Sunny ‘Liberal Conspiracy’ Hundal is organising a follow-up to 2008’s successful ‘Blog Nation’ event. Details over at Liberal Conspiracy, but Sunny asks what we’d like to discuss; below the fold, then, are some thoughts.
In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.
Yet this would be no ordinary service. It would never be stopped by traffic or points failures.
That may be true, and it is some time since the Thames froze. However, the Thames is a tidal river. A very tidal river, it moves at speeds of up to 8 knots. Moreover, the tides do not occur at the same time every day. Altogether, this means that the Thames is fundamentally unreliable for timekeeping purposes as, from the point of view of the commuter, you have to leave at a different time each day to get to work on time and may well have a variable amount of hanging around (or extra work). If the Thames Barrier, in this or a future incarnation, is permanently raised and the Thames is no longer tidal, this could change.
Secondly, Mr Gilligan makes a somewhat simplistic analysis of cost/benefit for buses and tube extensions. Certainly, the numbers might be, prima facie, better for the river but it does not consider at all how well served riverside locations already are against the relative lack of provision in other areas.
Thirdly, Mr Gilligan, when not continuing his obsession with standing outside on moving vehicles 1 makes an interesting admission:
Boris has sometimes been accused of lacking a big idea, an equivalent of Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge — something people can point to and say: “He did that.” I think a new TfL riverbus could be it.
I was rather under the impression that the New Routemaster was meant to be the big idea. Maybe Gilligan has gone off it, or realised that it’s either not going to happen or, if it does, will be suboptimal value for money.
I would add Mr Gilligan needs to be a bit more careful about his sweeping statements.
You only have to try it once to know why. In the morning rush hour, the traffic in Greenwich inches round the one-way system. The trains are slow and crowded. On the river, charging upstream at 30 knots (35mph), we are the fastest thing in a five-mile radius.
AsPolitical Animal and Boris Watch point out on Twitter, within five miles of Greenwich are trains (60mph), the Jubilee line (50mph), High Speed One (140mph) and City Airport (takeoff speed for a STOL aircraft ~160mph, although they don’t make many stops in London) (here, here and here).
xD.
1 – “On the open rear deck of the Cyclone Clipper, two newcomers to the service are grinning to themselves at the sudden surge of speed, and the glorious, if rapidly receding, views of the Royal Naval College. Inside, the more seasoned passengers have settled down with their laptops. There is a small buffet, and on the way home you can even get a massage.” I wonder how many people would be standing outside in today’s inclement weather.
A little while back, I wrote a piece arguing for a ‘Guardian London’ supplement to the Guardian, similar to Guardian America or Comment is Free, both here and at Liberal Conspiracy.
Whether or not the Guardian read, let alone paid any attention to, my thoughts, I am very glad to see this:
Guardian Local planned to launch next year
Starting with Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, guardian.co.uk is planning to launch a local news project in a small number of locations. At the moment guardian.co.uk is looking for bloggers – with journalistic qualifications “desirable” – to help cover community news, and report on local developments. The project will emphasise local political decision-making, and is scheduled to go live next year.
“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media.
Read more over at the Guardian. Now, I think there is a difference between the ‘local’ and ‘hyperlocal’ and the coverage I think London – the fifth home nation – needs. However, it takes the same line of wanting to build and support citizen journalism. London also needs better local coverage and, if coverage at the local level in London can be improved, we might be able to do the same for London level coverage.
The London Evening Standard is to become a freesheet, the BBC report. thelondonpaper was pulled by News International last month. We are now down to three, non-specialist, London-wide newspapers, the ES, London Lite and Metro. I’m excluding things like Sport, Shortlist and City AM.
This is not good. We will shortly only have two newspapers in London. Television and radio news for London is largely a joke, with the possible exception of the City Hall slot on BBC1’s Politics Show.
London has a population on the order of seven and one-half million. If it were an independent country, it would rank ninety-second out of two hundred odd, behind Burundi and ahead of Switzerland. In terms of GDP per capita, it would be third, behind Luxembourg and ahead of Norway. It is a population, financial and cultural centre. In other words, London matters. From the point of view of the UK, London really matters. What happens within London matters. The politics and governance of London matter.
However, there is no London polity. It is starting to develop on the internet, but the lack of coverage of London politics in traditional outlets (including, I would add, the Standard) suggests that the desire for coverage of the politics of the city is not yet there (or at least not yet recognised). Of course, it’s hard to see to what extent that desire exists, or to generate it, without that coverage. We find ourselves in a catch-22. I think that greater awareness of the existence of London as an important political entity below the national, UK level would be a good thing, for the reasons I describe above. Perhaps the development of some sort of London national sentiment would help, although that has historically required the generation of an imagined community through what Benedict Anderson refers to as print capitalism. Given that we need better and wider supervision of London governance in order to make the same London governance work, I think we have to use the inelegant principle that when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow; perhaps giving powers to London similar to those Wales had after the first devolution might be a start.
xD.
UPDATE 1550 – I’d like to flag up a couple of posts relating to the London Evening Standard by the Tory Troll and 853.
The fearmongering, lying, racist Richard Barnbrook should not be suspended from Barking & Dagenham council.
As Adam ‘Tory Troll’ Bienkov reports, the decision was handed down by a joint standards committee between the GLA and B&D council. Barnbrook put up a mendacious video saying there had been three stabbings in three weeks in LB Barking & Dagenham when there hadn’t and didn’t take the video down when its falsehood was pointed out to him by the police.
Otherwise, the remedial measures I think are rather appropriate. From the GLA, they are formal censure; a requirement to apologise on the GLA website and on his personal blog; to undergo training on ethics and standards in public life. From B&D, they are suspension for one calendar month without pay; requirement to apologise; failure to apologise leading to indefinite suspension. I’m sure that the press and blogs will cover it. The Evening Standard will, with a bit of luck, splash it on its posters.
I simply that is wrong in principle for anyone to be able to cashier an elected representative other than the electorate. Moreover, it makes it far too easy for aspersions to be cast on spurious grounds – and yes, I am thinking back to Ken’s mayoralty here. If an elected representative has to be removed, let there be a recall election, not a second-guessing of democracy.
In the middle of Leicester Square is a statue of William Shakespeare. It depicts him with a scroll with (as a quick Google reveals) a line from Twelfth Night IV ii:
There is no darkness but ignorance
Which strikes me as a pretty good motto.
On the plinth is the legend
This enclosure was purchased, laid out and decorated as a garden by Albert Grant Esqre M.P. and conveyed by him on the 2nd July 1874 to the Metropolitan Board of Works to be preserved for ever for the free use and enjoyment of the public.
In 1848, Leicester Square was the subject of the land-law case of Tulk v. Moxhay. The plot’s previous owner had agreed upon a covenant not to erect buildings. However, the law would not allow purchasers who were not ‘privy’ to the initial contract to be bound by subsequent promises. The judge, Lord Cottenham, decided that future owners could be bound by promises to abstain from activity. Otherwise, a buyer could sell land to himself to undermine an initial promise. Arguments continued about the fate of the garden, with Tulk’s heirs erecting a wooden hoarding around the property in 1873. Finally, in 1874 the flamboyant Albert Grant (1830–1899) purchased the outstanding freeholds and donated the garden to the Metropolitan Board of Works, laying out a garden at his own expense. The title passed to the succeeding public bodies and is now in the ownership of the City of Westminster.
Apologies for the quality of the photos – camera phone!
I’ve spent a very pleasant evening in the company of the Sceptics in the Pub London, where the speaker was Dr. Aubrey de Gray, Chief Scientific Officer with the SENS Foundation. In brief, de Gray (Wikipedia article) set out the work of the SENS foundation which, as I understand it, looks at ageing as a disease which it then sets out to cure as a problem of regenerative medicine. While that is the primary aim, it has the effect, if successful, of increasing both quality and quantity of life; that is to say, making something approaching immortality not only possible but desirable.
De Gray set out a paradigm whereby metabolism causes damage, and damage then causes pathology. In this model, gerontology attempts to intervene in the first step – problematic because of the great complexity of metabolism – and geriatrics intervenes in the first step – problematic because damage has already caused pathology and is at best palliative. He sought to reverse accumulated damage before it became pathological.
Initially, this would allow for an extension of the useful human lifespan by perhaps thirty years. Once that first step was accomplished, refinements in technique would allow, excepting being hit by cars and so on, to continue for arbitrarily long periods, through the possibility of increasingly eficacious treatments before the eficacy of repeated cycles of previous treatments lost eficacy.
You can get a flavour of his speech from this TED talk.
Broadly, I would raise three problems with de Gray’s plan.
Firstly, the scientific. I can’t assess his science, but a number of people there raised fairly substantial problems with his paradigm and with the conclusions he drew from it. That is probably one for the peer reviewed papers.
Secondly, the technological. The very long, four-figure lifespans suggested depended not just on continuing improvements in the (speculative) set of technologies, bit that those improvements happened faster than people died because of a loss of eficacy as described above. The examples de Gray cited in support of his position were the motor car and the aeroplane. Unfortunately for him, the equally plausible alternative of the jet pack was raised: theoretically possible, desirable even, and can be turned into a prototype that can fly for half a minute, but can’t be turned into a production model (because the amount of fuel that can be loaded onto a human is finite and less than what’s needed for useful flight). Another example would be power from nuclear fusion, which has been ten years away for fifty years. It is a prediction based on little more than fiat.
Thirdly, the socio-economic. In answer to a question from yours truly about the cost of the treatments, de Gray was quick to observe, thousand-year life spans would have major effects on world society, meaning that we could throw much of traditional economics out of the window. If we do that, though, we throw political economy out of the window. Thus, de Gray’s assetion that the state would pay for its citizens to have these treatments is distinctly problematic as the state, as we know it, would not necessarily sill exist. Even if we accept that the state still exists in a recognisable form and that it makes economic sense for states to pay for these treatments, it does not follow that they will pay for them. As de Gray thought equality was a major issue, it’s worth going into at slightly greater length.
The basis from which de Grey works is that regenerative medicine is medicine like any other, albeit with remarkable effects. As we know from the current debate in the US, there are plenty of people who see taking money from them to pay for the healthcare of others as morally wrong. There are also plenty of countries that would like to provide comprehensive healthcare, but cannot afford it. De Grey provided no explanation of how we would roll out this treatment when we cannot at the moment give people with economic potential very cheap drugs – say, hydration salts for diarrhea – that would have similar economic benefits to the de Grey treatments but at vastly lower costs per dose. From the point of view of the state, it doesn’t matter whether a day’s work is done by a thirty-year-old or a three hundred and thirty-year-old. Given that states do not have to provide pensions or old age healthcare now, and that the mechanism by which they will be convinced to do so is absent, it seems as reasonable to conclude that arbitrarily long lives will remain the province of the wealthy as to conclude that we will enter this brave, new world. A nightmare scenario would be lots of people having access to these treatments but not making the necessary lifestyle changes. If we kept dropping kids every twenty or thirty years over a thousand year life, we’d very quickly overpopulate the planet.
I hope that de Gray’s science is more thorough than his statecraft.
Of course, if de Gray is right, I look forward to seeing you at the February 2317 meeting of Sceptics in the Pub London – assuming someone hasn’t already booked the room.
I rather doubt this will have much electoral impact as lots of the people on the 507 are coming from outside the Greater London area.
In other bus news, which I hadn’t heard about, East Thames Buses has been sold to Go Ahead. Both the sale and the fact that the only news outlets which carried the story, other than Mayorwatch, seem to have been Socialist Worker and Investors’ Chronicle, neither of which I read, bothers me.
TfL have released more information on the replacements to the 507. As of Saturday, 25th July (edited – had August originally!) 2009. The note, which is available here as a PDF, says:
Brand new two door single deck buses will replace the current bendy buses on route 507.
Passengers will still need a valid ticket before boarding through either door.
A more frequent service will run during Monday to Friday morning and evening peak hours. Buses will run about every three minutes.
New service on Saturdays and Sundays. Buses will run every 15 minutes during the early morning and every 12 minutes throughout the day.
My thoughts, in the same order as above:
New buses are indeed going to be replacing, at non-zero cost, the perfectly decent and relatively new bendies.
One of the objections to bendies was fare evasion. You only had to touch in if you were using pay-as-you-go Oyster; people with passes didn’t have to at touch in at all. Only 1% of journeys, according to this TfL FOI request, were made using paper tickets. Because not everyone had to pass the driver – you could board at any door – it was impossible to verify except when an inspector was on board. It will be possible to board through either set of doors on the 12m replacements; that problem (which didn’t really exist, largely as they were used by commuters who have Travelcards anyway) isn’t solved.
The service will be more frequent; every three minutes instead of every five during morning and evening peaks. Mercedes-Benz Citaros carry up to 149 passengers (source). Alexander Dennis Enviro200 Darts have a maximum capacity of 61. At three minute intervals, the smaller buses would need a capacity a fraction over 89 to match the bendies. That is a reduction in capacity on busy routes, meaning more people queuing on Mepham Street at Waterloo and, more problematically, on Terminus Place at Victoria.
The new service on Saturdays and Sundays is to be welcomed. As I have previously said, the bus is principally used by commuters but it passes three housing estates, a couple of schools and goes through residential areas.
This represents very bad value for money: relatively new buses are going to be replaced and capacity is going to be reduced. As many people, including Dave Hill, Christian Wolmar, Adam ‘Tory Troll’ Bienkov, MayorWatch and BorisWatch have said, scrapping the bendies is a bit of a daft thing to do and suggests that Mayor Johnson didn’t know much about the diverse London transport situation (not that I claim to in any great detail) before running for this office and has either not bothered to learn since or has realised he is trapped into silly, headline-grabbing populist policies.
Evidently, the UK has come to a halt because of the snow. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m in Oslo. Suffice to say that ten or fifteen centimetres of snow isn’t a problem for Norway.
Looking at Facebook, lots of people are complaining that the snow brings London to a halt. Ten centimetres of snow lying on the ground, up here, can be counted on consistently during the winter. In the UK, it’s a once in fifteen or twenty year event. It’s simply not worth building the transport system to deal with events that happen so infrequently. It would make as much sense as Norway preparing itself for sand being blown in from the Sahara.
Stop complaining, build a snow person and enjoy the day off work.
