The Fight Against ULEZ

Before going any further, let me state that as a Londoner who has never owned any kind of motor vehicle, I have no dog in this fight, and like people everywhere I would rather breathe clean air than pollution. Having said that, what Sadiq Khan is doing now is insanity. If you haven’t heard of Sadiq Khan, he is the devout Moslem who promotes gay pride parades in London; he has also been its Mayor since May 2016.

Khan’s predecessor was Boris Johnson, who went on to serve as Prime Minister. Under his tenure, plans were introduced to make the capital an Ultra Low Emission Zone for all road vehicles – hence the acronym. This necessitated the extreme monitoring of vehicles, which was not that much of a problem because London was already a Low Emission Zone, the infrastructure having been installed in the previous decade. The LEZ came into being on February 4, 2008, and before that, from February 17, 2003, there was the congestion charge.

The original pretext for LEZ and now ULEZ was of course clean air, but there was also a desire to reduce the traffic in London, hence the more honestly named congestion charge. This isn’t a bad idea in itself; one of the few good things to come out of the Covid lockdowns was the realisation that a lot of travel is unnecessary, especially for work. Sadly, work isn’t yet unnecessary, but that is another issue.

Anyone who ventures into especially Central London and who has done so regularly as I have since the 1980s will have detected little if any difference in the volume of traffic under either the congestion charge or LEZ. Most motorists have tended to grit their teeth and pay the charge. That has all changed with what most of them consider a liberty if not an outrage. As things stand, the ULEZ will come into force on August 29 being extended to cover most of Greater London and indeed beyond it. London is not an easy place to define. Central London consists of the City of Westminster and the City of London (the Square Mile), but it has been fluid over the years. For example, both Bayswater in West London and Hackney in the North East were once in Middlesex, as was Hayes, where I grew up, and even Uxbridge, another four miles or so further west.

If Khan gets his way, all drivers (and motorcyclists) in the Greater London Area who are not driving exempt vehicles will be forced to fork out £12.50 per day or face heavy fines. There is a bit more to it than this, but the bottom line is that this policy, if it comes into force, will trash many small businesses as well as making it uneconomical for many people in lower income brackets to drive to work or drive at all.

Five London boroughs objected to ULEZ and applied for a judicial review of Khan’s decision; they were rejected. As an elected mayor, Khan has a duty to consider public opinion before taking such momentous decisions. A public consultation was held on ULEZ, and in spite of massive opposition to it, he decided to go ahead anyway, indeed, he had already ordered the cameras before ULEZ was confirmed. A better idea would have been some sort of vote, but he would probably have ignored that too. In addition to cleaner air, Khan has tacked on the so-called fight against climate change to his scheme, but as he is an enthusiastic supporter of the World Economic Forum, no one should be surprised. Let’s just see him try to turn London into a 15 minute city.

It is common knowledge that Khan and his followers are totally out of touch with the way real people live, and that he told a pack of lies in order to promote this scheme. How does a painter and decorator or plumber answer house calls if he cannot afford the daily charge or a new compliant vehicle, is he supposed to travel on buses and trains with a ladder and paint brushes or a cabinet full of plumber’s tools? What about a young mother who wants to pick up her kids from a school four or five miles away or take them to school in the morning? Do we really want infants, especially girls, travelling by bus alone when unnecessary?

In Khan’s view, people who oppose it are extreme conservatives or even Nazis. He claimed that four thousand people in London die prematurely every year due to pollution from traffic, a claim that is clearly nonsense. Difficult though it may be for younger people to believe, the air quality in London has never been better. In the 1950s, there were “pea soupers”; check out some of the archive footage on YouTube of the Great Smog of 1952.

The staggering cost of the ULEZ charge will also force those businesses that survive to raise their prices. Travel including transporting goods uses energy. A modern city, a modern nation, needs cheap energy to run. This is why the cost of living in isolated places is so much more expensive. Here is how Iceland compares with the UK.

Leaving aside Khan’s association with the WEF, there is a lot more to this scheme than a simple money grab. Labour’s Angela Rayner, who is renowned for her big mouth, let slip that the end goal is to charge drivers by the mile, those drivers who survive. This would necessitate extremely intrusive surveillance, including meters in all electric vehicles. And if it isn’t stopped now, there is no reason to believe it will stop with London. Indeed, a number of UK cities already have their own versions of ULEZ and more are planned. Other countries also have them, although they go by various names:

Umweltzonen in German; Miljozone in Denmark, etc.

There is light at the end of the tunnel though. Last month, Hertfordshire Council banned ULEZ signs and cameras; this month, Kent followed suit. At least one group has also been taking more direct action, a masked gang of “Blade Runners” has been vandalising ULEZ cameras. One cannot of course condone criminal activity, but extortion is also a crime. Hopefully this scheme will eventually be abandoned; there are better and less repressive ways of reducing both traffic and pollution in London and every other city on Earth.