Boris wants to negotiate a no-strike deal with the RMT union.

This is the union that rarely agrees to even fairly reasonable demands, instead going on strike at the slightest sign of problems.

The idea that Boris - of all people - can persuade them to give up their right to strike ever again is one of the most ridiculous things in his whole manifesto.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of trying to stop them striking, promising to achieve this in his manifesto makes one wonder how seriously we should take any of his other pledges - it’s just so unlikely to happen!

Tony Travers, who’s doing booming business in media appearances trading on his undisputed expertise on London government, told the Guardian

that the RMT would prefer a Johnson victory because the union believed that despite his posturing the Tory candidate would be easier to beat than Livingstone, who had been “hard and canny” in negotiations.

“If they [the Tories] really are going to bring in a union-busting transport leader he or she is going to have to be very tough because the RMT are lethally strong,” added Travers.

So who’s he going to call in? And if Boris antagonises the RMT from day one, can we look forward to even more RMT walk-outs over the next four years if he’s Mayor?

Boris has really surpassed himself with the naïvité of today’s policy announcement: give people vouchers in return for their recycling.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? On the surface of it, perhaps it does. But if you stop and think about it for longer than he evidently has, guess what? It turns out to be an illogical idea with a negative environmental impact.

The mantra of environmental experts when it comes to waste has long been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The point of this list is that they are in priority order. You should reduce your consumption of the planet’s resources as a top priority: if you never consume a resource, no environmental harm is done. You should reuse an item if at all possible - by refilling that water bottle you bought with tap water, you don’t need to buy another one, so although the initial purchase had an impact, that impact won’t be repeated as often.

Only after these two have been done as much as possible should you move on to actually disposing of something, by recycling it. Recycling takes energy, machinery, perhaps some extra materials, and of course big trucks driving around picking it all up. While it’s obviously preferable to landfill or incineration, it’s not a way to save the planet in and of itself, any more than eating two low-calorie ‘Diet’ chocolate bars is healthier than eating one. (Disappointing, I know.)

Boris’s plan is to weigh people’s recycling, and the heavier it is, the more vouchers they get given. This is rewarding people for breaking the first two rules as much as possible - the more you consume and then the less of it you reuse before recycling it, the more vouchers you will get! This is green politics for idiots - perhaps unsurprising when a prize idiot without the first clue about the environment is spearheading it.

I could go on longer about this but I won’t - instead I’ll point out another problem with this so-called policy.

The Mayor of London doesn’t actually have any powers over recycling. To call this a policy is therefore a bit rich - it’s more of an aspiration.

Boris reckons he’d get the London Boroughs on side, but that seems unlikely in most cases. Most boroughs have already chosen their path to encouraging recycling, and in many cases they’ve done so in ways that are fundamentally difficult to reconcile with this idea.

For instance, in response to media scare stories about charging people for waste collection by weight, several councils have made a point of publicising the fact that none of their bins or recycling receptacles contain microchips to enable this to happen, so their residents can sleep easy. Boris’s plan would therefore require a wholesale replacement of all those bins and boxes, to allow the weighed boxes to be traced back to the households in order to issue the vouchers.

Will the cash-strapped councils be expected to pay for all these new bins and any new technology? Or is Boris stumping up the money? Either way, it’ll be taxpayers’ money, which he’s usually pretty keen on saving. Oh and what are all these replacement plastic bins made from? Oh yes, oil. Good green policy, this.

If this policy is intended to save on waste going to landfill, as he claims, then the only way to do this is to do something based on the weight of waste going to landfill, but of course that would be more difficult to do as an incentive rather than a punishment.

Boris has long been an outspoken critic of anything with a whiff of punishment for polluting behaviour - e.g. describing the Low Emission Zone as “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe” - so he only wants to adopt incentives, not punishments. But then, one person’s incentive is another’s punishment - if the vouchers are all being funded out of tax, and some people get more of them than others, aren’t the ones receiving fewer vouchers effectively being punished?

So in summary, this policy is illogical, back-to-front and near-impossible to implement. No wonder Boris doesn’t want to discuss the issues.

Boris has been grabbing the headlines today by pledging to plant 10,000 trees around London over his first four years as Mayor.

But in 2002, the current Mayor launched the Million Trees Campaign, which aims to plant - surprisingly - a million trees around London by 2012. By the end of the 2006/7 planting season, the fifth year of the campaign, a total of 425,000 new trees had been planted in London.

By comparison with this total of nearly 100,000 per year, Boris’s 10,000 trees in four years looks utterly pathetic.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media lauding the plan as some kind of eco-revolution. Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change. (The USA under Bush is the only developed country in the world not to sign up to this, in case you thought this might not be a particularly extreme stance to take.)

Everyone knows Boris hasn’t a green bone in his body, and offering to plant a handful of trees over a long period of time goes no way whatsoever towards demonstrating otherwise.

P.S. To pay for the trees, Boris has pledged to scrap the Mayor’s newspaper, The Londoner, which is basically his equivalent of those newsletters/magazines that most local authorities send out from time to time to update their residents on what they’ve been up to - and, of course, to put their own spin on things. You know the sort of thing: the local media are up in arms about library closures, then you receive the Borough News which tells you how the council are consolidating some of their library resources into one much better library which will save you Council Tax, and so forth.

So The Londoner is biased, of course. But goodness me, to read some of the things Boris has been saying about it, you would think it was literally nothing but outright lies from the front cover to the back. In a city where the only city-wide paid-for newspaper and two out of the three freesheets are produced by the Daily Mail group, between whom and the Mayor there is little love lost, it’s not surprising he might want to point out a few falling crime figures or other things the Standard and its offshoots may ‘overlook’.

And of course, Mayor Boris wouldn’t need the Londoner anyway. Why invest time and money putting together a newspaper that looks like the Evening Standard but talks up your achievements instead of knocking them, when you can just let the Evening Standard do the work for you?

In the unlikely event you’re one of the tiny minority of Londoners to whom the type of bus operated on a small number of central routes actually matters enough to you that you agree that most of a Mayoral election campaign should be focussed on it, read on.

Channel 4’s FactCheck have had a look at one of Boris’s manifesto claims: “[Bendy buses] have twice as many collisions with pedestrians and cyclists than other buses.”

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect ’than’ (what did all those school fees buy?), you can certainly read some figures to suggest that this is true, which is why FactCheck give this claim a generous 50% accuracy score.

However, those figures compare bendy bus-operated routes against every other bus route in the entirety of London! This overlooks the obvious fact that bendy buses operate in central areas only, serving some of the most pedestrian-full streets in the city. Anyone who’s walked (or, I assume, driven) around central London will be familiar with how little attention many pedestrians pay to the red man signal and how prone they are to run out into the road to get to whatever exciting thing awaits them on the other side. Sheer volumes of pedestrians make these roads much riskier to operate any vehicle on.

When you compare bendy bus figures with a selection of non-bendy routes operating along similar roads in similar conditions, lo and behold, the figures become more or less identical (and certainly the difference is statistically insignificant, given the low overall numbers of accidents involving any types of buses).

And I’m delighted to see that those mischievous FactCheck researchers aren’t content to leave it at that, but instead deliver one final twist:

How do bendy buses score in contrast to accidents involving the old Routemaster?

Changes in routes mean that data isn’t directly comparable, but according to other figures TfL gave FactCheck, between January 1994 and September 2007 there were 0.05 fatalities per million km operated by bendy buses and 0.08 fatalities per million km operated by Routemasters.

For every dodgy use of statistics to support Boris’s bizarre obsession with abolishing bendy-buses, there’s an equally dodgy way to use statistics to prove his policies woefully misguided - hurrah!