innerhippy

Boris Johnson
Mayor of London
Greater London Authority
City Hall
The Queen’s Walk
More London
London SE1 2AA

8th April 2009

An Invitation to Breakfast

Dear Boris,

Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on your first year in office. Even your most fervent of critics must be dining out on a large portion of humble pie. And it is on the subject of dining that I am writing, in particular breakfast. I invite you to join me for breakfast at my home in Hammersmith, where we can feast upon delicious home made pancakes, with fresh fruit and lashings of authentic Canadian maple syrup. All washed down with Borough Market’s finest fresh coffee.

After breakfast, I would then like you to join me on my regular commute by bicycle to my workplace in Wells Street, just off Oxford Street. This journey will, I sincerely hope, demonstrate the absolutely woeful provisions for cyclists in West London. The highlights of the journey I shall now tempt you with.

How To Survive Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout

The coffee earlier consumed is of paramount importance at the start of the journey. You’ll need to be awake. We will cycle past the monolithic Westfield Centre with its three lanes of traffic and join the fearful Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. When the Westfield developers planned the new traffic routes, there was an attempt by local residents to get a cycle path installed across the middle on the roundabout, in order to provide them with a safe route across one of the busiest and most dangerous junctions in London. Sadly, the land belongs to Thames Water, and they just weren’t interested in lending this redundant land to the community. So, around the roundabout we’d go, dodging the myriad of cars, buses and lorries as they scream up towards the M41 motorway.

The Ascent of Notting Hill

Having successfully navigated the roundabout, we’d crawl up Holland Park Avenue and gingerly thread ourselves around the tightly packed traffic. This road is often blocked, so unless you want to fill up your lungs with the effluent of large diesel engines, we’d have to overtake and take our chances with the oncoming traffic.

By the time we reach Notting Hill you’ll have worked up a good sweat – and the next part down Bayswater Road provides a welcome respite from gravity.

Lancaster Gate – London’s Peripherique

And then the real fun starts: Lancaster Gate. This junction is a 4 lane semi-orbital in which you have to cross all lanes not just once, but twice before rejoining the road going East. In fact, this part of the journey is so dangerous that almost all cyclists use the pavement on the westbound part of the Bayswater Road, just north of Hyde Park.

Now obviously I would never do something as evil as cycling on a pavement, so we’d dismount and walk the 200 metres to Victoria Gate where we can join the North Carriage Drive, just inside the park. There’s always plenty of Community Support Officers lying in wait with their charge sheets, should anyone attempt otherwise.

Hyde one-doesn’t-do-bikes Park

At this part of the journey it would be apparent to you that we are not using Hyde Park. The entire stretch up Bayswater Road, including the aforementioned peripherique-from-hell, could be bypassed by using the park. Alas, the reason for this apparent anomaly is because cycles have been banned. Yes, astonishing but sadly true. I have had numerous “conversations” with the friendly park’s constabulary about this, but they insist that cycling around Buckhill Lodge contravenes Health and Safety on grounds that it is too steep. The Queen also, apparently, frowns upon all things 2-wheeled (a bit like Westminster Council),
and I guess she knows best about these matters. Just imagine the lure to even the most dedicated of tube users of commuting in this idyllic environment.

Regents Street Obstacle Course

So, finally, we enjoy the delights of Hyde Park itself, safe from congested traffic, fumes and over-exuberant special constables gathering £30 from all unsuspecting cyclists. Past Speaker’s Corner and over Park Lane, past the American Embassy surrounded by legions of machine-gun toting policemen, and onto Regents Street. The utopia of relative carefree cycling ends as we’d again muscle ourselves in between the buses and taxis. Here we’d play a great game called “avoid being squashed by the bendy-bus”. The incredulity you’d experience at their apparent willingness to overtake and immediately stop will by surpassed by their ability to block every lane of the carriageway, at the slightest hint of a corner or parked vehicle.

We’d part company towards Wells Street, which would be my destination and I would thank you for enduring this ordeal with me. Or perhaps you would stay to watch my futile attempts to find somewhere to lock the bike, which you’d likely find highly amusing. You’d then have the unenviable prospect of navigating your way down to City Hall to your own workplace. Perhaps one day I will join you, just to see how I could get myself killed in a different part of London.

In case you don’t have time to join me for breakfast and the subsequent adventure, I sincerely hope that you will appreciate that the provisions for cycling in London are embarrassing at best, and lethal at worst.

Personally, I would hope that the Mayor of London would have it in his or her power to finally get to grips with this situation and actually get some decent cycle lanes built. Paris managed it along with their wonderful Velib system, so why in heaven’s name can’t London? When the Olympics come in 2012, all visitors would clearly understand why we have a world class cycling team – because the only place we can safely cycle is within the confines of a velodrome.

I very much look forward to you joining me for breakfast.

Yours sincerely,

RSVP.

It seems that this dreadful woman has been caught with her hands in the tax payer’s till.

She is claiming that the house in which her husband and children live is not her main home, and so has pocketed £116,000 in expenses. She claims that her main residence is a flat in London. But along come her London neighbours, Dominic and Jessica Taplin, who know exactly how often she stays there because of the platoon of security personnel that accompany her.

Mrs Taplin said: “When I read that she says she spends most of the week here, I thought, ‘That is a fabrication’.” ie bollocks.

The parliamentary Standards Commissioner, John Lyon, has now accepted this complaint and will investigate the matter fully.  JS contests that she has done nothing wrong.

Well, we’ll see about that shall we. With all these snooping powers that she and her crooked predecessors have introduced, it should be very easy to establish the truth. There must be mountains of CCTV footage recording her movements,  mobile phone records and an email trail that will prove exactly where she was and when. Ha ha! She could be trapped by her own snooping laws! Let’s get all that information into the public domain and we’ll see how she likes her privacy being wrenched into the open.

I am struggling to find words that adequately describe my feelings of utter revulsion over what this wretched woman and her brain-dead cronies in the government have done. It seems that the position of Home Secretary brings with it a pathological contempt for what used to be Democracy UK. An endless precession of half-wits have held this position and have duly screwed things up.

First up, the brilliant David Blunket who decided that the £18 billion ID cards scheme would be a terrific way to loose all our personal data. Then we had Jack Straw’s murky dealings with Extraordinary Rendition (the gun’s is still smouldering), followed by a lifetime achievement award from Privacy International for introducing the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act that enforces widespread internet snooping powers. Then there was that buffoon, Charles Clarke who tried to get 90 day internment enshrined in law – thankfully booted out of parliament only to re-emerge as watered-down  “control orders”.   And as for SOCPA….don’t get me started.

Enter stage left, Jacqui Smith – the most miserable of them all. Not satisfied with control orders, she then pushes through for 42 day internment (down from 96) and a few weeks ago the Coroners and Justice Bill which permits the state to snoop on our emails.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have another gem from the Ministry of Control: Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act such that taking a photograph of a policeman may lead you to a 10 year stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Astonishing. Even the Metropolitan Police Federation are “concerned” with these new powers that have landed on their table, they must think it’s Christmas. Be in no doubt, the police will abuse these powers – just has they do with the rafter of existing anti-terrorism laws. This is no reflection upon the police force per se, but a police force as a bunch of average people with average intelligence. Does Jacqui Stasi-Smith think that driving another wedge between the police and the people is really going to help crime fighting? Doesn’t she get it? We’re supposed to be on the same side you moron!!

Adam Curtis in 2004 made a brilliant documentary series for BBC called The Power Of Nightmares which shows how politicians use fear to hoodwink the public in order to retain power. This is precisely what this government continues to do – so much knee-jerk policy can be distilled down to “fear-of-terrorism” that not only tramples on habeas corpus but also hands any Kalashnikov wielding shitheads a resounding victory. These fools in Whitehall have done more damage to our democracy in the past 6 years than the Nazis could every have done.

The former head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has also broken ranks by writing  “It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism – that we live in fear and under a police state,”. Here bloody here.

I’m so bloody angry I’m going to go outside and shoot a policeman. With my potato gun, of course – a camera would be illegal.

I'm astonished that nobody has pointed the blame at terrorists for the current economic woes. I'm the last person on earth to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, but it would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?

Our "Al-Quaeda" chums are sworn enemies of our western culture, citing capitalist greed as being the root of all evil (well, they've got a point there). They've tried chucking bombs, crashed a few planes, ranted on websites – all with little effect. So why not trash our system from the inside and play the western world at its own game: financial trading.

Derivatives exchanges have "market makers" – a bunch of traders paid by the exchanges to inject liquidity into the market. They flood the market with orders that will never quite trade to give the illusion to other traders of a healthy market. Where are these people trading from? Which country would be awash with cash from recent high oil prices…Saudi Arabia? Am sure that equity markets have similar systems – all these complex financial products that are available to affluent, anonymous global traders.

All they would have to do is buoy up the markets, pull the plug and watch it all come crashing down. Sound familiar?