Not many Londoners can be happy as they grope through the frozen
murkiness of the commute to their first days back at work after the
winter break. Adding to their misery is London's mayor, Boris Johnson,
who has made their journey much more expensive with huge fare rises.
Critics of Johnson's transport policies have highlighted how these massive increases - 20 percent for single bus fares alone - would not have been so high if Johnson hadn't trashed other sources of funding for London's transport.
Scrapping
policies such as the extension of the congestion charge into West
London or the £25 charge for gas guzzling cars have rightly been
identified as stopping millions of pounds coming into the Transport for
London (TfL) budget.
The impact of Johnson's cancellation of
London’s Venezuelan oil deal has not received as much attention,
however. Though not as lucrative as the estimated £70 million
congestion charge extension, the Venezuelan oil deal would have meant
an extra £18 million for cash strapped TfL. Perhaps even more
importantly, it was a genuinely great deal for Venezuelans.
The
deal was brokered by former London mayor Ken Livingstone and Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez as an exchange of London's urban expertise –
city-planning, transport and environmental protection – in return for
cut-price fuel for London's buses. This oil subsidy meant that
Londoners on income support could travel half price, and was warmly welcomed by a wide range of poverty activists.
Both during his election campaign and after becoming mayor, Johnson said he wanted to cancel the deal
because it was "morally bankrupt" for a rich city like London to take
oil money from a “very poor country" like Venezuela. He cancelled the
Venezuelan deal but kept cut-price travel for those on income support,
landing TFL with the bill, which ran into millions of pounds in unfunded costs.
Johnson
tried to imply Venezuela was not getting a good return from the deal.
This was completely untrue. Venezuela is a country that has suffered
from decades of lopsided development fuelled by the country’s main
export, oil. Its capital Caracas is a combination of skyscrapers and
ramshackle housing, with chaotic and often gridlocked traffic.
The
almost total lack of urban planning is painfully evident and makes a
huge difference to all Caracas residents. Despite having a superb
underground system, this and the city’s public buses are severely
limited, placing a heavy emphasis on the car.
Venezuela does
not lack oil or oil money. It is the fifth largest producer in the
world. What it does lack is reliable and good value access to exactly
the type of skills and experience that the London-Venezuela deal
offered.
Johnson might have had an excuse for his comments if
the Venezuelan government wasn't spending money on its own country’s
poor. But the opposite is true, with unprecedented amounts of oil money
being used to establish successful health, education and employment
programmes that have made real progress in reducing inequality.
Livingstone got it right when he said that this made Johnson's termination of the deal a "piece of mindless vandalism". Now that Johnson has bumped up fares by this extreme level, while throwing away an estimated £18 million for London and simultaneously harming the people of Venezuela, it seems even more mindless.
If
Johnson's handling of London's transport budget is a taste of what
people can expect from a Conservative government, then the prospect of
that party taking charge nationally is far more chilling and murky than
any overpriced January commute.
Alex Holland is an Associate Editor of The Samosa and a Labour council candidate for Brixton Hill, Lambeth. He was an Associate Editor of Venezuelanalysis.com from 2005-2006 during which time he lived and worked in Caracas.
Venezuelan Analysis
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