Those 18 Doughty Street Sources

I thought I'd look into the sources used for the 18 Doughty Street attack ad on Ken Livingstone... Guess what I found?

A load of old cobblers, that's what.

I'm not even a particularly strong supporter of Ken, but having to wade through 18DS's piss-poor attempt at an "attack advert" ("oooh, look at me, I'm the new Karl Rove") just wound me up.

So, here they are, those "sources" in full:

1 Taxi Bill
'Yesterday morning, for the second time in a month, Ken Livingstone took a 234-mile taxi trip home from Blackpool to London. The journey took more than four hours and the fare was £260, charged to council-tax payers through the Greater London Authority (GLA).’
SOURCE HERE - Daily Telegraph Article.
Price of First Class Ticket London - Blackpool £173.50 (www.nationalrail.co.uk)

X3 passengers = £520.50

... or almost exactly twice the price of the cab.

2 Share of Council Tax up
‘In 2000/01, the average cost of the Mayor to a Band D council Taxpayer was £123 a year for each household. This year, it is £289 (an increase in cash terms of 135%). Next year, it will be over £300.’
SOURCE HERE
Source = Victoria Borwick, prospective Conservative candidate for Mayor 2008. Couldn't find an impartial source boys?

Other sources including the London Evening Standard suggest an even higher increase of 147%.
SOURCE HERE
Source = London Evening Standard, unsuccessful litigant against the Mayor 2006; currently running long-winded "Get Ken" campaign (see Standard editor Veronica Wadley's article on Ken Livingston, Febraury 24 2006 [not online])

3 Traffic speeds static and cost up
‘When it comes to road user charging, the essential trade off for motorists is that a charge is paid in exchange for a quicker journey. Unfortunately, the Mayor has dropped his side of the bargain, with the average speed in central London the second lowest on record since 1968.’
SOURCE HERE

Source = Angie Bray, Conservative GLA Member, Conservative PPC.

Click through to Department for Transport: Dead Link

4 London is now less safe than New York

According to the survey of 18 of the EU’s 25 countries, London was more dangerous than Istanbul or New York.
SOURCE HERE

Policing is a joint responsibility of the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Authority. MPA's political representation is: 4 Tory Members, 4 Labour Members, 1 UKIP (One London) Member, 1 Green Member.

5 Not visited London’s 10 borough’s since re-election:

This was revealed when Andrew Pelling, a member of the London Assembly asked him about his visits to London boroughs.
SOURCE HERE.

Misleading. The question asked about visits "as mayor" - i.e. official visits.
According to that list, he has visited Brent once since 2004. Ken Livingstone lives in Brent.

6 Trip to Cuba

‘Ken Livingstone's botched trip to Latin America cost Londoners more than £35,000, he has admitted. It cost £19,051 in flights and hotel bills for the Mayor and four aides to spend six days in Cuba, during which he spent around 30 minutes at an Olympic conference.’
SOURCE HERE

Source = Evening Standard, published less than three weeks after that newspaper lost a High Court case against Ken Livingstone.
The paper does not quote any sources for the statistic.
The trip to Cuba was in response to an invite from Lord Moynihan, former Conservative Sports Minister, to an international Olympics convention.

7 Party to celebrate 50 years of Cuban revolution

‘Ken Livingstone is planning a "massive festival" across London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution. Although the Mayor's office refused to provide budget estimates, it could cost up to £2 million.’
SOURCE HERE

Source = Evening Standard. Subsequently shown to be untrue: http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=10289

8 Al-Qaradawi is the strongest force for the modernisation of Islam

“Unbelievably, Mayor Livingstone asserted in the question period that Yusuf al Qaradawi was the “strongest force for modernization of Islam - he is the future of Islam.”
SOURCE HERE

First person report on heart-on-its-sleeve US conspiracist-conservative blog.

Today's headline story, for example, lists all the recent shooting incidents of people with muslim surnames in the US and asks, without any evidence whether they are part of jihad:

"Talovic joins an unfortunately growing list of Muslims who have committed random acts of violence, only for officials to assure us that their actions have nothing to do with terrorism. Maybe none of them do, but the list is full of troubling details..."

Nutjobs one and all.

9 Qaradawi describes suicide bombing against Israel as duty

‘Recently he told Al-Jazeera that he was not alone in believing that suicide bombings in Palestinian territories were a legitimate form of self defence for people who have no aircraft or tanks. He said hundreds of other Islamic scholars are of the same opinion. In this respect, he is very much in tune with what the vast majority of people in the Arab world believe. Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that "an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.’
SOURCE HERE BBC
SECOND SOURCE HERE BBC
Finally, what appears to be a fair source... but its a bit pointless, given the weakness of the source in point 8.

10 Qaradawi supports severe punishment for homosexuals
"Almighty Allah has prohibited illegal sexual intercourse and homosexuality and all means that lead to either of them. This perverted act is a reversal of the natural order, a corruption of man's sexuality, and a crime against the rights of females. Muslim jurists hold different opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements."
SOURCE HERE
Yes, but Ken Livingstone doesn't support severe punishment, does he? See also point 8.

11 Bob Crow’s support for a Communist party candidate.

‘RMT rail union leader Bob Crow praised the Communist Party's candidate in Pontypridd, Robert Griffiths, as 'a champion of workers' rights and an internationalist who is implacably opposed to Blair's wars' last night (Tuesday).’
SOURCE HERE
Bob Crow is a Communist? Well I never...

Crow supported a Communist in Pontypridd, but Ken Livingstone didn't, did he?

Ken and Bob aren't exactly the best of friends.

Besides which, according to the Telegraph, "Mr Crowe and the brothers are the arbiters of London's transport. Ask any commuter."

12 Invited him to the board of TFL ‘Both Steve Norris, the Tory candidate for Mayor, and Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes said they would remove Mr Crow from the TfL board if elected to power. He was only backed in the post by Mr Livingstone.’
SOURCE HERE.
Yes, but they weren't elected to power, were they? Why not? Because Bob Crowe has control of the RMT and could shut down the transport system whenever he wanted. Dialogue with him is annoying but necessary.

13 Has spent £100 million of Londoner’s money on self publicity and policy propaganda. ‘There is already much evidence of waste: spending on publicity by the Mayor and his various quangos has been estimated at over £100 million a Year (nearly as much as was spent by the Labour Government in its first Year in office); staffing costs at City Hall have nearly trebled from £12 Million in 2000/01 to £33 million in 2005/06.’

SOURCE HERE.
Source: Victoria Borwick, candidate for Conservative Mayoral Nomination 2008.

That source list by category:
2 Conservative politicians
1 American nut-job blog
1 Right-wing newspaper with an avowed campaign against your subject (including one report which has been shown to be untrue)
1 Dead link
4 sources which, though fair representations, fail to relate to - or deliberately misconstrue - the point 18 DS are making.

All in all, completely Fair and Balanced then.

If 18DS wanted to have a crack at Ken, they could have spared a hell of a lot of time and simply linked to his wikipedia page, which spells out far more than 18DS's cack-handed attempt.

BTW, I'm not even saying that all of 18DS's allegations are untrue, just that a first year undergraduate could have done a better job in sourcing them.

It's the arms trade next week. They can't balls that up, can they? Eh? Oh.

Still, I'm particularly looking forward to how they deal with the tricky connection between Al-Yamamah and Mark Thatcher...

***EDIT***

I left a comment on the 18 Doughty Street site, drawing their attention to the "deficiencies" in the sources. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be able to publish my comment. Strange, isn't it, that nearly all the comments on 18DS are positive, while on Iain's blog (which to his credit, he doesn't appear to have censored) most of the comments are, well, pretty negative really.

I hope I haven't offended the nice boys at 18DS...

***EDIT 2***

I stand corrected. My comment on the 18DS site highlighting the problems with their sources is now up.