Fun with numbers (race to the bottom)

From The Evening Standard:

Fast-food takeaways will be banned from opening within 400 metres of schools in a bid to tackle the capital’s child obesity epidemic.

In addition, all new chicken, fish and chip and pizza outlets will have to sign up to minimum healthy food standards before getting planning permission. Sadiq Khan will announce the policy in his draft London Plan, the capital’s “planning bible”, due to be published later this week.

You know the answer is going to be 'zero', but let's do the numbers.

400 yds = 366 metres.

A circle with a radius of 366m has a surface area of 420,000 sq m = 0.42 sq km.

There are approx. 3,700 schools in Greater London (24,372 x 8 million/53 million).

3,700 schools x 0.42 sq km = 1,554 sq km.

Surface area of Greater London 1,569 sq km

I was a bit slow on the uptake here.

Dan Cookson beat us all to it, and even the BBC has pointed out that "In some parts of London, the only places that new fast food outlets would theoretically be allowed are in the middle of parks or the River Thames."

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Evening Standard (5 September, page 56):

It was the postwar policy package of rent controls, higher property taxes  and easily available council housing that enabled Lammy's parents to buy a house for £6,000. It was inevitable that house prices and rents would rocket after Thatcher and Blair dismantled and reversed this.

There's much to welcome in Lammy's housing plans. If anything he is too timid. Why not cap private sector rents at 20 per cent below current levels rather than 20 per cent higher, saving billions in Housing Benefit and easing the strain on working tenants.

Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Evening Standard (page 45):

Boris Johnson wants the rest of the country to "give London back its tax", but London already soaks up wealth from the rest of the country. The best-paid civil servants are based here; public sector workers receive London weighting; per capita spending on infrastructure is higher in London, and so on.

The biggest inwards transfer of all is because the financial services sector, which collects rent and interest from the rest of the country, is headquartered here. The value of all these payments to London far outweighs the payments going out.

This is quite clearly evidenced by the fact that London is the area least affected by the recession. As a result of all the internal migration to London, rents and house prices are on a rising trend even as they fall elsewhere. Higher rents in turn soak up most of the financial advantage of moving to London, so ultimately, the people who benefit most are those who own land and housing in London. It is from these people that Boris should be looking to claw back taxes, not the rest of the country.

Mark Wadsworth etc.

Forced to retire at 48. On a pension of £64,000 a year.

Why don't they just share the job? It's not like anyone else is really bothered.

Righteous vs Righteous

Glorious!

The BBC has been accused of political bias for allowing Boris Johnson to appear on EastEnders despite rejecting an idea from his predecessor Ken Livingstone...

Mr Livingstone approached the BBC during his last term as Mayor, hoping to highlight a recycling campaign on the show. He said: "They said it wouldn't be appropriate, that it was political. They've obviously changed their tune, but then they have always been quite keen on Boris." Labour Assembly member Murad Qureshi accused the BBC of giving Mr Johnson free publicity.

The BBC claimed that the office of Mayor was "politically neutral".

Boris 'Bansturbator' Johnson

"Boris Johnson’s deputy, Ray Lewis, resigns in row over sex allegations"

The story so far is in The Times.

Here is the photo from the front page of today's LondonPaper:
You can just imagine the conversation:
Boris: "OK, let's get our story straight"
Ray: "I never, ever, encouraged a child to put his or her hand down my trousers"
Boris: "No, like I'm doing now, that's never happened to him before"
Ray: "Does this remind you of what you had to do to your teachers at Eton, you naughty boy?"
Boris: "It reminds me of the maths teacher, what a fat, sweaty prick"
Ray: "Oooh ... I have a fat, sweaty prick?"
Boris: "No, you just look like one ... shit ... are these microphones on?"

Let's not forget that Red Ken had been in charge for eight years before stories about Lee Jasper or Rosemary Emodi came to light - which makes me thing that Red Ken can't have been that inefficient or corrupt - Bonking Boris has been in charge for what ... six weeks? And he's lost the plot already?

Is Boris Johnson stupid or devious?

Asked by Andrew Marr whether he would run for a second term as London Mayor, Boris 'Bansturbator' Johnson said that he would be judged on many things - crime, transport etc (fair enough) and whether we had had "a successful Olympics".

Somebody buy this man a calendar! The next Mayoral elections will be in May 2012, a month or two before the London Olympics (or possibly a year-and-a-bit).

Twat, frankly.

While we're on the subject, can I report this poster:to the Advertising Standards Authority? The ban has made my journey home marginally less pleasant, so the slogan clearly fails the test of "truthfulness".

"Boris bans booze on buses"

And trains and everywhere else.

I find myself completely in agreement with Bob Crow for once.

Boris Johnson's acceptance speech

Boris and his crew are always yapping on about how intelligent and well-educated he is.

Wot?

He has had months to prepare speeches for victory and defeat, he had his moment of glory and just came out with a shapeless rambling collection of snippets of this that and the other, the whole thing was condescending, clumsy, pointless, humourless, badly delivered etc etc.

Siân Berry's drugs policies

I have ridiculed some of Siân's policies here and here, but in all fairness, the Green Party's drugs policies are pretty sound:

* Regulation and control over the sale of cannabis for medical and recreational use.
* A local democratic tax on cannabis sale, where the purchaser chooses a local project to receive a percentage of the profits.
* Licensed cannabis supply based on the Dutch coffee shop model.
* Decriminalising recreational drugs such as ecstasy and psychotropic mushrooms.
* Providing heroin on prescription as a route into a range of other consensual treatments.
* Improving information and health education relating to all drugs.
* A ban on advertising and sponsorship of tobacco, cannabis or other currently illegal drugs.

However, she doesn't mention cocaine or crack-cocaine. It's all well and good pointing out in your manifesto that "57 per cent of all crime and 80 per cent of burglary in the UK is to feed a heroin or crack drug habit", but if she says (quite sensibly) that heroin should be available on prescription, what about cocaine or crack-cocaine? Would they be available on prescription as well?

What she also doesn't mention is that the London Assembly has absolutely no authority whatsoever to implement such policies.

"UKIP hopeful looks beyond Europe"

Gerard Batten gets a fair write up on the BBC website. That's always puzzled me about the BBC, of all the MSM, they're the ones who treat us most fairly.

Price and quantity demanded

Many London commuters whine that the Tube is too crowded and too expensive and most of the candidates for London Mayor are trying to tap into this sentiment*;
Boris - "We pay the highest fares in Europe and we deserve value for money",
Sian - "The cost of travel is one of the main reasons London is such an expensive place to live ... I would focus on making day-to-day travel more affordable for ordinary Londoners",
Brian- "Tubes charge first class fares for third class travel. Despite record investment, they are still overcrowded, overheated and unreliable".
Ken, who is apparently only narrowly behind in the race, has been Mayor for eight years, and has had plenty of time to put his grand plans into effect. And to be fair, he did bitterly oppose the hugely expensive PFI nonsense.

So none of them have a clue about economics, do they?

1. The Tube is running at full capacity, so in the medium term you cannot increase quantity supplied.

2. Reduced prices would mean an increase in quantity demanded, i.e. even more people would want to use the Tube, so it'd become even more crowded at peak times (if that's physically possible).

3. Somebody has to pay for the cost of running it. None of them have said which taxes they'd increase to cover the shortfall. The least-worst way of funding public transport infrastructure is via Land Value Tax, but that's a bit beyond the Mayor's remit, methinks.

4. The 'high' cost of Tube travel (actually, season tickets are very cheap) does not increase the 'cost of living'. If the Tooth Fairy paid for the Tube to be totally free, then London would be a more attractive place to live and people would have more money to spend on ... rents and housing. So rents and house prices would go up (scroll down to The Error of Public Tollways), and the total cost of living would stay much the same.

* Even Gerard is not immune to this, although he's the only one who'd scrap the Congestion Charge - more people in cars = less people on the Tube - hooray!

London's airport capacity - poll results

Thanks to everybody who voted.

The overall response to the question "Would you like to see an expansion of airport capacity in and around London?" was as follows:

Yes - 17 votes
No - 7 votes

Right! The four main candidates are going to have to share those 7 'No' votes, I wonder if any other candidate will be brave enough to try and grab the 17 'Yes' votes for him- or herself?