Wednesday, 06 January 2010 01:00 |
By Alex Holland
Not many Londoners can be happy as they grope through the frozen murkiness of the commute to their first days back at work after the winter break. Adding to their misery is London's mayor, Boris Johnson, who has made their journey much more expensive with huge fare rises.
Critics of Johnson's transport policies have highlighted how these massive increases - 20 percent for single bus fares alone - would not have been so high if Johnson hadn't trashed other sources of funding for London's transport.
Scrapping policies such as the extension of the congestion charge into West London or the £25 charge for gas guzzling cars have rightly been identified as stopping millions of pounds coming into the Transport for London (TfL) budget.
The impact of Johnson's cancellation of London’s Venezuelan oil deal has not received as much attention, however. Though not as lucrative as the estimated £70 million congestion charge extension, the Venezuelan oil deal would have meant an extra £18 million for cash strapped TfL. Perhaps even more importantly, it was a genuinely great deal for Venezuelans. The deal was brokered by former London mayor Ken Livingstone and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as an exchange of London's urban expertise – city-planning, transport and environmental protection – in return for cut-price fuel for London's buses. This oil subsidy meant that Londoners on income support could travel half price, and was warmly welcomed by a wide range of poverty activists. Both during his election campaign and after becoming mayor, Johnson said he wanted to cancel the deal because it was "morally bankrupt" for a rich city like London to take oil money from a “very poor country" like Venezuela. He cancelled the Venezuelan deal but kept cut-price travel for those on income support, landing TFL with the bill, which ran into millions of pounds in unfunded costs. Johnson tried to imply Venezuela was not getting a good return from the deal. This was completely untrue. Venezuela is a country that has suffered from decades of lopsided development fuelled by the country’s main export, oil. Its capital Caracas is a combination of skyscrapers and ramshackle housing, with chaotic and often gridlocked traffic.
The almost total lack of urban planning is painfully evident and makes a huge difference to all Caracas residents. Despite having a superb underground system, this and the city’s public buses are severely limited, placing a heavy emphasis on the car.
Venezuela does not lack oil or oil money. It is the fifth largest producer in the world. What it does lack is reliable and good value access to exactly the type of skills and experience that the London-Venezuela deal offered.
Johnson might have had an excuse for his comments if the Venezuelan government wasn't spending money on its own country’s poor. But the opposite is true, with unprecedented amounts of oil money being used to establish successful health, education and employment programmes that have made real progress in reducing inequality.
Livingstone got it right when he said that this made Johnson's termination of the deal a "piece of mindless vandalism". Now that Johnson has bumped up fares by this extreme level, while throwing away an estimated £18 million for London and simultaneously harming the people of Venezuela, it seems even more mindless.
If Johnson's handling of London's transport budget is a taste of what people can expect from a Conservative government, then the prospect of that party taking charge nationally is far more chilling and murky than any overpriced January commute.
Alex Holland is an Associate Editor of The Samosa and a Labour council candidate for Brixton Hill, Lambeth. He was an Associate Editor of Venezuelanalysis.com from 2005-2006 during which time he lived and worked in Caracas.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 06 January 2010 10:55 |
Bill, please stop believing what the capitalist media with its rich people's agenda: to enrich themselves by exploiting us working class people. The capitalist media is full of lies and deception, to benefit corporations and harm the working class and the environment.
And please read the article, and Teddy's comment and my comments, before you make a comment.
Rightwing politics is the support of capitalist economic relations. I.e. the support of a system in which a few people (the capitalist class) own the world's capital (farmland, factories, etc.), and everyone else must work for them; we working class people do the work that creates all wealth, and then the owners of capital, who control the businesses, only pay us part of that wealth, and they keep the rest for themselves. That is capitalism: legal robbery - the rich robbing the poor, the rich robbing the workers.
Rightwing politics also means directly or indirectly supporting the culture that always comes with capitalism: prejudice, discrimination and oppression.
Leftwing politics means leaning towards socialism. Socialism is NOT what happened in the USSR and Mao's China. Socialism, according to Marx, is "society owning and controlling the means of production, distribution and exchange" (i.e. all people managing the economic sphere democratically). I.e. wealth and power shared out equally amongst all people.
How could anyone not like socialism? Only really selfish people, who hate humanity could be against it.
Everyday I am communicating to working class people who support capitalism, and everyday I am calling on them to listen to facts about the capitalist system, to dispel the propaganda of the capitalist media.
Please listen to us, brothers and sisters of the working class! Please ignore the capitalist media for a moment and please look at the facts!
E.g. in capitalism, workers do labour, and this is how all wealth is created. But the capitalist class, who own capital (farmland, mines, factories, shipping companies, supermarkets, etc.), use that economic power of ownership, to only let workers keep part of the wealth they produce, while the capitalist class take a big chunk of that wealth (profit) for the mere fact that they own capital.
Capitalism is legalised robbery!
Socialism is when we, the people, take control of our world's capital (farmland, factories, etc,), and manage it democratically, ensuring human rights for everyone - including food, health care and clean water.
Everyday I am communicating to working class people who support capitalism, and everyday I am calling on them to listen to facts about the capitalist system, to dispel the propaganda of the capitalist media.
Please listen to us, brothers and sisters of the working class! Please ignore the capitalist media for a moment and please look at the facts!
E.g. in capitalism, workers do labour, and this is how all wealth is created. But the capitalist class, who own capital (farmland, mines, factories, shipping companies, supermarkets, etc.), use that economic power of ownership, to only let workers keep part of the wealth they produce, while the capitalist class take a big chunk of that wealth (profit) for the mere fact that they own capital.
Capitalism is legalised robbery!
Socialism is when we, the people, take control of our world's capital (farmland, factories, etc,), and manage it democratically, ensuring human rights for everyone - including food, health care and clean water.
At some point his clown act will end and proper scrutiny on his administration and the combination of incompetence and inertia that characterises it, combined with some spiteful neo con economic polices such as, let’s just put up fares on public transport and let’s not be beastly to hedge fund managers catches up with them.