3 Comments

• AHawkins 17th Feb '08 - 12:17pm

  The problems with Brian Paddick’s campaign for mayor are now becoming quite acute. He is getting seriously out of line with the very voters who have switched from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, for example those former Labour voters who voted for Sarah Teather or Lynne Featherstone.

  I do not believe that he represents these voters when he opposes the Low Emission Zone. Brian’s positions on a range of issues are too right wing, and he is preoccupying himself with attacks on Ken Livingstone considerably more than he is on criticism of Boris Johnson. The range of wrong positions is now significant: opposition to the Low Emission Zone; opposition to the 25 pounds CO2 charge on gas guzzlers; praising the Sun’s Page 3 girls; opposing making the pensioners’ Freedom Pass operational all day, ie before 9am. He even, as far as I can work out from the coverage of his transport launch, proposes to pay for his plan to introduce women-only tube carriages by attacking the household income of tube workers, by removing their entitlement to a travel pass for their partners. No doubt Brian has not through the disastrous effect of trying to get a radical policy like this adopted by attacking a section of transport workers.

  Much worse even than this was Brian’s reported policy for the tube which he proposes should be run by one firm running ‘tracks, trains, staffing and signaling for a fixed fee and Transport for London takes the fares’, ie to privatise it and run it as a private sector monopoly. (I have seen this reported in more than one place, including in the Evening Standard this week, although I cannot seem to find any of this detail on Brian’s site).

  Ken Livingstone has quite rightly criticised this policy.

  Livingstone’s agenda is considerably more attractive to natural Liberal Democrats than Brian’s.

• Nick 18th Feb '08 - 12:04pm

  There are simple answers to these questions from A Hawkins. In fact what Brian Paddick is proposing is in tackling vehicle emissions in London is far more radical than even the Green Party has suggested. Far from opposing the LEZ, Brian is suggesting ways that vehicle emissions can really be tackled in London rather than the only 0.3% improvement in air quality that Ken Livingstone admits his LEZ proposals will make.

  Brian also does not oppose the changes in the Freedom Pass. Nor did he praise Page 3 girls, only pointing out that they represented more of a normal image of the average sized woman in Britain today than did the ultra skinny models parading up and down catwalks. A Hawkins shouldn’t read everything he reads in the Sun, or for that matter and – mostly paid for by London’s Council taxpayers – Ken’s propaganda.

  As to the comment on the future control of the Tube. If London’s successful and growing bus routes, DLR and Overground Rail can be run under the model Brian Paddick is proposing; why can’t the Tube?

• Nick 18th Feb '08 - 2:24pm

  PS: Reading Saturday’s Morning Star, as one does, I notice that A Hawkins words are replicated in full in an article written by Ken Livingstone.

  Is A Hawkins Ken Livingstone, or does Mr Livingstone not write his own articles?