The dubiously talented array of non-job holders at the
so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) has not featured on Zelo Street for a while,
so today they get not only a mention, but also an invitation, to show that they
are really concerned about taxpayers getting value for money and bearing down
on the most blatant examples of Government waste. One might expect them to be
hot on the case.
Cripes TPA chaps, keep cavey for Bozza!
But such expectations would be sorely misplaced, because the
TPA is first and foremost not a popular movement, but an Astroturf lobby group
and a firmly ideological pillar of the Conservative Movement. So their focus
right now is tomorrow’s Conservative
Renewal Conference, held under the aegis of Windsor Conservatives and
supported by the TPA and the Freedom Association.
This no doubt explains their absence from the debate
surrounding the
decision by Transport for London (TfL) to order 600 production examples of
the New Bus For London (NB4L), aka the BozzaMaster, at a cost of at least £160
million upfront, plus an additional £40 million a year – every year the vehicles are in service – for them to have
conductors, who will not check fares.
That £160 million figure could rise significantly, not least
because Wrightbus of Ballymena is the sole supplier of the vehicles, and they
contain a significant amount of one-off equipment, from the rear platform to
the custom glass and body panels to the power unit. And uniquely, TfL is
having to order the buses and impose them on operators – those operators
don’t want them.
This means contracts for routes operated by the NB4L will
have to be specially drawn up, the conductors – another “feature” the operators don’t want – will be employed by TfL, there
will be no future outside London for the buses because nowhere else wants them,
and their operational life will be just
14 years (many Routemasters put in more than 35 years’ service).
The extra costs over and above what would have been incurred
by allowing operators to order conventional double deckers will mean either
higher fares – and there is already slated to be less financial support for buses
in London in future, so these will already be rising – or less service
elsewhere on the network. Boris Johnson’s vanity bus will be a bad deal all
round for Londoners.
So where is the TPA? Well, yesterday, when the TfL
announcement was made, their “Grassroots
Coordinator” Andrew Allison was
scanning job adverts to find non-jobs (I know, he would have been best
advised starting with his own) and the rest of his colleagues were conspicuous
by their absence from the airwaves on the subject of the NB4L. When London’s taxpayers
needed their advocacy, they went AWOL.
Because the TPA is about ideology, not taxpayers. And that’s not good enough.
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