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.
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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5053Chavez offered us a great deal too. A 10 year contract for oil at 50 dollars a barrel. But Bush said NO! So we paid as much as 147 a barrel until it went down. Now it's going back up. It's already more than the Chavez offer by 30 bucks and it's going up more because the banksters and the hedge funds are making sure of that. Can we get our deal back Hugo?
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