10 November (Part 2) - The Conservative view on ULEZ 15 months after its imposition
The
Mayor said there were only a few minutes left in which to debate the
original ULEZ Motion and Councillor Kurtis Christoforides
was first to catch the Mayor’s eye. He said he “was disappointed by the tone of
those opposite because they were the least constructive that I have ever heard
them be. It feels like a real shame.”
“I want to speak on its impact on working people. What exactly is a working
person, the finest minds in the Labour Party having been straining every sinew
to solve this knotty conundrum? The Prime
Minster’s definition is that working people know who they are which is not very
specific. It is very difficult to build good policy on that foundation so it is
no wonder that Labour ignores the impact of ULEZ on working people because they
don’t even know what or who they are.”
“Another possibility is that the term was a deliberately ambiguous pre-election
ploy. I hope very much that Bexley residents with Labour representatives pay
very close attention to whether they are working hard for them because with all
this confusion about what counts as work who knows what the Party opposite
spends their time doing.”
“There is a point to all this theorising and this is it.”
“Wealthy people who don’t need to work don’t drive 20 year old diesels; they
have the latest Tesla. No, it is the people mentioned by my ward colleague
[Cameron Smith] that are affected. The same people mostly affected by the loss
of the Winter Fuel Allowance and the increase in employer National Insurance
contribution and the tax on family farms. Did pensioners not work? Do small
business owners not work? Do farmers not work? In my ward they do.”
“Those opposite will say they have raised the minimum wage but the problem with
that is if you don’t have a job the maximum wage is zero and the policies that
they are advocating, they are supporting, they are introducing, are taxes on
jobs. Things like ULEZ and NI going up means job opportunities go down especially
for young people and the lower paid.”
“What makes this distasteful is that the Party opposite has claimed to be the
great puritan defenders of working people, the guardians of the have not, the
hammer of the evil Tories who would balance the books on the backs of the
poorest and they have done exactly that. This is not Socialism and what happens
if you remove Socialism from the Labour Party? Just the Champagne and Lord Ali’s clothes.”
Time
being the enemy again, Members had voted earlier for an extension of only
20 minutes, the Mayor asked Cabinet Member Diment to sum up.
He congratulated Councillor Smith for bringing the Motion forward and Councillor Fosten
for his Maiden Speech “but he only knew where more money could be spent and none where it could be saved”.
“ULEZ remains deeply unpopular in Bexley. 15 months on from the extension the
Labour Mayor and TfL continue to struggle to demonstrate tangible benefits while
the costs to residents who can ill afford it are clear, We have no Underground,
we have no Overground, no DLR, no Thameslink. We need dramatic improvements.”
Councillor Fosten’s campaign for Thameslink to stop
at Erith and Belvedere requires the train companies talking together to
avoid the conflict at North Kent junction. “It is not that simple. Major
rescheduling is required.”
He welcomed the Bexley Village Councillors’ campaign for the Superloop bus to stop at
the Bexley War Memorial instead of running non-stop
from Bexleyheath to Sidcup bypassing two stations along its route.
“We have had promise after promise from TfL that there would be more
electric buses but there have been none in the past two years.”
The Mayor argues that the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels must both be
tolled but the M6 and the M6 Toll roads coexist. “The toll is simply another
way of extracting money.”
Unlike the Mayor in his ULEZ-free Manifesto Bexley Council was elected on a Manifesto to
pursue the legal route against ULEZ.
The revised Conservative ULEZ Motion was approved.