From Boris Johnson’s transport strategy:

In the life of the strategy, the Mayor may consider road user charging schemes if other measures at his disposal are deemed insufficient to meet the strategy’s goals and where there is a reasonable balance between the objectives of any scheme and its costs and other impacts.

It’s point E21 in the executive summary – see page 19. Similar material was present in previous mayor Ken Livingstone’s transport strategy too. Some London Conservatives and Ken-haters, who’d convinced themselves that Transport for London was a conspiracy of Communist vegetarians, leaped upon this as proof of hidden agendas to ban go-faster stripes, cross-dress Mondeo Man, nationalise the Victoria sponge and so on.

Such screams of outraged discovery have not been repeated under Ken’s successor, despite the existence of point E21. This is unsurprising. Boris has cut the congestion charging zone in half and made plain his view that extending it to the suburbs would be “a blatant tax on the motorist.” Please note in passing that Boris calls the C-charge a “charge” when he’s feeding the media tales of billing Obama for his embassy’s poor manners, but a “tax” when he’s thinking of ballot boxes in Bromley.

But whatever it’s name, he’s against more of it. And so, for now at least, is Ken who has ruled out bringing back the western extension that Boris – in the end rather reluctantly – abolished should he re-take City Hall in May. This a sad state of affairs given that estimates of the annual cost of congestion to London’s economy range from £2 billion to £4 billion and that it is calculated that 4,000 Londoners a year die prematurely as a result of poor air quality generated mostly by road traffic.

The report commissioned by the London Assembly’s Greens published last Friday is therefore very welcome. Compiled by Professor John Whitelegg, it is called Pay-as-you-go: managing traffic impacts in a world-class city, and takes as its premise that Boris’s ambition to make London the “best big city in the world” cannot be released unless its road traffic is controlled more effectively.

The report reviews research which has found congestion charging effective wherever it’s been introduced and looks at technological advances that would make a London-wide pay-as-you-go road pricing system technically possible. It addresses the problem of selling such a radical idea to the public as follows:

Public support is very closely linked to concepts of fairness and equity. In the context of London with millions of trips being made by public transport, walking and cycling it is self-evidently fair to levy a charge on the much smaller number of car trips that cause a much larger environmental burden than non-car trips. If that revenue is then deployed for the benefit of all Londoners and for a cleaner, greener London then that is likely to win and retain public support.

This may seem madly optimistic in view of recent public rejections of congestion charging in Manchester and Edinburgh, an issue explored by a man from London Travelwatch at the City Hall launch of the report. He reminded us that mayor Livingstone introduced charging in the face of opposition from everyone from (surprise, surprise) the Evening Standard to his own advisors and that not every politician is as single-minded and ready to take big risks as Ken.

Still, as the report points out, road pricing is unusual in that it unites economist concerned with efficiency, enivronmentalists concerned with pollution and CO2 emissions, and social justice campaigners who want transport policies that help women, children and those on low incomes. There is also the question of London’s need to raise money in the age of austerity. Professor Whitelegg reaches the following conclusion:

The revenue benefits of a London-wide pay as you go scheme are substantial and it is highly unlikely that the objectives of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy can be achieved in an era of declining public finance, rising costs of supplying and maintaining public transport operations and no significant increase in revenue from road pricing.

Put in very clear language it is our view that a London-wide road pricing scheme is essential and without it congestion will worsen, air pollution will worsen, the legal consequences of failing to meet air quality standards will grow in severity and fall on the GLA, the health of Londoners will suffer, CO2 reduction targets will be missed and London will stand no chance whatsoever in achieving “best in class” status that it so richly deserves.

Read the whole report here.

Unemployment across the UK has risen again, and once more London has not escaped the national trend. Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show the seasonally-adjusted rate for the capital for August to October to be a fraction short of 10%, the worst of any region apart from the north east of England and an increase of 0.3% from the previous quarter. November’s ONS figures for claimants in London, which don’t include all unemployment people, underline the continuing bad news. The total is 234,699, representing an 11.9% increase over the past year.

At constituency level, the highest percentages of claimants are in Hackney South and Shoreditch (8.6%), Tottenham (8.3%), West Ham (7.6%), Walthamstow (7.4%), Edmonton (7.3%) and Bethnal Green and Bow (7.3%). These locations prompt a certain bleak reflection: four are in Olympic host boroughs; two sit alongside the Square Mile; one is where the summer’s riots began and another is its next door neighbour, a place grimly associated with fatal youth violence.

Mayoral candidates have been responding. Conservative incumbent Boris Johnson remarked that young Londoners in particular were being “squeezed out” and urged businesses to take on more apprentices and paid interns. Yet he appears to have uttered not a squeak of complaint about the scale of the government’s public spending cuts, which have produced so much unemployment in the capital as they have across the country.

For the Liberal Democrats, the Tories’ coalition partners, Brian Paddick said much the same, although he specified the City rather than London businesses in general, urging it to “put money into training and apprenticeships” and the current mayor to try harder.

Jenny Jones for the Greens? “Both the Coalition and the Mayor’s office seem willing to consign an increasingly large section of today’s youth to the sidelines,” she said. “With such a concentration of affluence continuing unscathed within the Square Mile under the Mayor’s protection these increases in youth unemployment are inexcusable.”

Labour’s Ken Livingstone launched a more general attack on the government and said Boris seemed “embarrassed” to mention unemployment in the capital. He accused him of doing nothing to “offset these negative trends,” and of being “more keen on covering up for his fellow Tories in government.” Ken had had a bit more to say on rising unemployment in a speech he gave on Tuesday, linking it directly to public spending cuts and “a stagnating economy” and pledging that if elected he would do all he could to “protect Londoners from the decline in living standards and the squeeze that ordinary people are facing.”

See full London constituency JSA figures on the Guardian’s data summary chart, starting at entry number 328. Have stiff drink to hand.