.png)
5 hours ago
1
If at first you don’t succeed; deny, deflect, attack. This is apparently the mantra of Sadiq Khan and his Transport for London (TfL) Commissioner, Andy Lord. This week both men hit out at volunteers like me and my friends at the Looking for Growth (LfG) movement, who in recent weeks have taken it upon ourselves to make the state of certain Tube lines ever so slightly less terrible.
Anyone who has travelled on the Bakerloo or Central line in London over the last six months will have seen the state of the rolling stock. The clear deterioration of standards, and surging sea of graffiti tags.
Astonishing.
Sadiq Khan says @lfg_uk and @tomhfh were wrong to use their initiative and do the Mayor’s job for him by cleaning graffiti up on the Tube themselves, when pushed by @Councillorsuzie.
TfL have a £775 million contract for cleaning graffiti – Khan must get a grip. pic.twitter.com/1mOVmQy3xp
Under the mantra of actually doing things, rather than simply accepting decline, LfG has been out on a number of cleaning missions, both to scrub off the shockingly prevalent spray painted tags – but also to shame TfL into clearing more up themselves. The boss of TfL hasn’t taken well to the shame.
Khan and his £639,164 a year TfL Commissioner might not take the Tube quite as regularly as I do
Lord responded to our work yesterday by saying no one should take this matter into their own hands. Extraordinarily, he went on to claim: ‘We also have evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it, so that’s being investigated by the relevant authorities.;
He said those words in City Hall, sat next to a sagely nodding Sadiq Khan. Two of the most powerful men in London were attacking me and my friends for cleaning up their trains – and suggesting that those involved in tidying the graffiti were responsible for putting some of it there in the first place.
LfG is the only group that has publicly gone out on these cleaning missions. It seems to me that the Commissioner appeared to be talking about our work when he claimed to have ‘evidence’ of people ‘creating graffiti and then removing it’.
It goes without saying that this is tosh. TfL must surely realise this. When it was asked whether they had this mysterious evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it – and if they’re accusing LfG of this behaviour, a spokesman sidestepped the question:
‘We know that some people are keen to help in cleaning up graffiti when it appears on our network and we recognise their spirit of volunteerism. However, we are extremely experienced in dealing with it and understand which processes and equipment are needed to effectively remove it. We therefore ask that it is left to our professional cleaners to remove. We are currently removing 3,000 tags per week on the Bakerloo and Central lines. All instances of graffiti are investigated by TfL to help prevent them in the future.’
TfL refused to repeat their boss’ claims in a written response. Curious.
When we’re not being told we’re spraying the graffiti ourselves, the Mayor is busy accusing us of hampering police investigations, by wiping away evidence. At Mayor’s Question Time this week, Khan suggested that ‘by encouraging people to clean up graffiti, it leads to fewer prosecutions because action can’t be taken, because the evidence literally has been washed away.’
How many more tags does Sir Sadiq think need to be photographed before he can start to go after their authors? I see these repeated scribbles on a daily basis and, having spent time scrubbing the things myself, I struggle to see why he thinks he needs to see any more.
The Mayor is, of course, a busy man. He and his £639,164-a-year TfL Commissioner might not take the Tube quite as regularly as I do. Perhaps they genuinely believe that the service for which they are responsible is sparkling clean.
Those in charge of TfL should be desperately worried that trundling beneath the genteel streets of Maida Vale are Tube carriages that would look more at home in a gritty 20th century New York crime thriller. Yet there is no sense of urgency to address this problem – and clean up our filthy trains. Instead, the focus seems to be to lash out at those of us who want to do something about the problem.
Perhaps under Commissioner Lord, TfL needs a new tannoyed catchphrase: Don’t see it. Don’t say it. And most certainly don’t try to sort it.
