The Mayor of London Boris Johnson is going to Hammersmith Town Hall yesterday to address a Conference of Conservatives from across London.
It was an honour that our borough was chosen for this important event. On Wednesday evening in the same building we approved our Council budget with £27 million savings while, despite all the scaremongering, protecting front line services.
The conference was concerned with practical ways of improving lives for Londoners and mounting a strong campaign to secure Boris a second term as Mayor.
By contrast the previous weekend Ken Livingstone held a conference for assorted extremist groups and the Cuban ambassador.
Here are the main points from Boris's speech:
In 2008 I made five key pledges to Londoners
I pledged to..
....beef up police presence on our streets
...tackle gun, knife and youth crime
....make transport safer by putting more uniformed officers on our buses and on our trains and stations
...protect our green, open spaces and encourage more recycling, and stretch the taxpayer pound, by axing waste and making City Hall spending transparent
I have delivered:
By 2012 there will be more police on our streets than in 2008 and there will be one million more visible police patrols each year.
Crime is down almost 8%. But specifically youth crime is down 15%, robberies down 21% and murders have fallen to their lowest level since 1978. We have also taken more than 10,000 knives and guns off the streets.
Our public transport network is now one of the safest in Europe – with bus passengers the safest they have ever been. We achieved this by puttingan extra 500 uniformed officers on the network and banning alcohol on buses, trains and tubes. Crime on buses is down 30% and on the DLR and Tube by 25%.
We have opened up squares and public areas, created 450 new green spaces for Londoners to grow their own food. We have planted over 9,500 trees, rather than cutting them down for propaganda newspaper, The Londoner. We have also driven forward recycling in London, setting up the London Waste and Recycling Board.
And we have done all this while saving thousands of taxpayers’ money by freezing our share of council tax and pioneering greater transparency in public expenditure by publishing all transactions over £500.
But that is not all.
In the last three years we have also:
Banged the drum for London, securing funding for the upgrade of Tube, Crossrail and the Olympics, leading one former Labour Transport Secretary to say: “Boris can take much credit for the remarkable deal.”
Fought London’s position as the financial capital of the world protecting jobs and investment.
Rolled out Oyster Cards onto the National Rail network making commuters’ journeys easier and faster.
Delivered a record number of new homes for our nurses, policeman, teachers and all those Londoners who are vital in supporting this capital.
And of course launched the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, with 5,000 bikes dotted around the capital. Within ten weeks Londoners had made 1 million journeys on the blue bikes.
And all this in the face of the deepest cuts in a generation.
We can do more.
But we have a fight on our hands and we need your support even more than we did in 2008.
Bus crime in Hammersmith & Fulham is up by 12% from 2009 to 2010, TfL's own figures: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/policing/16174.aspx
Posted by: The Inconvenient Truth | Sunday, February 27, 2011 at 01:57 PM