Politics is an industry incorporating the ‘business side of things' - this is the price the public pay for 34 per cent - plucked at joyous random from my straw cogz - of them taking an active interest in political issues. And Ken Livingstone is a tainted fool in an industry of social lepers. Unsurprisingly, he looks half decent by comparison to the shower of shitters who get into ministerial and other devolved positions of power in the present political epoch of homogenised free market automatons. 

Lividbone is a populist pillock and the worst aspect of his ‘battle' with the Northcliffe Fascists (beyond causing intentional offence to someone on the grounds of their racial identity. Hey, it's combative anti-semitism! Not very healthy) was his erstwhile column as a restaurant critic of the London Evening Daily Mail. According to Kenneth himself, this was ok because it was under the editorship of Max Hastings at the time.
 
Of all those who have benefited from Labour politicians with working class backgrounds entering the political elite (it's still an elite), it is ‘1066' Hastings, with his Guardian columns and new-found reasonableness, having nearly voted Labour himself. Why would you want to attract the patronage of a tosser like that, with his exploitation of the Falklands slaughter for publishing funds? Probably because little Kenny has taken a leaf out of the Blair crib sheet of political appeal and wants to keep some Tories on side, even though you don't need to in London, where they are mostly an endangered species outside of the establishment cash pits in central and west London.
 
PPPlease
On tubular smells, Kenneth fought a high-profile campaign to resist PPP but to no avail. Here, I don't think he can really be blamed but it does seem that he hung around in the court long enough to make the government nervous and to ensure that his left wing had not been scorched or scalped to any great extent.
 
The deals for repairing and improving the underground infrastructure have been allocated to two companies: Metronet (Bakerloo, Central, Victoria, District, Circle, Metropolitan, East London, Hammersmith & City and Waterloo & Pointless); and Tube Lines (Jubilee, Piccalilli and Northern)*.
This is, of course, the tip of the proverbial niceberg, as hundreds of subcontractors will be involved in actually doing the work, just as happened with Failtrack on the national network (but didn't stop its share price peaking at £17. This, of course, bore no relation to reality, as Failtrack's rank inefficiency and incompetence throughout its existence is well documented).
 
The companies that won the bids are mainly groups of financiers with transporty names (and one conveniently similar to the Daily Mail free rag spat at commuters every morning). However, they do have the odd construction company - Amey and Jarvis. Oops not anymore. But Bechtel is firmly slotted in with Tube Lines - as part of their consortia, just to reassure investors that, if they fuck up, they won't actually have to go down the tubes themselves. Anyway, the banks will bail them out if they lose interest or don't feel they're profits are increasing every year.
 
The government claims that for the first 15 years of the 30-year PPP contracts, £2 billion will be saved. Of course, that is only a ‘saving' if you believe that the traditional method of procurement would have cost £2 billion more than the PPP, with its built-in profit guarantees for the private contractors and ever-likely invention of extra risks, just to doubly guarantee immense cash prizes for those plucky shareholders who can hold their nerve for a few years (just read The Times and you'll be ok).
 
As the Transport, Local Government and the Reeegions select committee reported in 2002, "The Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions [strangled idiot Stephen Byers at the time] told parliament that the PPP contracts will save £2 billion compared to the public sector over the first 15 years. There is no 15-year public sector comparator on which to base this claim. Neither London Underground nor Ernst & Young were able to support this claim. Indeed, such a claim flies in the face of the conclusions of the National Audit Office review of the PPP in December 2000. There is no 15-year public sector comparator and the figures quoted by the Secretary of State had no basis in any of the published reports. The apparent continued dominance of the highly constrained financial analysis as the basis for the decision-making process is ill-founded and mistaken."
 
The 30-year contracts Metrobet and Pube Lines have won are worth £15.7 billion and the National Audit Office have already judged the PPP to date to have costed taxpayers £455 million in expenses and no guarantee of service improvement. Add to that the £590 million that the cost of the contracts went up by as a result of the contractual negotiations taking ‘longer than expected' (city lawyers, handsomely remunerated by the hour, pulling out all the stops in their interpretation of the ‘risk' their clients were accepting by taking on the work) and Byers' biased claims of savings to the public purse through PPP look to have been a customary piece of time-buying by politicians for the private sector. You can trust Labour (to sell out at the first opportunity once they are in power). 
 
*Some of this is at the National Audit Office site, where a reasonable report lives