The London ULEZ in action

Transport for London have published their first set of what must loosely be described as "numbers" since the ULEZ was extended, from their ANPR cameras and payment / fines records.  It's fair to say that little can be taken by way of meaningful conclusions from this effort, although it is conceivable they'll be in a position to do better between now and the Mayoral election next year.  Whether "better" will include anything genuinely meaningful and useful is open to question.  Don't bother looking at what has appeared in the meejah on this: the TfL numbers provided are so ropey that pressmen and politicians alike have been resorting to guesswork in an attempt to make a commentary-narrative from it.

Under the weighty heading "Compliance Data" we have been given numbers for the first month, plus historical figures, supposedly for the purpose of demonstrating "improvements".  Can they properly be compared?  No, because the number of cameras deployed has been changing p- increasing - throughout, AND coverage by cameras in the extended zone was very patchy indeed in that first month.  (Some boroughs have not been cooperating, which means TfL has been largely confined to installing cameras on "its" roads - the Red Routes - although these do, or ultimately will, provide quite a mesh for capturing vehicle movements of any distance within the full zone.)  Maybe, perhaps some time in 2024, they'll have a fairly full network of functioning cameras.  Even then, there are helpful online resources enabling the crafty driver to (attempt to) plot a route that avoids them.

Then there's the obvious issue that drivers' behaviours in the early weeks of a scheme aren't necessarily indicative of how things will be when it settles down.  

TfL's own commentary cheerfully mashes up DVLA data relating to vehicles known to exist and be registered to a London address, with vehicles actually logged by the cameras.

Finally, there are as yet no data whatever on air quality which in principle is the purpose of the exercise.

Granted that much of this data shortfall will "improve" over time (in the statistical sense of more cameras in action, data collated from a longer period of the scheme's operation, and air quality data actually being provided), it still isn't clear we'll get solid conclusions on what ought to be the political issues arising.  Partly that's because all the politicos involved are quite capable of cherry-picking data, not to mention abusing statistics and of course lying outright.  But even if the data were turned over to the most objective statistical analysis, there are several fundamental problems, including:

1.  It is really obvious that the number of dirty old bangers on the road has anyway been decreasing steadily, for the simple treason that they fall off the perch eventually and are replaced, if at all, by inevitably newer, cleaner models.  This has been going on inexorably for decades.  Khan won't be able to prove what part, if any, of the "increase in compliant vehicles" is down to his ULEZ extension, as opposed to the steady march of technology, or indeed to people no longer being able to afford to drive - including firms going out of business.  He may not even find a handy inflexion-point on the graphs to call in aid.
2. Still less will he be able to conclude definitively on any changes in air quality that might be registered in due course.  (a) Road vehicles are only one contributor to air pollution.  Another very large contributor is the vast fleet of diesel engines associated with building sites: diggers, cranes, gennies, etc etc.  According to Private Eye, Khan has resolutely refused to implement the latest European standards on building-site emissions, on the grounds that to do so might impact on London's economy (and he's probably right, at least at the margin).  Plus, (b) the road network is constantly changing - indeed, Khan himself is having a new cross-Thames tunnel constructed, which is bound to result in increased traffic.  Stick all that up yer exhaust pipe, Sadiq, and smoke it.

None of these objective difficulties will prevent the politicos from bandying their chosen "analysis" next year - and of course Khan from brandishing his cute little book "Breathe" on the subject of air quality.  (Nicely reminiscent of Gordon Brown who laughably wrote a tome on "Courage" ...) 

There are several possible desiderata in play**, that in an ideal world we might seek to audit.  The easiest will be "number of compliant vehicles on the road".  But that is at best a proxy for "air quality", and if the latter doesn't show a material improvement that can somehow legitimately be claimed by Khan's scheme, the former will be irrelevant.  Which leads us to "value for money".  Ah yes, VFM.  Well, let me simply say that last month I scrapped a car, for which Khan kindly paid me £2,000.  Which was around double its market value (or three times what Webuyanycar offered me).  Me and tens of thousands of others.  Thanks, Sadiq.

ND 

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** Some will suspect that another desideratum is - more cameras surveying our streets ...

Sadiq finds £7 million for war on London crime

Well, the London Mayor is on twitter today, reheating a £7 million pledge to tackle youth crime with support centres as if it is new money. Instead it was previously promised in April 2018.


This is over and above the claimed £110 million extra he was claiming for the Police Budget in his budget - most of which is projection and justification for tax increases on Londoners.


Of course, as the picture next to this shows, as an ex-Human Rights lawyer, Khan has some notable views on crime and criminals - the Tories went to far in saying he supported terrorists. Had they stopped at saying he hung around with some unsavoury types it would have been more accurate, if less impactful.


Whilst it is hard to find numbers, the major initiatives announced by the Mayor when it comes to policing have been to support with core services the national anti-islamophobia police unit and the increase in allocation of police units to tackle online abuse and hate crime.


In April we had 300 extra police drafted in by the Met to tackle the stabbing epidemic. Of course, the most interesting piece to that was the Met Police chief rather delicately saying we need to see 'societal change.' Clearly what he meant was we are seeing societal change as London's ethnic melting pot starts to rapidly reflect the communities from which it is drawn around the world more than its historic make-up (of Eastend gangsters...hmm?). Noticeable is the rise of ethnic gangs of different nationalities and colours - again, we have had this historically with Jews, Irish, Italians. Almost like it is a side-effect of massive waves of immigration?


The police are no doubt trying hard and we have seen some small efforts to try and reduce moped crime of late. However, they will do themselves no favour in proposing to one another at the Pride Event on Sunday instead of being the serious forces fighting crime, true of not, it reflects badly on them in the middle of a crime wave.


Khan all the meanwhile is flummoxed by all this. His inner lefty wants to promote lots of ideas and ideologies of the left which are about empowerment and engaging the communities. The people of London increasingly want crime sorted and criminals arrested not given holidays and pashmina's. All of that is difficult to square with a crackdown on crime - surely there is an opportunity for someone else at the next Mayoral election?

Will the EU catch an ICO cold?

One of the big bubbles in the world at the moment is the massive growth of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO's). At its heart this a business of issuing tokens that are pretending to be money. The tokens are promoted and some go up in value and some down. It is a new ear of electronic store/deletion of value.


However this past few months the Icarus phenomenon has struck, even China is thinking about cracking down on this multi-billion dollar industry. Japan this week has said it is considering next steps.


The USA has one a whole lot further, the SEC is now issuing subpoenas and demanding info from the coin offer companies.


The key issue, is that ICO's have thus far managed to sneak around  the huge regulatory barrier of the Finance sector, by only pretending to be money and in reality being software they have skated the old rulings. Of course, to their customers they are a form of money. It's very clever and of course has been exploited at length.


Finally though, now the bubble is very toppy, the regulators are getting their act together. However, noticeable is the EU and also UK, being much slower to act. yes, Mark Carney and the Bank fo England as ever are calling investors 'fools' and such like (none of us have the spectacular BOE pension fund to look forward to though, do we?), but they have not really done anything.


The EU and UK are primarily concerned about money laundering - as always their main fear is they maybe losing tax revenues somewhere. So the focus is on how transactions can be monitored and KYC checks done.


The US and others have a more fundamental approach, that is are many of the currencies even vaguely legitimate or are many of them just complex frauds to hoover up money from retail investors?


Of course, in the short term this may lead London and Frankfurt/Berlin to become crypto-central for a small while which is a decent bump to our growing FinTech industry, but we would have to question the benefits of this. London hardly needs to host yet more ways of either money laundering or ripping off people with financial scams - already it is a world beater at both.

London attack not a terror attack?

As much as many people want to, I can't see the terrorism really in the London attack this week.


I found myself not too far away at all at the time (I have a long, dull anecdote about how many times I have been at the scene of terrorism, which in précis, means don't be friends with me).


But thinking about this idiot who committed this atrocity, I can't see the real radicalisation here that is terror related.


This looks more, sadly, like the American school massacres. A certain kind of drop-out of society wants to make a name for themselves and off they go on a death-spree.


We don't label the American school attacks terrorism (or Dunblane, here). They are acts of individual madmen, they are copy-cat ways of committing suicide by harming others.


Because of ISIS there is a section of muslim society motivated to commit atrocities, but without ISIS would they be doing equally as crazy things - after all in this case, as with many before, there does not seem to be much planning or any kind of political statement made.


With no political statement, it is not a political act- and therefore not really terrorism.


Of course, if it were me, I would be closing Wahabi mosques down in the Country as they enable this kind of atrocity - but the Government is too weak for this. Preferring to hope the security forces are up to it rather than making difficult political choices.


What do you think Terrorism or not?

Is London the Price of BREXIT?

How many policy conflicts can a voter hold in his head?

A commonplace observation:  mid-term elections of any kind are a punt on the popularity of the government.  It seems pretty obvious that BREXIT's best chance is Cameron's crew being in bad odour.   They've made a great start on that, despite all manner of tactical trimming (delaying the Heathrow decision, dodging awkward budget choices, getting the EC helpfully to defer banning toasters, etc etc); and Jezza seems to have nudged ahead of Dave in the polls.

Since nobody has the slightest interest in debating Dave's Deal, and both sides instantly claim all 'events' confirm the rightness of their own cause, it all comes down to the mood of the moment.  Project Fear will get ever more shrill; ministers' statements will get increasingly implausible;  Nicola Sturgeon's convoluted contributions will leave the Scotties in all manner of amusing dilemmas; and Camerosborne will be wallowing in their first really serious popularity trough.

And then London will go to the vote:  Mayoralty and GLA.  Somewhat paradoxically, Khan is for Remain and Goldsmith for Leave: but Khan needs incohate anti-government sentiment above all else - he's got no use for complex, nuanced messages.  Somehow it's hard to imagine the Labour Party thinking, hmm, it would be nice to win London - but we should probably let the Tories keep it, so Cameron can have an easy ride in the referendum.

No, I think they'll be piling into the government wherever and whenever, to the best of their (admittedly rather feeble) ability.  More significantly perhaps, so will 'events' - particularly those over which dark forces have strong influence.  (Do we seriously think the Turks will come to the aid of Turkey-supporting Cameron by putting a stop to the 2016 summer migration surge?)

Now someone in the Labour hierarchy who is genuinely pro-EU (which doesn't include Corbyn, of course) will be piously rehearsing a different logic.  First, we take London, then it's all hands on deck for the referendum - and it'll be Us Wot Won It!  Trips off the tongue easily enough: but it sounds to me a bit like Harold Godwinson in 1066:  first, it's off to Stamford Bridge to tough up Harald and the Norwegians, then it's all down to Sussex and bring on the Normans!  Like many of Osborne's schemes, it sounds like a plan - but it ain't.

Cameron can lose London (and believe me I don't want that) by being deeply unpopular in May.  That's a fairly serious loss of prestige which significantly compounds his credibility problem.  And then Labour parlays its famous victory into propping him back up and turning it around in June?  Alan Johnson announces that Labour has now taken charge of public policy, and we're all to vote the way he tells us?  I suspect the cyclical, tidal forces of anti-government sentiment don't subside quite as quickly as that.

ND

Sewage, Garbage & Keynes

Outpouring

The long-awaited but much contested London 'super-sewer' has been approved by Eric Pickles, to no-one's great surprise.  Thames Water, of course, are telling stories of how much cleaner the river will be when the 'Thames Tideway Tunnel' provides the capacity required to properly handle the extra volumes of water from severe rainstorms.

In recent months I have been told, seperately by a civil engineer and a financier, that this is so much garbage.  (Incidentally, it's fairly clear that both their private vested interests are best served by the project going ahead - indeed, by any massive project going ahead.)  The reason is that, thanks to new planning & building standards as part of a very successful programme called SuDs - Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems - the overload on the existing system at times of sudden downpours has been reducing steadily, and will reduce further as more and more developments are made using these techniques.  The spec for the super-sewer was drawn up before SuDS really started in earnest: comparable to investing in a scheme for disposing of the 'ever-increasing' amounts of horse manure produced by all those horse-drawn vehicles on the streets of London Town.

No light at the end

But let's not get hung up on the facts.  We've commented here before that the UK's substantial civil engineering industry is heavily dependent on a rolling rogramme of public giga-projects: Channel Tunnel, Jubilee Line, London Ring Main, T5, Olympics, Crossrail, HS2 etc etc. In other words Keynes, as ever, still rules.  We may be fairly sure a large part of the insouciance with which Whitehall as a whole accommodates the nonsense of windfarms is all part of the same unstated policy.  And of course windfarms are even better than digging holes & filling them back in, because they cause systemic problems that trigger the next round of projects!  Just a shame (I hear you chorus) that such a large proportion of the money is spent with foreign firms ...
 
And all with almost-guaranteed rates of return: and (mostly) paid for by consumers on their bills - what's not to like ?  The likes of National Grid and Thames Water couldn't survive without this ceaseless round of 'activity'.   

Light at the end of the tunnels ?  There is no end.

ND

Friday Street Vignette

Some of you may have noticed that I have not been around  much this week, such is the mistress of capitalism forcing me, err, onto the streets of London this week at the behest of my employers.

Even this harsh labour is not without its fun moments though. One of my favourite at the moment is enjoying the sheer number of Romanian and other East European scam artists who are trying it on. Now this is of course illegal, and the picture to the ledft here, courtesy of this article, shows The streets re teeming with these types and in a way I quite like them, given I know what they are doing it's kind of like playing a 15 second role in a Derren Brown show.

Yesterday I had a new one tried on me as I was walking down Holborn not far from Hatton Gardens. 10 yards in front of me a man looks down and picks up a gold ring - a man's wedding band a bit like the one in the picture below. He starts looking at it and weighing it in the palm of his hand.

As I walk past I casually remark, "good spot!",

As I do so he turns to me and says he is just a tourist and has not need of it and offers it to me for free (at this point the penny drops for me, so to speak).

"Ahh, How kind I say - but really it is of no use to me"

"Take it for your family" he says.

I push it back into his hand, but he give it to me.

"Fine then, thanks" I say as I move to walk away.

"How about some money for my lunch?" he says.

"No cash I am afraid"

"Well, cash machine then" he points vaguely over the road. Now at this point I do consider if he is likely to get too shirty or violent, but it seems unlikely given his size and the busy street we are in.

"Really, have it back, if you need some money go over to Hatton Gardens with it"

"No" he implores "You must take it."#

"I have to go" and with that I turn and walk away. As I do I see the puzzled look on his face. Clearly no one has actually walked yet with the ring whilst not handing over a decent sum of cash - his face is quite a picture.

Anyway, that is a first for me, the 'ringer'  - any other stories like this? I have a few more and I can't believe its just me who keeps bumping into these street conmen.