Boris Johnson on Ken Livingstone - an archive

As a service, here's an archive of articles where Boris Johnson has mentioned Ken Livingstone.

No big hostages to fortune on the policy front, a bit negative on the congestion charge without committing himself, and an attack on the bendy buses that can be dismissed as a joke.

1. Why we cyclists need to strike a deal with pedestrians - On life as a cyclist in London and being attacked by

Ken Livingstone's odious, inhuman, socialistic 18-metre Frankfurter buses blindly pasting the cyclist against the kerb

2. Getting our knickers in a twist over China -

Quite often on a Wednesday lunchtime I find myself conferring with my friend Rudi the sandwich man about the madness of Ken Livingstone, and his latest monstrous scheme for London. Rudi blames the congestion charge for pushing up his costs. I can't stand the evil frankfurter buses that crush cyclists to the kerb

3. We'll get more hosepipe bans if Prescott showers us in new homes - Boris doesn't understand why we need hosepipe bans

It is true that we have had a dry winter, and that the reservoirs are low. But it somehow beggars belief, when cataracts of the stuff are falling out of the sky, that Ken Livingstone should be so panicked by London's water shortage that he has broken off from welcoming hate-spouting imams to warn us all to take showers rather than baths and not to flush the bog without a very good reason

4. Whatever you do Ken, don't apologise - Boris sides with Ken over his spat with the Evening Standard

We have in our newspapers a non-story, a media spat, about the insults that newt-fancier Ken Livingstone is alleged to have dished out, on leaving a party, to a reporter from the Evening Standard. The story is now in its third or fourth day; it is dying; and what does our Prime Minister do? He intervenes! Iraq is still a war zone, our hospitals are filthy, people live in fear of crime, and Blair finds time to demand an apology - on behalf of the Evening Standard - from Ken Livingstone. Well, I do not normally side with Red Ken, but on this occasion I say, Ken, whatever you do, don't apologise.

5. Two wheels good, four wheels bad -

P is also for PAVEMENT, which you should only mount in the most extreme circumstances (e. g., if you are driven off the road by one of Ken Livingstone's demented new single-deckers, so long that they can't turn corners)

6. As London goes down the tubes, village pubs call time -

The biggest threat to ye old village boozer is not the breathalyser, or even Gordon Brown. It is the misery of trying to get to work on the London Underground. It's Ken Livingstone, and Bob Kiley, and John Prescott, and the Treasury, or whoever is responsible for the unbelievable and chronic chaos on the Tube.

It is the result of decades of Labour-controlled inner city education, which means that the middle classes feel they have no choice but to protect their children and take them somewhere leafy. It is the result of crime, and the danger of being pumped full of lead by the cops for having a cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun, or possibly, under Ken Livingstone's dictatorial plans, of being shot for having any kind of cigarette lighter at all"

7. Bush's pork barrel politics put me off McDonald's -

You can't drive a car around London, not when Ken Livingstone is about to slap some loony tax on car use, not when you can't park a car anywhere

8. The phoney war of the Spaniard's succession -

We have Ken Livingstone and his ineffable band of loonies filling in their taxi expenses, while the Tube decays, and while King Newt simultaneously spends our taxes on enormous, Big Brother-style posters of himself, in which he asks us to write and tell him how he is doing

Comments

[Matthew]

He's much more than a bit negative on the congestion charge - here in the Spectator he called it the "poll tax on wheels" (the link no longer works but it's here http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200302/ai_n9215606) he says he prefers rationing by demand than by price. It looks like the Tories might be abolishing the charge.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that it is the business of government to seek to control the right to drive until the point at which motorists and available road space are in approximate equilibrium. There is already a perfectly good mechanism for ensuring that this is the case. It is called congestion.

Anyone who attempts to drive along the Marylebone Road at 8:30 in the morning will find themselves caught in heavy traffic. The next day, if you possibly can, you are likely either to time your journey differently, catch the Underground or not leave home at all. Congestion is self-limiting, which is why roads never reach the armageddon of ‘total gridlock’ frequently forecast by the roads lobby and the anti-roads lobby alike.

Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge may well cause many motorists to make the desired switch from car to public transport, but it will achieve that end in a way which is considerably less fair than leaving the job to congestion itself. The charge as conceived is a horribly regressive tax which will impose the same fee upon a nurse pottering to work in her ten-foot Mini Metro as upon a capitalist swell barrelling along in a 20-foot limo. Those who can afford to travel about by taxi — including, thanks to taxpayers’ largesse, Mr Livingstone himself — will escape the charge altogether. The charge is equally perverse in the way it values some neighbourhoods more than others. Why is congestion such a problem for residents of Mayfair that they deserve a congestion charge to be set up for their benefit, while people who live in the backstreets of Elephant & Castle will have to put up with the extra traffic generated by the congestion charge?