Boris Johnson’s "foreign embassies" in Delhi and Mumbai have been mothballed amid claims the move will cost London millions of pounds of new business, it emerged today.

The Mayor has revealed that the London Development Agency offices in India have not been staffed since last year. He said the operations – which generate inward investment, jobs, students and tourism for the capital – were under review.

Labour Assembly member Murad Qureshi said: "It is disgraceful that the closure of the GLA’s offices in India has been carried out by the back door, without Londoners being informed about the decision to mothball them.

"Developing economies like India’s have grown in global importance due to their having escaped the worst of the recession. The Mayor’s decision to allow the Mumbai and Delhi offices to close is utterly irresponsible." read more

Last week Boris Johnson became chair of London United, the organisation co-ordinating the capital’s support for the England 2018 FIFA World Cup bid. This after he stood down the previous week from chairing the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Waste and Recycling Board. What does that say about his priorities?

Well, apart from breaking pledges he made to the London electorate in May 2008 that he would chair both the MPA and LWaRB, it shows that when the going gets tough Boris will leave it to others to get things going on major issues like crime and policing or building London a new waste management infrastructure.

Boris promised to chair the MPA as part of his scaremongering election campaign about crime in the capital, which was in fact falling overall and continues to fall. Nevertheless, last year faith hate offences in London were up by 46.7%, homophobic offences by 26.9%, rape by 24.2%, gun crime by 12.6%, residential burglary by 5.9% and personal robbery by 5.7%. So Boris can hardly claim to have got crime sorted during his brief stint as MPA chair.

With the new Waste and Recycling Board, it is crucial that it makes an impact now and doesn’t miss the golden opportunity to adopt new low carbon technology. But again Boris is walking away when needed.

By contrast, chairing London United is not a job Londoners elected him to undertake. But it is far easier position for Boris to entertain himself with, involving a lot of promotional events but not much actual hard work or attention to detail.

This is what we have come to expect from Boris. His is a mayoralty that gives precedence to photo ops and self-advertisement, but when push comes to shove on the big issues that affect Londoners, the Mayor is nowhere to be seen.

In response to questions by Labour Member of the London Assembly, Murad Qureshi, Mayor Boris Johnson has admitted that the London Development Agency’s offices in India, established by his predecessor Ken Livingstone to promote London’s interests in one of the world’s most important developing economies, are no longer functioning.

According to the Mayor, ”the LDA’s representatives in Mumbai and Delhi resigned last year and have not yet been replaced”, pending a review that will decide whether the offices should be reopened.

Murad Qureshi AM said: “It is quite disgraceful that the closure of the GLA’s offices in India has been carried out by the back door, without Londoners being informed about the decision to mothball them.

“Developing economies like India’s have grown in global importance due to their having escaped the worst consequences of the recession. It is vital that London’s businesses are properly represented there.”

Murad added: “The Mayor has already conducted a review of the GLA’s international offices. It found that ‘the rationale for London to have offices in key emerging markets is fundamentally sound’ and that they ‘do play an important role in promoting London’s interests, from supporting the capital’s businesses to enhancing the image of our city around the world’.

“The Mayor’s decision to ignore the findings of his own review and allow the Mumbai and Delhi offices to close is utterly irresponsible.”

Ends.

Notes

1. Murad’s questions about the GLA’s India offices and the Mayor’s answers can be consulted here:
http://www.london.gov.uk/mqt/public/question.do?id=29898
http://www.london.gov.uk/mqt/public/question.do?id=29899

2. The Mayor set up a review of the Greater London Authority’s overseas offices in 2008 and it reported its findings in January last year. Headed by the Mayor’s then deputy Ian Clement, the review concluded that there was no case for closing these offices. A press release from the Mayor (16.1.09) reported that “the review found the rationale for London to have offices in key emerging markets is fundamentally sound” and quoted Clement as saying:

“It is absolutely essential given the current financial crisis that we do everything within our power to promote the capital in major markets around the world to ensure London emerges strongly from the downturn.

“We have taken a serious look at whether taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely and how to get the best possible deal for Londoners. The review has found that the GLA’s offices do play an important role in promoting London’s interests, from supporting the capital’s businesses to enhancing the image of our city around the world.”

http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=20540

3. This decision was taken after London’s business community lobbied heavily for the offices to be retained. In a submission to the GLA review the London of Chamber of Commerce and Industry stated:

“Closing the offices in India and China as part of a cost-cutting exercise would be short-sighted and send entirely the wrong signals to potential investors and importers in two of London’s most important potential markets. The GLA may save £1 million, but it is London firms that may ultimately end up paying a much higher price. If the Mayor is not out there promoting London, someone else will be promoting New York, Paris, or Sydney instead.”

The LCCI’s Submission to the GLA Review of London’s International Offices can be consulted here: http://www.londonchamber.co.uk/DocImages/3756.pdf

4. The decision to retain the GLA’s overseas offices was reported in the Evening Standard (19.1.09) under the headline: “Boris saves City Hall ‘embassies’.”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23622530-boris-saves-city-hall-embassies.do

A grandmother working for the BNP at City Hall is feared to be behind plans to unite far-Right activists in advance of the general election.

Tess Culnane, dubbed a "neo-Nazi granny" by her rivals after being a member of the BNP and National Front, has been recruited as an aide by
London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

She was a strong supporter of former BNP leader John Tyndall and has stood in London Assembly, European and council elections. She was the National Front candidate in the Haltemprice and Howden, Yorkshire, by-election in 2008 that was called after then shadow home secretary David Davis quit and then retained his seat.

Speaking of Mrs Culnane’s role, Labour assembly member Murad Qureshi said: "In this instance the BNP has revealed its fascist underbelly, and voters should not be fooled by the party’s attempts to present a more moderate image." read more

Boris Johnson started the year by hitting Londoners with record public transport fare increases of up to 20 per cent on a single bus journey and 18 per cent on some outer London tube fares. These are the biggest real-terms fare increases in the history of Transport of London.

The direct result of the London Mayor’s decision will be a big, late-recession hit on the finances of public transport users (especially those on lower incomes who spend a higher proportion of their incomes on travel).

People are rightly pointing out the injustice of public sector workers being urged to forego pay increases while Boris wades in with a massive 20 per cent hike in their bus fares. And what do commuters get for their increased fares? The Mayor who promised “more bang for your buck” is actually proposing a reduction in bus services by eight million kilometres. This is on top of his decision to start reducing the number of London’s police officers (455 fewer by 2012/13) and firefighters (16 less during 2010-11).

This is all in contrast to his natural, instinctive defence of those “masters of the universe”, the investment bankers on whom we have become dangerously dependent. Appearing oblivious to the public revulsion at the bonuses, excess and peril in which they placed our economy, Boris went in to bat for the City (leading figures from which helped fund his election campaign).

Obama has come out so strongly in favour of re-regulating financial services that the Tories nationally have realigned themselves with the United States government. But Boris is still “instinctively anxious” (David Cameron had to deny a split over the issue) and continues to warn somewhat hysterically that bankers could leave London in their thousands. This claim looks more dubious by the day as big firms cut their year-end payments as a result of Alistair Darling’s reforms and the property market looks up.

How Britain and the world emerges from the economic crisis and what regulatory shape our financial services take is set to be a key battleground in the coming months. Will Boris Johnson continue to rail against any Government action and increased regulation? The same City figures who financed his bid for the mayoralty also fund the Tory Party and may expect similar levels of support.

It’s clear that, in the capital, the Tory Mayor had no more hesitation in clobbering the travelling public with massive fare rises than he had in jumping to defend the financial services from any kind of Government action.

Is this what we can expect from the Tories nationally? In opposition, they have taken a populist line in support of Obama’s proposals. But let’s watch this space.

First published in Tribune, 31 January 2010

There are "clear inadequacies" in pollution safeguards imposed on the planned expansion of Heathrow Airport, London Assembly members have said.

Measures against the impact of a third runway were not "fit for purpose", its environment committee added.

It was also concerned that no single authority would ensure owners BAA and airlines complied with pollution rules.

London Assembly committee chairman Murad Qureshi said: "Our investigation has raised grave concerns about some of these safeguards, including clear inadequacies in approaches to tackling air pollution levels around Heathrow.

"We would also question whether the suggested noise benchmark is fit for purpose and if the aviation emissions targets are achievable." read more

On 6 January, Mayor of London Boris Johnson was the featured speaker at the launch of Policy Exchange’s new report At a Rate of Knots, which advocates the use of public subsidies to expand passenger transport on the Thames. London Assembly Member Murad Qureshi has warned that Policy Exchange’s proposals should be treated with caution.

Murad said: "In the heyday of the working Thames, it was indeed a highway – but a highway to move freight rather than passengers. Today there is much scope for increased use of the Thames in transporting goods, building materials and waste, which would have a positive environmental impact by reducing the number of HGVs passing through London.

"But I am unconvinced by the case for large-scale expansion of passenger transport on the Thames. When Transport for London put out an open tender to improve river transport in 2003 the two operators who responded reported that ‘little more than the existing service could be introduced without a large amount of subsidy over a long period’.

"Policy Exchange base their proposal on dubious statistics. They claim that Thames Clippers presently receive a public subsidy of 14p per passenger, whereas Transport for London has put the figure at 69p. This compares with a subsidy of 33p per passenger for buses.

"If Boris wants to improve public transport, he would be better advised to expand bus services, rather than cutting back on them as he’s currently doing."

Murad added: "Bear in mind that Policy Exchange was the inspiration behind Boris’s plan to replace London’s bendy buses with a revamped Routemaster, a vanity project that will cost Londoners millions of pounds. Hopefully Boris will examine Policy Exchange’s river transport proposals more critically to make sure that he won’t be pouring more of our money into another expensive and impractical scheme."

It’s now a year since I went over to see the elections in Bangladesh which brought a civilian government back into power with a huge popular mandate. During its first year in office the new government has had to deal with mutineers, assassins and war criminals.

Almost immediately into the government’s 5-year term, in February we heard stories of a mutiny amongst the military in Dhaka which sent alarm bells ringing and raised fears that the military had once again taken control of the country. It transpired that rank-and-file soldiers from the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Rifles were revolting against their officers and not against the new civilian government. This was met with some relief but the aftermath of the mutiny has caused controversy.

For example, Amnesty International has raised concerns about justice for the alleged mutineers currently on trial in Bangladesh (download their report here). In truth the suspects are fortunate that they have not been court-martialled and are being charged through civilian courts rather than by the army, as clearly officers wanted to take matters into their own hands. Furthermore, it appears that officers have somehow got involved in the prosecution of these suspects if the allegations of mistreatment in detention are to be believed. The officers should be told quite clearly to go back to the barracks and let the civilian courts get on with it.

It is not only the trials of the mutineers that have kept the courts busy, as the government had immediately to deal with some unfinished business, namely prosecuting the assassins responsible for the deaths of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family on the 15th of August 1975.  The court case was successfully concluded in mid-November with death sentences confirmed on those convicted. The challenge now is to get them back to Bangladesh as some of them are abroad.

Prosecutions are also imminent in connection the war crimes committed by those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the war of liberation in 1971. The government was given a popular mandate during the election last year to deal once and for all with this issue which has been hanging over Bangladeshi politics since the creation of the state. Thankfully the cases will start around February or March 2010 and will also undoubtedly have an impact on internal politics with the Bangladeshi community in the UK.

So where in the world but Bangladesh would mutineers, assassins and war criminals feature so dramatically in a single year of the nation’s political life? That’s one reason why I’ll continue to take interest in the politics of my ancestral home even though sadly I no longer have my father to tell me what’s happening out there.

As often happens with the newly converted, Boris is now piously preaching to the rest of us on all matters green, for example in his latest Telegraph column on his way to the sideshows at the Copenhagen Summit. Not that he necessarily practises what he preaches. For a start, it would have been better if he had made the effort to get to Copenhagen by train via Brussels rather than on a short-haul flight.

Nor was it clear what he was doing there. Telling the world how London shows the way with retrofitting public buildings and promoting electric cars is all very well, but Boris can take little credit for the former policy, which was launched under the previous Mayor. As for electric cars, it is not at all clear that the Mayor is in a position to lead on this, given that the vast majority of charge points will have to be on suburban roads controlled by local authorities and not on the TfL red routes where we rightly have little off-street parking. And Boris fails to explain what the source of supply for the electricity will be. Is it to be from renewable energy sources or from the sources we are already using? If the latter, then even if electic cars would reduce noise and air pollution they would contribute little to reducing our carbon emissions.

And whilst Boris is preaching to the world about London’s achievements, we should not lose sight of the fact that, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recently published European Green City Index, we are only a middle ranking city when it comes to greenery – in 11th place, just behind Paris. That’s the reality: in the European cities league table we occupy an equivalent position to Fulham or Sunderland in the Premier League, not Chelsea or Man United. Quite honestly only the host city Copenhagen, which comes out top of the Green City Index, is entitled to go preaching to the rest of the world on what cities can do to reduce their residents’ combined carbon footprint.

While he has a look at the tables in the Green City Index and London’s position in them, Boris should also take time out to reconsider his neo-Malthusian views on population growth as a cause of potential environmental catastrophe. (“We are replicating too fast,”, he tells his Telegraph readers, “hurtling towards nine billion souls on the planet like bacteria multiplying on a Petri dish.”) While the Evening Standard has highlighted how this does not fit very well with Boris himself having four kids (which of course is a personal choice), a more fundamental criticism is that the perspective of disaster caused by rising population has been discounted on numerous occasions before in history.

As I wrote about advocates of neo-Malthusianism in an earlier post:

“What they do not want to admit is that the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less, the magic number consistent with stable population, and that it’s expected to fall below this level between 2020 and 2050. (See the recent article in the Economist.) That’s not surprising as poor countries are going through the same demographic transitions that rich ones went through, but at an earlier stage in their development and much more quickly.

“As for environmental damage, the poorest people in the world like the Bangladeshis are producing at most 0.3 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita annually, whereas a US citizen produces 20 tonnes. So, while it’s clear that if the poor countries recreate the same consumption patterns as the US we will certainly have some problems to deal with in the future, at present that is a distant prospect. It is the environmental damage caused by the developed countries that is the immediate challenge.”

Boris’s time in Copenhagen would have been better occupied advocating that cities should be party to any agreement, given that 75 per cent of the CO2 emissions originate from cities and the human race has reach a point now that 50 per cent of it now lives in these huge urban centres. Particularly now that nation states have proved unable to agree amongst themselves on the way forward after the Kyoto agreement, Boris should be calling for cities to step into the breach. Now that would be some leadership!

Oil refinery in Qatar

Speaking at a meeting of its Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation at Istanbul in November, Bangladeshi president Zillur Rahman called on the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to take a lead in combating climate change and in supporting countries like Bangladesh that are fighting the consequences of global warming, even though they make little contribution to its causes. Up to now, however, the OIC’s record on this has been poor.

A 2007 study concluded that the rich Arab states in the OIC had been reluctant to take a lead on addressing climate change: “… efforts by wealthier Muslim states are imbalanced with many of them doing very little and not acknowledging the urgency of the issue. Saudi Arabia, who holds most of the purse strings of the OIC, has long been a sceptic of climate change.” Indeed, the response of Saudi Arabia’s lead climate change negotiator at Copenhagen, Mohammad Al-Sabban, to the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was: “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.”

Looking at annual CO2 emissions per capita in the Gulf states (International Energy Agency figures for 2007), it is immediately apparent that the figures are much worse than even for the United States, which is usually seen as the villain of the piece. For example, Qatar’s annual emissions stand at 58.01 tonnes per capita, the United Arab Emirates’ at 29.91 tonnes, Bahrain’s at 28.23 tonnes and Kuwait’s at 25.09 tonnes, whereas the figure for USA is 19.10 tonnes. These emissions are even more astonishing when compared with the figure for Bangladesh, which stands at 0.25 tonnes per capita. It does make you wonder what is being done in these rich Arab Gulf states to produce such huge CO2 emissions.

As for discussions on climate change amongst the Arab states, here again the problem is the reluctance of the ruling elites in oil-rich countries to support any measures that might reduce demand for oil and petrol. This despite the fact that the Middle East is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures, with vast areas of agricultural land between Egypt and Iraq expected to lose fertility as a result of global warming.

In November, at the launch of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) report on climate change in Cairo, UNFPA officials pointed out that 15% of people in the Arab world already have limited or no access to potable water and that water scarcity induced by climate change was expected to cut food production in the region by half. They called for more cooperation between the Arab League, UNFPA, and Arab NGOs to help governments draw up appropriate policies.

A report released in November by the Lebanon-based Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) criticised the near complete lack of research data on climate change in Arab countries and called on Arab nations to immediately draw up adaptation and mitigation plans. One of the authors stated that “we have no data about the effects the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will have on our coastal zones, even though we know they are very vulnerable”, adding that this makes creating plans to reduce risks from climate change difficult.

Not surprisingly, we have come to expect very little from the OIC in such global environmental summits as we are seeing in Copenhagen this week, where the negotiations on behalf of the developing world are undertaken by the G77 plus China. We hear much talk about the importance of the ummah as the basis for international unity among Muslims, but the oil-rich states have so far shown little sense of unity with their co-religionists over such a critical issue for mankind as climate change and global warming.

In addition to the conference of the parties reaching an agreement on limiting global warming to 2C over pre-industrial levels, the other bone of contention at the Copenhagen Summit is clearly money. That is, how much wealthy countries will be paying poor ones to help them deal with climate change. Given the huge sovereign funds that many of the oil-rich Muslim-majority states are sitting on, derived essentially from the sale of hydrocarbons, and given that the burning of these fuels makes a major contribution to greenhouse gases, you might think the oil producers would feel some moral obligation to the nations who suffer the consequences of global warming.

Moreover, at present the huge funds that the oil-producers possess are usually invested into property and assets in the developed world, when investment in the developing world in green industries and the low carbon economy could well give them better returns and certainly a better conscience. Now that would be a grand idea for all those funds standing idle in bank accounts in the world’s major cities. In the meantime, some zakat to those on the front line of climate change in countries like the Maldives and Bangladesh is surely not too much to ask.

Published in the Jakarta Globe, 16 February 2010