Banditry: The idle musings of John B

Local press exclusives on specialist topics are seldom the most reliable or accurate commentaries you’ll ever find on anything ever. Nonetheless, I’m concerned by the East London Advertiser’s current alleged scoop on Crossrail.

The ELA claims that:

Crossrail chiefs fear the deteriorating economic climate, spiralling Olympic costs and the election of Tory Boris Johnson as Mayor of London will persuade Mr Brown to delay construction.

The source said: “It’s only my opinion and not the corporate line, but my strong feeling is that in the current circumstances, the Government will more than likely delay the project by a few years.”

If the ELA is right, then the government are making a very daft short-termist decision swayed purely by bean-counters and spurious “OMG, debts are evil” worries.

Simply put, Crossrail is a 10-year project with benefits over 30 years. Dropping it because of short-term budget constraints would not only be utterly ridiculous, it would be the worst possible choice the government could make. Economic bad times are a positive reason to build Crossrail, not a reason to shelve it.

The ideal time to build a massive infrastructure project paid for largely with public money is during a construction recession, when the workers, managers and contractors responsible are unable to find sufficient private sector work. This would not only make Crossrail cheaper for the taxpayer, but will also prop up the wider economy, stemming unemployment and reducing the impact of falling private sector demand on GDP growth.

What about actually finding the money? Well, governments are able to get credit on good terms right now, since they’re among the lucky few for whom the markets believe they’ll be able to pay it back. And UK national debt is in reasonably good shape as a proportion of GDP – 37% now against 43% in 1997, so there’s no obstacle to ramping up government borrowing to buoy demand and cushion the tough times.

Yes to sceptics, the 37% figure is too low, since it does not include finance leases under PFI that would be accounted for as debt under IFRS. These amount to an extra £30bn on top of existing debt of £530bn, taking real public sector debt as measured under IFRS to 39% of GDP. Some people account for PFI by counting all future PFI liabilities including payment for services which haven’t yet been delivered but if you do this then you do not understand how accounting works [*].

Sorry for that digression. The point is that the government has plenty of room to borrow money to stimulate the economy over the next couple of years, and building Crossrail would be one very good way of doing this. Financing it entirely through public sector borrowing would raise the national debt by 1% of GDP, which is entirely affordable. Axeing it would be somewhere between a short-termist capitulation to Treasury interests, and a deliberate attempt to screw things up for the incoming Tories…

[*] If I sign a billion pound contract with the government to provide them with and maintain their widgets for the next 40 years, and I book sales of £1bn for year one, then I go to jail. This is precisely what people who count PFI liabilities at £100bn are doing, except for the “going to jail” bit.

I’m not sure Boris would approve:

(photographed by me at Kings Cross St Pancras station, 14/5/08 at 2215)

Update 19/5 – Veroniq has come up with a much better headline:

“And the London Underground is not a political movement”

A non-Londoner asked me on Saturday what I thought Boris Johnson would be like as London mayor.

I said that I really didn’t know, which was the main reason I hadn’t voted for him (I also can’t stand his Wooster-ish public persona, but I’m quite happy to vote for someone I don’t personally like if they’ve got the right policies and record) – but that there would be a few indicators very soon that would almost certainly give us the answer, and that the most important will be whether he sacks transport commissioner Peter Hendy and London Underground MD Tim O’Toole.

Aside from Ken Livingstone, Hendy and O’Toole were the most important people driving the massive improvement in London’s public transport that has happened over the last eight years.

Ken managed to wrangle the money out of Whitehall; Peter Hendy made the new schemes happen (he was running London Buses throughout the period while they turned from Utterly Bloody Useless to Really Really Good); while Tim O’Toole stopped the Underground from falling over despite everything. They have built a team at TfL that works, and that would continue to massively benefit Londoners if it were to remain in place.

If Johnson were to sack Hendy and O’Toole because of their assocations with Ken, bendy buses, congestion charges and other sensible but unpopulist things, then that would have an immediate, significant, real and negative impact on London.

If he were to keep them in their posts, not only would the effects on transport be good – it would highlight a more general willingness to accept the good things that the old regime brought, and to put London’s needs above petty point-scoring.

So, which is it going to be?

Conservative Assembly Member for Ealing Richard Barnes quoted here appear to think that sacking them would be a Good Idea (how dare anyone “make life unpleasant for motorists”, would seem to be his main point), and is tipped to be Johnson’s deputy.

However, the latest couple of reports seem to suggest that Johnson is likely to keep them in place. For London’s sake, I hope the reports are right…

Congratulations to BAA and BA for the successful opening of Terminal 5 – it’s taken less than a week of live passenger testing to get the whole thing working pretty much as it’s supposed to.

If you think that achieving that kind of switchover in that kind of timeframe with the kind of really-rather-minor chaos that’s taken place is anything other than reasonably creditable, then you’re a churlish muppetteer with no knowledge of how things work in the real world. Which means you should probably seek a career in journalism…

I’ve no sympathy for anyone who was delayed, either. If you book to fly out of a new airport terminal the day after it opens, what on earth do you expect will happen…? I flew into T5 on Sunday, and was entirely unsurprised by the 35 minute wait at the gate to sort out some steps because the airbridge wasn’t working. Had I been particularly worried about 100% on-time arrival rather than interested to see the new terminal, I’d've flown a different airline.

(side note: anyway, who the hell takes hold luggage onto aeroplanes? You can easily get a fortnight’s clothes, a computer and plenty of stuff to read into a pair of hand-luggage-able bags, thereby shortening your arrivals time by at least 45 minutes and diminishing your chances of lost luggage to near-zero…)

In 1988, the UK government sold off its 100% stakes in British Leyland and British Steel, flogging the former to BAe and the latter on the stock market.

So it’s nice to see them reunited under common ownership 20 years later…

There’s an occasional debate on whether photography is allowed on the Tube, generally sparked when a staff member harrasses someone for doing it.

The answer is crystal clear: photography is indeed permitted on the Tube without express permission, as long as you don’t do anything dangerous like using a flash, or sell the pictures you take.

TfL’s website confirms that photography on the Tube is allowed for personal use. This is supported by part 10 of rule Sa109 in staff’s Working Reference Manual (I don’t have a copy, but anyone hassling you should), which says:

10.1 Passengers can take photographs with small cameras for private purposes, provided
* flashlights and/or tripods are not used
* No obstruction or inconvenience is caused to staff and/or passengers.

10.2 Representatives of the media, press or photographic agencies and film companies, and other persons taking photographs for commercial purposes must first get permission from the Press Officer.

I think the only reason this is an issue is that the TfL page on commercial photography is easier to find than the one on general photography, and hence one gets mistaken for the other. Hopefully this post will help direct people to the right places…

(thanks to, and also; in response to the comments here)

This is good: spoof Tube announcements, from the woman whose voice is used on the real ones.

My favourites include “will the gentleman in the pinstriped suit“, and “passengers should note“…

The largest number of people ever carried by a Boeing 747 was 1,122.

NB while these passengers were Ethiopians, any use of 1980s playground jokes is nonetheless strictly frowned upon.

It’s truly an autumn of Finally Approving Transport Projects That Should Have Happened 10 Years Ago. As well as Thameslink 2000 and Crossrail (both of which approval I’ve somehow failed to write about – bad me), we’re now getting the Camden Town station rebuild.

As regular readers may be aware, I approve of all of the above. If we were hanging all the NIMBYs, that would be even better still…

Via the Grauniad blog, this is quite fun – the Great Bear redone to illustrate Shakespeare characters…