Venezuela’s grandiose President Hugo Chavez plans to support London’s transport system with subsidized oil, and he’s doing it on the invitation of the city’s embattled mayor, Ken Livingstone.
Venezuela last week signed an agreement to subsidize the fuel bill for London’s buses by up to $32 million/year, a 20% discount that Livingstone said would fund half-price rates on city transport for Londoners who receive income support.
The scheme will see state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela pay cash to Transport for London, which will reimburse private bus companies for the discounted fares. In return, Livingstone will send his transport chief, Peter Hendy, to establish an office in Caracas, where British officials will share their expertise in traffic management and urban planning.
Foreign aid?
Livingstone confirmed that the cost of advising Venezuela will be less than the value of Chavez’s fuel subsidy, causing some observers to note the oddity of the deal-if not its embarrassment.
Richard Barnes, a member of the opposition Conservative party, said it was nonsense for the mayor of London to develop a foreign policy of his own. Said Barnes: “We are a G8 [Group of Eight] capital city, and we are getting foreign aid.” One senses that Livingstone has a purpose-an ulterior motive-in such aid.
Roger Lawson, the London spokesman for the Association of British Drivers, recently noted that Livingstone’s policies always latch on to the latest popular idea. “Mr. Livingstone’s sole agenda,” said Lawson, “is to support the policies that will get him reelected, rational or not.”
The London mayor is responsible for the most controversial system yet devised for curbing the capital’s traffic nightmare: an £8 ($15) charge on cars entering Central London.
The so-called “congestion charge” has proven highly unpopular with the local citizenry-especially residents and other people whose businesses depend on shoppers and deliveries from outside.
Venezuela’s poor
A recent Ipsos-MORI poll commissioned by the city says 36% of Londoners are satisfied with his performance, 26% are dissatisfied, and 28% are neither. The rest had no opinion.
Significantly enough, however, in the Ipsos-MORI poll nearly 40% of the people who described themselves as “very dissatisfied” gave one reason for it: Livingstone’s congestion charge.
If such dissatisfaction is translated into votes, it means that Livingstone faces a substantial opposition to his policies-some estimate up to 150,000 lost votes.
What better way to shore up his electoral chances than by offering cheap seats to the city’s poor, a potential pool of voters said to number some 250,000 souls altogether.
But one wonders how Venezuelans feel about all of that lost revenue since, after all, despite living in the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, more than a third of Chavez’s fellow citizens exist in poverty.
