Boris as Mayor

I’ve just read a run down of all the votes in the London Mayoral elections, and I’m really surprised at how many people have given 2nd preference votes to candidates who simply had no chance of winning.

It’s too late to be checking now Boris-watchers

I don’t mind freely admitting that, as a new blog, I don’t have the viewing figures of well known and rightly respected blogs such as Hopi Sen’s, Recess Monkey, and - not so rightly respected - Iain Dale (bleh) and so I was quite surprised when logging on today to find a sudden surge in views on my blog, 99% of them related to Boris Johnson.

You can’t elect Boris Johnson as mayor just because he hasn’t ‘gaffed’.

It seems to me, looking at the press converage on the campaign for London Mayor, a large amount of attention is paid to Johnson and whether or not he has commited any ‘gaffes’ yet. And the fact that he hasn’t on a massive scale - like offending all of Liverpool - seems to be a justifier for him becoming Mayor of London, as if ‘not making gaffes’ was the number one quality needed when running a team of 109,000 people, with an £11billion budget, presiding over a city of ten million people that is one of the most ethnically diverse in the world.

Ken Livingstone - Saviour of New Labour?

It occurred to me, following the race for London Mayor, that if Ken manages to win and it steadies the good ship New Labour, and we go on to win a general election, would May 1st prove to be the turning point? And if so, how ironic it would be that the man who New Labour tried to crush in 2000, ended up saving them from destruction in 2008-2010. 

Obviously even if Boris ‘Some of my best friends are picaninnies’ Johnson wins the election there is nothing to say Labour won’t go on to win the general election. Boris might even help us in his own gaffe-prone way. He won’t be chained to Lyndon Crosby forever, surely.

The irony is that rumour has it the Tories would like Johnson to lose, only finishing close enough to claim progress and momentum, while not having the huge liability that is Boris Johnson running the entire city of London in the name of the Conservatives. So if he does lose, which I think he will, expect both parties to be quite pleased to some level. That said, if Boris does win it will more or less be the Tories running it from behind the scenes, the real danger for them would be in situations where he has to be in the public eye, such as the Olympics.

The best line in the whole election so far is when David Cameron recently said of Boris, ‘He might even win it’.

PS The ‘Some of my best friends…’ joke I nabbed from the Recess Monkey blog, check it out at www.recessmonkey.co.uk