sunnyday

Answered by All Nominees

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Answered by Siôn Simon

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Answered by Guy Kawasaki

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Answered by Ken Livingstone

Being Mayor of London is too serious a job for the election to be decided on the basis of personality alone.

This election is about taking the big decisions that affect every Londoner, from the £1billion a year tube upgrades to the £16 billion Crossrail project.

I will carry on transforming bus services, provide an extra 1,000 police officers on the beat and keep the neighbourhood police teams, fund £79 million for young people to have safe places to go outside school, and safeguard the policy that 50% of all new housing is affordable. And I will make tackling climate change and the environment a priority.

I have a track record of managing London - improving bus services, putting police back on the beat. Dealing with the highs and lows of London such as winning the Olympics and the terrorist attack on 7 July.

In contrast, Boris Johnson’s incompetent plans on buses have descended into chaos with his admission that a new Routemaster bus would cost over £100m, rather than the £8m he originally claimed.

Imagine Boris Johnson in charge of London’s £39bn transport budget. Suddenly he’s not so funny.

Answered by All London Mayoral Candidates

Sian Berry

The key problem for most Londoners is the incredibly high cost of living, which is why my policies are all designed to save people money, while many will also save carbon as an added bonus. With things like lower transport fares, free insulation available to everyone, more affordable housing, a living wage of £7.20 paid by every employer, and a wider range of local shops and markets providing cheap, healthy food, I’ll improve everyone’s quality of life and cut living costs at the same time.

Answered by Siân Berry

It was a very strange ‘debate’ which I don’t think Jeremy Paxman handled very well at all. Beforehand, we saw Tim Yeo (Tory head of the Environmental Audit Committee in Parliament) talking about ‘personal carbon quotas’, which are a Green Party policy we believe are the only way to tackle climate change in a socially just way. But then later, when I mentioned this policy in the debate, Paxman reacted like I’d suggested flying all our carbon emissions to the moon. Very odd, and Ken Clarke and Stephen Hale weren’t much help in keeping the debate to the subject in hand either. I thought I said only coherent and sensible things, but the debate as a whole was a bit of a shambles to be honest.

Answered by Siân Berry

Apart from the fact that most of the Mayor’s initiatives need to be expanded (for example I’d triple the cycling budget), the main policy sticking point between the Greens and Ken Livingstone is that he still wants to build an enormous motorway bridge over the Thames Gateway. This is a policy remaining from his first term in office (before he needed our Green votes in the Assembly to pass his budget) and it would be disastrous for both Londoners and the environment. There will be a huge increase in noise and traffic pollution in east London, and is not the way to solve the transport infrastructure problems facing Londoners.

I’d spend the money on new train and tram services instead and reduce the need for car travel, rather than build more roads, which has never been shown to improve traffic problems.

Answered by All London Mayoral Candidates

Lindsey German

I love two things really. I love the multiculturalism which is very different from when I was growing up in London and I think it makes it a much better city than it was then and I love the greenery in the parks. I think London is a unique city - not always good architecturally but its a unique city in terms of this and I can't think of anywhere else that has so much greenery and is such a nice place to live from that point of view.

Sian Berry

I love the diversity - of people, lifestyles, culture and above all food. I love that within a few minutes of my home I can choose from, among other things, excellent Brazilian, Ethiopian or Phillipino food for dinner.

Answered by Siân Berry

My plan to close the airport at the end of its lease and replace it with affordable homes and a green industries park would bring much wider benefits to the people of London than more tarmac and low flying aircraft. 

City Airport wants to expand by 50% onto GLA-owned land, and I have pledged not to allow this if I were Mayor.  The increase in pollution, noise and congestion would cause more misery for Londoners in the local area, and the further increase in carbon emissions would spell disaster for the environment.

The majority of City Airport customers are on short-haul flights, which could be replaced by other forms of transport such as trains. The new Eurostar facility from St. Pancras means travelers can be in Paris or Brussels faster than if would if they flew.

Answered by Brian Paddick

Simple answer “No.” Due to the ways votes are counted at this election, people have two choices. They can vote first for who they think will run London best, and then they can vote second for their Party loyality. I expect a lot of people to be voting for me first. Oh and can I also urge people not to forget about the elections to the London Assembly. There too people should vote Liberal Democrat so that either I end up with a strong team of people to support me while Mayor, or there will be people, beholden to no one person, who can hold another Mayor firmly to account.

Answered by Brian Paddick

There is absolutely no indication that introducing ID cards would make any difference to crime levels in London. There are much more effective ways of tackling crime, getting the guns and knives off our streets and dealing with low level crime. Would an ID card tackle this? No.

Answered by Adrian Van Klaveren

I think the argument is a slightly different one. I think the argument is making sure that it is possible for people to find them, that its possible to search for them, that we’ve actually made the navigation to get to those sorts of stories as simple as we can and that’s something that we’ve been working on. You know we now have an index on our website called “Also in the news” which is the home for that kind of story because you’re absolutely right, I mean there are a lot of people who are keen to read, watch or listen to that kind of content and we have to make it possible for people to get to that and it is a part of what we do. Equally, we can do things through interactive TV in terms of offering that kind of story for people who want to find that through the menu, so I think there’s a role for us in aggregating it and making it findable. I actually think giving it more prominence….I don’t think that the vast majority of our audience feel that what we should be doing, is saying in the end that funny story about the man who was locked in the toilet is more important than what’s going on in Kosovo – they’re not expecting us to do that and actually we would be getting it wrong if we would be doing it that way. It is simply saying they do have a place in what we offer and we’ve got to make it easy for you to be able to get to those stories that we’re not ashamed of them, we don’t hide them away, they are there and for those that want them and want to bookmark it and go back to it, absolutely fine, you can do that.

Answered by Adrian Van Klaveren

I’m not sure I’m very impartial here because I work for the BBC News so I’m terribly partial. I’ll give you the honest answer – where I tend to for choice, is still fairly BBC skewed really – if you’re looking at television, the main things I consume are News 24 and the 10 o’clock news from the BBC. If you look at Radio, I’m a great 5 Live fan just because of the passion and the tone that 5 Live actually brings to it. For newspapers, I’m much more likely to read all of them, there are ones which stand out, I mean actually I always like to look at the Daily Mail because I think the Daily Mail really knows its audience and there is a way into what is actually going on in Britain that you can get from the Daily Mail that you won’t get elsewhere. And I think there is something in that which makes it well worth reading each day. If you are looking at web sources I guess the other place I start apart from the BBC site is, you do look at Google News because there you’ve got such a good digest of what is being talked about, different sources for it, sometimes surprising things. And you know the power of Google News and the reasons it’s growing so fast are precisely because of that – the very easy way to get at a wide range of stories. Because of what I do, you tend to flick through a lot of them [newspapers] as opposed to just reading one. But I will often read the Times, the Mail or the Telegraph.

Answered by David Leigh

I use them in different ways. Newspaper in the morning, internet to check during the day, TV news headlines at night.

Answered by David Leigh

Printed news is deeper, more considered and researched - and portable!

Answered by Simon Bucks

The McCann case touches anyone with children who has had to make daily decisions about looking after them. I completely reject the idea that our coverage is only designed to satisfy morbid curiosity. But all news coverage depends on the consumers being interested, or indeed curious, in the subject. The implication of your question is that we should prescribe what people should be interested in, a philosophy more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy.

Answered by Niall Couper

No. Specific rights may assume a higher significance for an individual according to the circumstances and threats that a person may face but all rights are important. Amnesty International campaigns for everyone in the world to able to enjoy all of their human rights. One reason for this is the 'indivisibility' of human rights - the way in which they are interlinked and intertwined

Answered by Philip Ingham

No, I've not tried it, but I believe it can work anywhere as long as it is thoroughly thought through and there is commitment to it.

Answered by Carol Barbone

There's only one back yard so far as global warming is concerned so the 'Nimby' argument hardly applies.

Answered by Anthony Lilley

A deeply interesting question about writers. I think the first thing is to challenge the idea that single writers are necessarily the central plank of any creative team in interactive media. The storyteller – or experience architect – is at the heart of the process, but my view is that the lonely single creator isn’t now – and possibly never was – the state of the art. Collaboration is central to this kind of creativity. Does background matter? I don’t think either “side” has it sown up – better to be a person with interesting things to say – or more accurately, interesting questions to ask - and a perspective which takes in interactivity than the best game designer or screenplay writer, I think.