0450 Hrs GMT London Wednesday 1 April 2009:
KHOODEELAAR! TOLD YOU SO! THAT Gordon Brown was wrong to ignore sound advice about the urgent need to make overdue investment in maintaining the EXISTING London transport infrastructure. Khoodeelaar! has analyzed the crassness of the Crossrail scam for more than 5 years now. And in that time, on a daily sometimes hourly, basis, we have uncovered evidence that has consistently vindicated our own findings.. Each and every single time.. For more than FIVE years so far... What is significant is that the Guardian, which has been as servile to Big Business Crossrail scam agenda as the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD, has been publishing these little items [see the latest one we have reproduced below from the Guardian web site which posted it in the past few hours only] showing a variety of funding shortfalls on existing London transport provisions. Yet neither the Guardian nor the ‘London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD’ has had the ethics or the morality or the economic competence to show that these shortfalls and problems c an be easily resolved by scrapping the wasteful Crossrail... Many times over. This is why we have been describing as CRASS b both the Crossrail scam itself and those who have been irrationally backing it...In the piece we reproduced below, the Guardian’s ignorant ‘transport’ ‘reporter’ Dan Milmo says that ‘Transport for London’ [=TfL] is cutting vital work due to the ‘economic circumstance’ but fails to say that TfL DOES have more than enough money to avoid those cuts. That money is unduly wastefully allocated to CRASSrail. Not only are the two CRASSRail scam-backing ‘mainstream newspapers’ suppressing the truth on this occasion to shield their CROSSRAIL scam agenda-setting controllers from accountability, they also behaved identically over the Channel 4 Dispatches item broadcast on Monday [30 March 2009] about Boris Johnson. BOTH the Guardian and the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD focussed hypocritically on a bit of Boris Johnson thuggery from the alleged past. We say alleged past because we do not believe that Boris Johnson has overcome the propensities that his friend ship with Darius Guppy had highlighted in the past. Both the Guardian and the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD failed to question the C Channel el 4 Dispatches programme’s real shortcomings and failures. Instead BOTH titles [the Guardian and London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD] in effect praised that shoddy and artificial edition of the Dispatches programme. How shoddy and artificial? Because all the information the Dispatches programme claimed to have researched and ‘discovered’ had been known already. And ESPECIALLY the incident of Boris Johnson having participated in a plot to have another journalist beaten up. ‘Another journalist’ refers to the fact that at the time of that plot, Boris Johnson had been himself employed as a journalist. In fact the incident was covered in more than one detailed report not along after it happened. And, just for the records, the KHOODEELAAR! campaign publications have updated the same incident in the past 2 years! This has been as part of our evidential demonstration of the flaws in those who have been peddling Crossrail scam... We have chronicled the conduct of the Guardian, the BBC and in some additional detail the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD. We have been doing this to maintain the veracity of our cause which is that the transport needs of London cannot be abused as a cover for Big Business and their stooges and touts to loot public money. That public money should be used first of all responsibly. And responsibility necessarily entails the active application of relevance and urgency. And appropriateness. And productivity. That the money and any resource including any attendant power must not be wasted. And that money must not be looted.. It is clear that as far as the CROSSRAIL scam is concerned, neither the Guardian - nor the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD, nor indeed the BBC -wants to acknowledge the existence of the universally relevant - or any - requirement or criteria or standard of accountability.. This is why we have also said that the people inside the BBC and those of their counterparts on the Guardian and the London EVENING nonstandard STANDARD who have perpetuated the suppression of the truth about Crossrail must all belong to a secret cult. Or a secret society. For had they not done so, they would have allowed the truth to be included in their peddling promotion an propaganda for Big Business ploy to loot £Billions of UK public money under cover of London Crossrail.…They would also have shown that the biggest failure in the list of Boris Johnson's failures should have been featured as the failure to tell the truth about why he has become Ken Livingstone’s most fanatic successor for the Big Business ploy...
[To be continued]
Tube station work halted after discovery of £400m funding gap
Dan Milmo
The Guardian, Wednesday 1 April 2009
Article history
Tube passengers will have to endure cramped conditions at some of London's busiest stations after the discovery of a £400m funding hole forced the postponement of vital upgrade work yesterday.
The London Underground funding gap, which already stood at an estimated £5bn, has widened further after a new shortfall of £400m was revealed and forced a last-minute revision to the capital's transport budget. The London mayor, Boris Johnson, ordered the postponement of work on stations that was formerly the responsibility of Metronet - the public-private partnership contractor that collapsed two years ago.
Transport for London, the mayor's transport body, said another funding hole of £400m has been found in Metronet's books since it was taken over by TfL. Metronet is responsible for three-quarters of London's tube lines including the District, Circle and Central lines. TfL added that its budget had been squeezed further by a drastic revision in tube passenger forecasts, from 3.5% growth to zero.
Peter Hendy, London's transport commissioner, said: "Lower projections for future fare revenue caused by the deterioration in the wider economy and the drain on TfL's resources caused by the collapse of Metronet means that some work planned for 2009-10 must be cancelled or deferred until a later date."
TfL admitted that its budget for the financial year to March 2010, hastily rewritten to accommodate the passenger numbers and Metronet, remained under review. "There continues to be pressure on the TfL budget as a result of the economic circumstances," said the spokesman.
London businesses warned that there was "no case" for postponing tube upgrades to fund less important policies, such as Johnson's pledge to bring back the distinctive Routemaster bus. Jo Valentine, chief executive of the London First business group, said: "There is no case, absolutely none, for robbing from the vital tube modernisation programme to pay for eye-catching but less-effective initiatives elsewhere."
TfL and the mayor's office are at loggerheads with the government over the tube's funding. The Department for Transport refuses to top up the £40bn awarded to TfL over seven years. However, TfL's fares income, which was supposed to match the £40bn settlement, could miss targets.
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