13 December - The election looms
A couple of election leaflets have dropped through my letterbox. Boris Johnson
tells me what a wonderful job he has done with a carefully worded sheet that probably
omits more than it includes. He tells me something I didn’t know; that the Freedom
Pass is now usable all day every day. So that’s goodbye to the ‘Twirlies’
then. Where was the publicity for that? As Boris says “it makes it easier for our
seniors to travel to hospital appointments”. Well maybe not for those in the Lower
Belvedere and Lesnes Abbey areas who need to get to The Queen Elizabeth Hospital
in Woolwich. They have the choice of the infrequent 469 bus which meanders around many
backwaters and can take best part of an hour, or jump on a train which can sometimes
get you all the way there (with the help of a five minute bus journey from Woolwich)
in as little as 12 minutes but isn’t free before 09.30. But one cannot argue
it’s not a move in the right direction and Boris so far seems to do more things
right than the Jew-baiting amateur pugilist that preceded him.
The other leaflet was the local Conservatives’ Lesnes Abbey ward one. While Boris
successfully hides his failures, like doing nothing to improve the Thames crossing situation
(where’s the Blackwall contra-flow got to?), the local bunch
produce far more dubious logic for re-electing them. I think it is bad enough to
deserve an entry in the Politics section.