Red lights will not do

Sir Robert Wright when reporting in “The wrong line from London to Caracas” February 24, about the quid-pro-quos that Ken Livingstone should be planning in appreciation of Hugo Chavez’s (not Venezuela’s) petrol gifts to London and that will allow to cut the transport costs for its poor (and rich?), he mentions that Transport for London, the transport authority, might help to provide Caracas with good traffic lights. Forget it! Traffic lights amounts to a too indecent mirrors-for-pearls gift in a country where the price of petrol is less than 3 cents of US dollars per liter and therefore the traffic is unstoppable, and also its President is running amok after and through any red light he sees.

A mutual admiration club of superheroes?

Sir, Tom Burgis in “Chávez agrees fuel deal for London poor”, February 21, quotes London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone referring to it as “the work Hugo Chávez is doing around the world in tackling the problem of poverty”. Has your major gone nut? The way he goes about it next time he might even come up with that his superhero Hugo Chávez will also tackle the environmental problems of the world, ignoring such facts that eight years into Chavez’s peculiar to say the least socialist government, the petrol is sold in Venezuela at 3 US dollar cents per liter, transferring thereby around 10% of its GDP from the poorest of the poor to those who drive cars, damaging the environment and making it almost a mission impossible for your aspiring world-traffic-problem-tackling-mayor to allow his transport Chief Peter Hendy to find a solution for the traffic jams of Caracas.

We also read that Mr Livingstone will “actively and efficiently promote Venezuela’s image in the UK” and I cannot resist speculating on what Chávez would have said if, in Caracas, one of its majors had signed a similar deal to promote the image of for instance the USA.