Sonny & The Sunsets - Dark Corners
Sonny Smith and friends are seeking inspiration from other worlds on their new single.
26 Mar 2013
A first-rate city with a second-rate country attached
— How a friend of BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders describes London. Discuss.
26 Mar 2013
ERAAS - Crescent
The Brooklyn darkwave duo channel their inner Amityville horror for a terrifying new video.
25 Mar 2013
London's best unwritten novels, and where you should go to write them
From a gentrification romance to a cemetery adventure, here are five contemporary London novels just waiting for YOU to write them.
24 Mar 2013
What do we learn from the Evening Standard's 20% drop in web traffic in February?
The Evening Standard’s web traffic fell in February, but that doesn’t mean the trend is down. How much the website prioritises growth online is what really matters.
21 Mar 2013
Calm it, moaners. The tube is working pretty well right now
The reduction of customer hours lost to delays has been sustained after the Olympics.
18 Mar 2013
The Lovely Bad Things - Fried Eyes
Orange County four-piece dragging California punk-pop out of the doldrums.
15 Mar 2013
"I want champagne Subbuteo." You can support a new book celebrating the beautiful flicking game
For anyone who’s ever super-glued a goalkeeper back on to his stick, for anyone who’s ever enviously eyed their friend’s cantilevered main stand, for anyone who’s ever played a real time FA Cup final against themselves…
14 Mar 2013
Death to Dishonesty - The Fake London Top 5
Researchers say London is the fakest city in the world. That stat is fake. Yet, our city has had some good practise at it.
1. West Ashfield Tube Station A fully functional tube station run by TFL, excepting the tube
2. The tennis match at the end of Blow Up The scene from the Antonion’s 1966 film was shot in Charlton’s Maryon Park.
3. London FC, London’s oldest football club The non-league team sued an older club for the rights to its history and won when the other team couldn’t afford to fight it.
4. 23/24 Leinster Gardens, Paddington, London W2 These grand houses don’t actually exist – it is facades covering a view of the open-air Metropolitan line from horrified W2s.
5. Lord Robert J Doughty A 19-year old from Thamesmead who bought his title online convinced Harrod’s to cash his £500,000 cheques. He eventually convicted for fraud and ‘driving with dangerous tyres.’
That’s our list – now let’s hear yours. Tullamore D.E.W. have launched their Death to Dishonesty campaign to “seek out the real and ignore the babble”. Help them make room for the Irish True values of realness, friendship, wit and a bit of rebellion by heading over to www.tullamoredew.com/DeathToDishonesty.
Enter your suggestions of dishonest and fake behaviour society could do without in to the Furnace of Resurrection app, and be in with the chance to see your submission symbolically burned in a real-life furnace. Oh, and you can win a trip to Ireland, which would be pretty great.
14 Mar 2013
Boris Johnson accused of fiddling crime figures
Boris Johnson has been accused of “fiddling figures” after claiming to have reduced crime by 13% since he became Mayor.
On at least three recent occasions the Mayor claimed that crime had fallen by 13% since 2008.
However the latest yearly figures show that total crimes fell by just 5% between 2008 and 2012.
In 2007-08 there were 862,032 recorded crimes in the city. By the end of 2011-12 that had dropped to 814,646, a fall of 5.49%.
There was a big fall in crime during the Olympics, but even if you take the figures for the 12 months to January 2013, crime has still only fallen by 8.6% since 2008.
Boris told the London Assembly last month that “in spite of the recession, we have seen the Metropolitan Police Service driving down crime with total offences down by 13.6% since I was elected.”
He repeated this claim at a meeting in Catford last week saying that: “crime has come down by 13% overall” and again at the MIPIM conference in France on Tuesday.
City Hall today said that the 13% figure had been calculated by comparing the first 56 months of Boris’s mayoralty with the last 56 months of Ken Livingstone’s mayoralty.
A spokesperson for the Mayor said:
“The Mayor is referring to the long term trend on crime in the capital rather than a comparison of two points in time. Since his election in May 2008, the aggregate volume of total notifiable offences has fallen by around 13 per cent, compared with the same sum of all offences over the same number of months of the previous administration.”
This is the same statistical trick he was criticised for using during his election campaign last year.
In March 2008 a member of the UK’s Crime Statistics Advisory Committee accused Boris of “misleading the public” after he repeatedly claimed that robberies had fallen by 16.3% under his mayoralty.
An independent analysis showed that robberies had actually risen by 18.8% since he became mayor.
The Mayor’s method effectively shifts the baseline back from the start of Boris’s mayoralty and exaggerates, or in the case of robberies, actually creates a fall in crime where there has been a rise.
Boris’s election campaign used the same method to claim that Boris had cut crime by 10% since he became mayor, when crime had actually fallen by just 5%.
Green London Assembly Member and Deputy Chair of the Police And Crime Committee Jenny Jones today accused the Mayor of “fiddling the figures” on crime:
“Once again we see the Mayor peddling misleading crime statistics. The Mayor has a history of fiddling the figures on policing as we saw with police numbers in the Police and Crime Plan consultation. The public deserve openness and transparency not the Mayor spinning the crime stats to paint a rosy picture.”
Johnson’s policing deputy was recently forced to admit that figures on police numbers used in a public consultation were incorrect by over a 1000.
Boris was also rebuked by the Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority two years ago after he repeatedly made false claims about youth re-offending rates.
He continued to make the claims despite advice given by those running the project that they were “complete nonsense.”
Rather than correct his error, the mayor instead accused the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority of being a “Labour stooge.”
Fact checkers later confirmed that UKSA Chair Sir Michael Scholar is a respected former Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher.
Last year the London Assembly passed a motion calling on the Mayor to sign up to UK Statistics Authority’s code of practice. So far he has not done so.
14 Mar 2013
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Summer Camp: Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- The five spookiest abandoned London hospitals
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- Random Interview: Eileen Conn, co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
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