Number 7 for me..but his record shows that he doesn't know how to. Boris couldn't hold a p?xs up in a brewery.Boris is good at opening things, one-liners and endless waffle – that is all there is of him. He only won the election because of Ken's gaffes causing Labour's activists (not that I am one) to vote against him coupled with the 200,000 Londoners who didn't cast their vote.When Ken was elected in 2000, London had an acute housing crisis, and a huge lack of investment in social housing. Ken doubled the number of homes built in London each year from 17,000 to 32,000 and worked towards 50% affordable homes in every housing development. He secured the largest housing investment budget ever in London – £5bn over to provide 50,000 homes in 3 years. He delivered on this.Boris Johnson has spent the past four years enjoying the fruits of Ken’s labour. From Crossrail to the Olympics, Bikes to Transport, Johnson has merely cut the ribbons on Ken’s projects.He abandoned Ken’s ambitious target that 50 percent of all new homes should be affordable. He wasted the £5 billion housing budget, failing to deliver the 50,000 affordable homes by 2011.And when his leadership was tested last summer, during the August Riots, he utterly failed even the basic test of being in London. What a contrast to Ken’s response to 7/7.By 2016 only 20% of inner-London and less than half of outer-London neighbourhoods will be affordable to people receiving housing benefit – most of who are either in work or pensioners.As the bloke in the pub put it to me, we've got a bunch of bikes for city blokes, when we could have had a bridge over the Thames for East Enders.
Ben Owen ● 5110d