Founding News Editor Shah M Azizul Haque AADHIKAR Media Foundation established with the publication of AADHIKAR the weekly on Monday 19 December 1980 from London E1 UK.
FEARS grew today that the eastern and western extensions of Crossrail may be delayed.
Transport Secretary Philip Hammond refused to give MPs a guarantee the £16 billion line will be completed as planned by 2017. He told the Commons transport committee: "The Government's objective is to deliver the whole of the Crossrail route network.
"But it's clear that that has to be affordable, and we are still at a relatively early stage of the project in terms of having a fixed handle on the costs." Angie Bray, Tory MP for Ealing Central and Acton, said the best return on investment would come from ensuring the extensions to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east, and Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, were built.
Mr Hammond admitted there was a link between fare revenue and the extensions as many commuters will use them. But he added: "Fare revenue is only one part of ... a complex financing equation. The joint sponsors have an obligation to taxpayers to ensure that the project delivers value for money."
The Govenment is contributing £5.1 billion, a levy on firms will raise £3.5 billion, and £2.7 billion will be borrowed on the back of future fare revenue. More cash will come from other private sources.
The Brick Lane and the Whitechapel London E1 Area campaign against Crossrail hole Bill
0930 Hrs GMT London Wednesday 12 July 2006-07-12
That ‘Crossrail Bill’ is now in the UK House of Commons, 12 July 2006 being allegedly ‘scrutinised’ by the ‘Crossrail Bill Select Committee’]
Khoodeelaar! court action may bring wider attention to Crossrail attack on the East End of London than may at first appear to be the case.
For a start, the series of actions that is about to begin, will include by definition the type of detailed examination of the evidence against Crossrail that has not been allowed to happen by the CrossRail Bill Select Committee in the UK House of Commons.
Although that examination should have taken place, if the claim - that the process of law –making in the UK parliament was taking place – or does take place - at the highest democratic and accountable level were to be justifiable
The realities as we have observed in June 2006 make that [above] expectation a most unrealistic one. The 'meetings' of the UK House of Commons 'Select committee' on the Crossrail Bill were conducted in an openly hostile way to those who had any serious objections to put against the Crossrail Bill.
For a start there is no culture of democratic accountability in the UK parliament. No wonder that even a diehard Tory like Quentin Hogg, himself no stranger to constitutional law, was forced to conclude that the system of ‘parliament’ that existed in the UK was one he could describe as an elected dictatorship.
A dictatorship, albeit an elected one.
But then, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party too had got elected at one stage,!
So what is the difference?
I shall report on the expected spaces that make up any alleged difference and on the danger of letting the elected dictatorship extinguish any remaining democratic values from the plastic parliament.
Can a programme of court actions produce results that a rally of thousands might not be able to?
I think it can do. And I am of the view after organising this Khoodeelaar! Campaign for the past 31 months to stop CrossRail digging holes in the Brick Lane and Whitechapel London E1 area and mounting other assaults on the community in the East End of London.
Can a programme of court actions produce results that a rally of thousands might not be able to?
I think it can do. And I am of the view after organising this Khoodeelaar! Campaign for the past 31 months to stop CrossRail digging holes in the Brick Lane and Whitechapel London E1 area and mounting other assaults on the community in the East End of London.
Crossrail threatens to blight most of the Brick Lane and Whitechapel London E1 area community. It threatens to drive out of business a very large section of the small business enterprises. And to make the environment a hundred times worse than it currently is.
All for nothing.
Mainly to make Canary Wharf expand to the City of London!
The mind boggles!
We are not expecting anything like the length of the McLibel cases. But we are most empathically about to commence something that may well end up as being the second such court action. Are we right to embark on this? Are we right to say that court actions would cost less person hours than organizing and maintaining massive demonstrations involving thousands of human beings would entail?
These questions are pertinent right now as we have reached the last phase before formal foiling of constitutional law challenges in court against the promoters and other institutionalised and institutional touts for the CrossRail project and its threat to the East End of London.
Long before the Crossrail Bill Select Committee [House of Commons] formally 'heard' some of the evidence against the CrossRail hole Bill threat to the Brick Lane and Whitechapel London E1 area, Khoodeelaar! the campaign against CrossRail had decided on a set of actions that included a specific constitutional dimension. After witnessing the blatant obstruction against key presenters of anti-CrossRail evidence in the Committee during June 2006, Khoodeelaar! Has now decided to test the UK law in a way that will perhaps bring the Human Rights Act 1998 into very unexpected focus.
1. The main constitutional law allegation that I could find against the Secretary of State was that he lied in and to Parliament, he misled parliament and he wrongly failed to tell the House of Commons fully and duly of the requirement that UK law had to comply with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental freedoms.
2. That was based on the preliminary and literal reading of the contents of the Crossrail Bill, as introduced to the House of Commons by [the then] Transport Secretary Alistair Darling on 22 February 2005.
3. Having observed since that date the many activities of the Transport Secretary and the rest of the groupings that make up the ‘promoter’ of the Crossrail Bill, it is clear that compatibility with constitutional requirements is not at the top of the priorities of the UK executive seeking to get the Crossrail Bill through Parliament.
4. It has been clear from the behaviour of the two successive holders of the office of Secretary of State at the UK Department for Transport over the past 24 months that compliance with the Treaty obligations on ECHR is nothing more than a nuisance to them and to the Blair regime. They have shown remarkably consistent evidence of hostility to the rule of law and due process and constitutionality for the promotion of the CrossRail project
5. It was only through the sustained campaign on the ground over the past 31 months backed up with original Khoodeelaar!! Legal analyses of the UK executive's behaviour that we have been able to show that the Secretary of State was wrong to have introduced the Crossrail Bill in the shape it was introduced and that he was wrong to have flouted the UK’s constitutional law making treaty obligations that he did.
Especially, as I have pointed out on dozens of occasions already including in pieces carried on indymedia UK and international sites, about the abuses of the executive powers to make several hundred million £ available to the promoters without any justification.
That abuse of public money ahs included the abuses of the local tiers of peoples and community representation.
Where Ruth Kelly herself lives, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Council has been one abysmally anti-democratic, anti-community, cabal of corruption, misrepresentation of the local people that is found anywhere in the whole of the UK.
And has Ruth Kelly’s aid a word in opposition to the corrupt Tower Hamlets Council?
Has she spoken a word in support of the community that is threatened by Crossrail?
To those who have sought to make light of our legal action programme, we can only s ay, WATCH this space.
The London ECONOMIST is as crass as the agenda it peddles and promotes. The role playerd in the creation of peoverty by that tool of Big Business that loots the rest of the economic will not be found in its pages. Nor will the facts be found in the so-called rival outlets. We put on the record the latest incident of the ECONOMIST promoting poverty-creation in London and at the expense of the people of and in East London in the context of or continuing examination of the evidence of HOW successive regimes in the UK keep poverty-creation going.
Here [below] is what the ‘ECONOMIST’ web site carries today [Sunday 25 July 2010]
Our detailed examination of the contents of the paragraph referring to ‘poor people’ will appear on this and other Khoodeelaar! And associated web sites and blogs ion the next few hours.
[To be continued]
“London's Olympics
Field of dreams
Two years before the Olympics, Britain is doing well. But it’s what happens after the games that matters
Jul 22nd 2010
FIVE years ago this month London won the right to stage the summer Olympic games in 2012. This newspaper did not share in the general rejoicing. We had argued that the games would be a waste of money and a great inconvenience to our home city. We haven’t changed our minds. We still wish that the whole circus had gone to Paris.
But we are where we are. London’s games are a mere two years away. The main stage for them is taking impressive and unstoppable shape on a tract of once deindustrialised, contaminated land in the east of the city (see article and article). What matters now is that London makes the best of its folly—and beats the sorry standards set by past wastrel hosts of the sporting jamboree. Besides staging games that are exciting and safe, three criteria will determine how well it does.
The first of these is money. Here London made a shameful start. In 2003 Britons were told that the games would cost about £3 billion ($4.9 billion), plus £1 billion to spruce up the grubby corner of their capital where the games would be staged. By 2007, when the sums were redone, the cost of getting ready had been bumped up to £9.3 billion. Part of the extra was for security, for which blame the suicide-bombers who struck the day after the city won the games. But most was for increased building costs, a lack of private-sector enthusiasm (and money), tax and a “contingency”—of £2.7 billion, if you please—to make the new budget unbustable.
Related items
* The 2012 Olympics: The greatest sideshow on EarthJul 22nd 2010
* Olympic legacies: Show's overJul 22nd 2010
Since then, though, the builders have done a fine job. They have kept to the bloated budget and might even hand something back to the Treasury. On this score, London looks much better than Athens, which overspent by a factor of far more than two—and the great record-breaker, Montreal, whose citizens were paying for the 1976 games for decades.
The second criterion is time. Many big projects struggle to get to the finishing line. Athens (again) had a severe bout of the jitters. FIFA, football’s global ruler, funnelled more cash into South Africa before this year’s World Cup to make sure that the stadiums were built before kick-off. London, though, is comfortably on course. Visitors from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in town this month, purred at its progress.
Keeping to time and budget, however, is the least Britons can expect. The third criterion is the most important: making good use of what’s left when the athletes, the IOC bigwigs and the world’s media go home. Lots of cities have failed this miserably. Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, the wonder of the world in 2008, is underused, goggled at by day-trippers and the odd concert-goer. Several sites in Athens (sorry to keep on, but you left us no choice) are empty and rotting. Some cities have done better. Barcelona’s Olympics in 1992 were a welcome element of a wider regeneration. Sydney, host in 2000, didn’t have much of a plan when its games ended but has made a success of its Olympic quarter, built like London’s on deindustrialised land.
The final lap
From the outset, the London Olympics has at least had a declared aim: the regeneration of the city’s poor eastern districts. Better still, London at least has started thinking about what it will do with its Olympic Park to help bring this about. In the coming months, the state-owned company that will take the park over after the games is expected to set out its plans.
Its task is to create a place where people will want to live, work and play in a part of town that people have been eager to escape, where jobs have been hard to come by and where welcoming, wide, green spaces are too rare. There are hopeful precedents in the new towns built after the second world war, the garden cities of a century ago and in the private estates built in west London in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are voices calling for much more social housing in the Olympic Park. It is true that London is short of homes for poor people. But concentrated social housing goes hand in hand with joblessness and enduring poverty: too much of the first will condemn the area to too much of the second and third. To imitate the success of the new towns and garden cities, and to generate jobs and encourage prosperity, the park will need a mix of homes as well as a good swathe of greenery. Get this right, and the games might almost be worthwhile.”
Other politically unpalatable options put forward to the Treasury include cutting the armed forces by tens of thousands, halting all investment in renewable technologies and scrapping plans to raise the school leaving age to 18.
Treasury officials spent the day ringing around Whitehall departments insisting they met the “close of play” deadline for submitting their proposed budgets. Final spending decisions for the rest of the parliament will be announced on October 20.
Around Whitehall there were howls of protest that the Treasury was making unreasonable requests, but Mr Osborne was adamant that most “unprotected” departments should outline cuts of either 25 per cent or 40 per cent. Only health and overseas aid are fully protected from cuts, while education and defence ministers were told to draw up smaller – but still painful – reductions of either 10 per cent or 20 per cent.
Mr Osborne is braced for a series of “shroud waving” stories emerging from departments claiming they are being asked to deliver the impossible or are being forced to break political promises. The Financial Times revealed concerns in the military about having to bear the cost of renewing the Trident nuclear deterrent, while transport officials said they might have to scale back the promise of free bus passes to older people. “They are classic tactics,” said one Treasury insider. “We will get a lot more of this in the next couple of months.” There is a view among Whitehall officials that Mr Osborne’s department is showing rather too much relish with the knife.
Some officials from spending departments are becoming increasingly frustrated by a “gruesome and unreal” process, driven by a seemingly merciless Treasury. They complain that there has been very little discussion of trade-offs and implications of cuts. “They just say show us the numbers,” said one Whitehall insider.
Mr Osborne and Danny Alexander, Treasury chief secretary, told ministers to produce two scenarios for cuts – one tough, one excruciating – to provide them with a “menu” of alternatives. The “star chamber” of senior ministers will make final political judgments. “If they do not come up with things that are sensible we will ask them to do it again,” said the Treasury insider. “We will identify around the cabinet table those who have done their homework and those people who have not.”
The Treasury reckons the scale of the cuts will force ministers to make radical choices. “They will have to stop doing things altogether or get someone else to do them,” said one official. “Just spreading the jam more thinly across all spending areas won’t work this time.”
Ken Clarke, justice secretary, is seen in the Treasury as the poster boy of the cuts process. His plans to stop sending so many people to prison and to scale back legal aid are viewed as models of original thinking.
The business department is struggling with the scale of the task ahead. With more than half its budget allocated to higher education – the funding arrangements for which cannot be changed until Lord Browne reports the findings of his independent review in the autumn – it leaves Vince Cable, business secretary, with little room for manoeuvre.
Mr Cable hopes the growth focus of his department might spare it the worst of the cuts, a view shared by Philip Hammond, transport secretary, who hopes the £16bn Crossrail project in London could do well in a cost-benefit analysis of capital projects.
Additional reporting by Robert Wright and Kiran Stacey
£1bn Train to Gain scheme faces axe in hunt for apprenticeship funding
Ministers are drawing up plans to dismantle a £1bn flagship scheme that gives subsidies to companies to provide adult education to their workforces, write Jim Pickard and Kiran Stacey.
John Hayes, minister for further education, is believed to have concluded that the Train to Gain scheme should be dismembered, with much of the funding switched to new apprentice schemes.
Last month, ministers cut Train to Gain by £150m to fund 50,000 extra apprenticeships, with another £50m sliced off to help fill a gap in the college rebuilding programme. Now Mr Hayes is keen to go further and reduce the scheme to a husk of its original form under Labour, transferring hundreds of millions of pounds to other apprentice schemes.
The decision is likely to be made after the Whitehall spending round in October, in which the business department is likely to be hit disproportionately hard.
An element of the Train to Gain programme is likely to be maintained, but only in a slimmed-down form. The government has also signalled that it is cutting funding to larger companies for training, while increasing the proportion that goes to small business.
Tom Richmond, skills adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that 1.25m people had benefited from Train to Gain, with more than half a million receiving a qualification. He said the scheme had enjoyed a 70 per cent success rate.
But he conceded that in a time of austerity it was hard to justify a programme that gave 100 per cent subsidies to activities that private companies might do anyway. Mr Hayes recently told the FT that apprenticeships had been “bastardised” by the Labour government.
He said he wanted to reinvigorate the qualification with proposals that included more relevant syllabuses and a range of extremely high-level apprenticeships equivalent to undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications. The main concern remains, however, that places on apprenticeship schemes are limited by a shortage of companies prepared to offer them to young people.
Mr Hayes is also preparing the ground for new “learning accounts”, which are likely to give every adult eligible for government-funded training a financial credit to pay for courses.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
KHOODEELAAR! Told the BBC so for 6 years and five months. That it was peddling the Big Biz agenda Crossrail scam at the expense of the EXISTING transport networks and infrastruc ture in London
As the Department of Transport faces savage budget cuts, it appears that funding for Crossrail is safe. But the suggestion that the Tube will have to bear the brunt of cuts is alarming.
With projected Tube upgrades already running behind schedule, a big cut in funding would be disastrous. Overcrowding, heat and antiquated signalling systems make the Tube woefully inadequate to serve a capital of London's size. Already the upgrades have taken far too long, with the schedule held up by the collapsed Public Private Partnership. Business leaders warn that failure to invest in the Tube will have real impacts on London's economy.
There is little scope for raising the shortfall from ticket prices: already, fares are rising next January ahead of inflation and are likely to continue to do so regardless of central government cuts. Nor is it easy to see how TfL could make up the difference from cuts elsewhere: it is already imposing swingeing efficiency savings, while deep cuts to the bus budget would hurt both the suburbs and the inner-London poor hardest.
London must take its share of cuts: that will inevitably mean slower and less ambitious Tube upgrades. But cuts so deep that they threaten the whole future of the project would be completely counter-productive. London will be the motor of the nation's recovery, and anything that damages its economy will end up hurting the provinces too. Transport Secretary Philip Hammond must convince the Chancellor that such cuts would be self-defeating.
Pensions crunch
Public sector pensions have been the focus of recent concern but they are part of a wider pensions crisis. Most private employers have now ended final-salary schemes, while others stagger under the weight of pension obligations. In this respect, the Government's mooted change to pension index-linking could be positive. But it is unlikely to please those who depend on final salary pensions.
The issue may appear technical but it could have a significant effect over time on pensioners' income. Private schemes are legally required to be index-linked, to prevent pensioners' incomes being eroded by inflation. Existing legislation stipulates that they be linked to the Retail Price Index, usually higher than the alternative Consumer Price Index because it includes house prices.
The Government proposes to change the law to link pensions instead to the CPI. This would help company schemes by meaning they pay out less, thereby improving their health at a stroke.
It would, however, reduce the monthly increase in pensioners' incomes. The difference would be small but cumulative: over 20 years, the change could erode income by as much as 25 per cent. Few pensioners pay mortgages, and CPI may thus be a better reflection of the price rises they face. That is unlikely to make a drop in income more palatable. Moreover, if house prices fall, CPI-linked pensions could end up costing employers more.
Ministers are right to be concerned about the burden of pensions on companies — but these measures risk angering a large constituency.
Khoodeelaar! Updating our diagnostics of and on the London crassly edited 'EVENING STANDARD '.
In the past eight years, the EVENING STANDARD has published lies after lies for big biz scam Crossrail. Never once has it [the London “evening no standards standard”] mentioned in the same item about Crossrail any aspect let alone the full subject of the London underground. So persistent has the standardless ‘EVENING STANDARD ’ been in its touting for big biz Crossrail that any ‘reader’ looking randomly at its promotion of big biz interest scam would not know that the standard even recognised the existence of the overwhelmingly more important London underground networks.
And any reader who did not know London would not know that there was any transport provisions s in place in London at all!
And that Crossrail would be the first transport line in London! The lying record of the Evening nostandards STANDARD is exposed today in the outlet’s item we reproduce below. We shall continue to diagnose the corrupting role played by the EVENING STANDARD , which is a disgrace and a disservice.
We shall cite examples from its [The standardless ‘EVENING STANDARD’] current and recent and historic behaviour of perniciously lying in and about and to ordinary people in London.
[To be continued]
from the EVENING STANDARD website at 1530 GMT London Friday 09 July 2010:
London's Underground system today emerged as a key target for Treasury spending cuts.
Crucial upgrades to the network could be in danger if Chancellor George Osborne insists on squeezing 25 to 40 per cent from the transport budget.
Transport secretary Philip Hammond is understood to be submitting proposals for cuts to the Treasury next week - a fortnight ahead of a deadline - for the summer-long comprehensive spending review.
Sources said he will not downsize the £16 billion Crossrail project, but business leaders fear this leaves Tube upgrades exposed.
Business leaders today warned that cancelling upgrades would undermine the capital's economy. A report by business group London First forecast "intolerable" conditions on the Tube in 2026 if the cuts were made. It claimed:
Temperatures could soar to 32C, breaking EU limits for transporting livestock, let alone people.
The 10-mile journey from Tooting Broadway to Canary Wharf on the Northern line could take an hour to complete as a result of delays caused by overcrowding.
The ticket barrier at Victoria station would shut every six minutes, for two minutes at a time, to maintain safety because of severe over-crowding.
Every passenger using Bond Street station would have to add an extra 10 minutes to their journey to push through overcrowded platforms and escalators. Baroness Valentine, chief executive of London First, said: "Without the Tube's modernisation alongside Crossrail, London's ability to accommodate jobs, population and new economic activity will grind to a halt, to the detriment of the whole country. Passengers will no longer tolerate the conditions. It may take a generation, it may be too slow to see by the eye, but it will happen, and our hard won status as a world city will slowly slip from our hands."
Experts say the Tube is vulnerable as it takes up such a large share of the £14billion budget at the Department for Transport, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies says is likely to suffer 33per cent cuts. Almost a third of the department's annual budget goes to Transport for London. Upgrades are planned for the Northern and Piccadilly lines. An upgrade of the Jubilee line is now due to be completed by October.
They could start by cutting the wretched announcements now plaguing the tube. It's one thing we really don't need and would at least give us a bit of peace and quiet as we swelter...
- rover, London NW2, 09/07/2010 15:59 Report abuse
"A report by business group London First forecast "intolerable" conditions on the Tube in 2026 if the cuts were made".
No doubt, with the inevitable increase in projected population. So now is high time to reduce pressure on our transport and infrastructure in general by AT LAST grasping the nettle of the huge problem of our imported populations.
Stop immigration, start repatriation, and we're on the way to a solution - including to that of the so-called "housing problem" - without any eye-watering investments.
The upgrading of the tube should be more of a priority than the building of Crossrail. It would not be a great suprise if Crossrail was very late and very over budget given it's complexity.
Sounds like a great plan, cut spending on the transport and schools budget to save the economy and then spend three times as much in 10 years time on the same projects and end up with the same level of debt.
Fred when you get a bunch of no hopers in government what can you expect? Call me Dave, moron Gove (only 22 mistakes), Nick the bag carrier, Vince "watch me dance all the way to Lords" Cable, Ken Clarke......oh this list goes on and on. Not forgetting Beaker the token ginger one.
Are the CrossRail trains going to have air-con? Please makesure they do...
Any chance we could get some on the tube as well?
Never understood why the Bakerloo line wasn't extended to the South East, like via Elephant to Deptford, perhaps under the existing road network like New Kent/ OLd Kent road?
Rather than the punishment taxes that government wants to lay at the door of London institutionals perhaps direct "donations" into the coffers of LUL. At least that way those that benefit most from London's improved transport infrastructure can see their money working for them rather then dissappear down the dark corridors fo Whitehall.
- Paula Griffin, South London, 09/07/2010 13:47 Report abuse
Perhaps Govt will now follow through on pledge to remove management consultants from the public sector and replace the expensive consultants managing CrossRail (whose costs don't seem to appear on TfL's headcount) with equally effective but much cheaper in house managers.
All of the expensive consultants on the CrossRail project can, in the current recession, be replaced by directly employed managers saving us taxpayers many millions.
Hmm, time for a strike by long-suffering tube passengers, methinks - and/or an undertaking that call-me-Dave's lot will alwauys travel by tube when mvoing around London.
these people are nuts. labour's deficit-cutting plans were adequate. it's good to spend on infrastructure in a recession - you get it cheaper, and you sustain businesses that would otherwise go under. someone needs to tell the treasury to put good economic sense ahead of ideology
Nicholas Cecil, Chief Political Correspondent
- Adrian, London, 09/07/2010 16:09
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