8 January - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 1 - Men of Honour
When Bonkers started in 2009 it tried to present the facts and where
appropriate both sides of the argument and leave readers to draw their own
conclusions. Bexley Council was then at the height of its dishonest phase and
there wasn’t really any need to point out the obvious with opinions. Over the
intervening years BiB’s original tagline of Dishonest, Incompetent, Vindictive;
stolen from The News Shopper, has become less appropriate than it used to be.
One subject upon which Bonkers has not been fence fitting is Sadiq Khan.
Councillor John Davey (Independent, West Heath) once said that Khan was doing
more damage to our capital city than the Luftwaffe in 1940. In the sense that London was
able to recover from the Blitz but is unlikely to survive the Khanage of the past few years, the former Conservative Councillor was right.
However
there is a minority view (the disregarded ULEZ consultation confirms it) that Khan is some sort of Super Hero for his blinkered
attack on the city’s economy which ignores various reports that he will do
almost nothing for air pollution. The reductions have come and will continue to
come naturally. There was a 94% reduction in pollution between 2016 and 2020 (Imperial
College figures) as older vehicles are replaced.
Because I am interested in how contrary views are justified the first of a
multi-part analysis by @tonyofsidcup is published below. It is unedited although I personally feel
some discomfort at the way the premature death of James Brokenshire from lung cancer has been used as supporting material.
His loss cannot sensibly be used to justify ULEZ in the way that smoking
was restricted following the death of entertainer Roy Castle whose demise was
blamed on performing in smoky environments. Polluting vehicles will be gone
within a very few years with or without Khanage. Smoking is still killing people
29 years after non-smoker Castle died from lung cancer.
Note: Photos above from my own collection.
The premature death, from lung cancer, of the Old Bexley and Sidcup MP James
Brokenshire shocked his friends and acquaintances among Bexley Conservatives. So it came as no
surprise that when in 2022 London’s mayor Sadiq Khan proposed to expand the capital’s Ultra Low
Emission Zone to include Bexley, the local party rallied behind the plan. “I welcome the
mayor’s efforts to clean up London’s air”, Brokenshire’s successor Louie French stated, “We simply
cannot tolerate avoidable deaths from respiratory disease”. Sidcup Ward councillor Richard Diment
reminded his colleagues that a 2021 study by Imperial College London named his ward London’s
worst-affected by air
pollution in terms of lives lost. “As the Cabinet Member for Education, I
regularly meet with the borough’s parents. I simply could not look them in the eye if I failed to support ULEZ”, he said.
Falconwood and Welling councillor Frazer Brooks agreed: “Living next to A2,
my constituents suffer from the borough’s highest levels of NO2 pollution, and it would be
unthinkable for me to oppose ULEZ expansion”. Councillor Smith of St Mary’s and St James Ward mentioned
his post as the communications director of the national Conservative Environment Network,
and said: “We may disagree with the mayor on many things, but protecting Londoners’ health is
our common priority. Yes, times are tough and everyone is feeling the pinch, but you cannot tell
an asthmatic child “Sorry, it was too expensive to give you clean air”.
“For me, it is a matter of Conservative principles”, Council Leader Teresa
O’Neill remarked, “A true Conservative is serious about personal responsibility. If your vehicle
pollutes the air that other people breathe, you accept your duty and pick up the bill. I would do this
readily”. Councillor O’Neill recalled that back in 2007, the council declared the borough an Air Quality
Management Area, citing high levels of nitrogen-dioxide and
particulate-matter pollution. “Air
quality has been Bexley Conservatives’ priority since day 1”, she said, “Every year, the Cabinet
debates the annual Air Quality Action Plan, and we always ask: What more can we do to make our air cleaner?”
Ok, let’s snap out of this daydream. All of the quotes above are made up.
Without exception, Bexley Tories have toed the party line and opposed ULEZ expansion, not once
acknowledging Bexley residents living with respiratory disease. (Clearly, Brokenshire was an
exception). The “green” Councillor Smith read out an anti-ULEZ statement in the council chamber.
After Mayor Khan announced, in November 2022, that ULEZ expansion was going ahead, Bexley
joined Tory-run Outer London boroughs of Croydon, Harrow and Hillingdon in opposition. In her
statement, Teresa O’Neill insisted that the “decisive” victory of Bexley Conservatives in the May 2022
local election - Tories’ 51% of votes vs. Labour’s 44% - gave the council the mandate to oppose ULEZ.
(In the following month, the “rebel alliance” indicated that it was going to
block TfL’s installation of ULEZ camera equipment on borough-managed roads. One wonders if, defying TfL,
the councils would be able to keep the money they receive from TfL. Each year, Bexley receives
hundreds of thousands of pounds from the City Hall, to fund things from bridge repair to the
salaries of lollipop people. In 2020, in a Covid-related development, TfL funding went away, for six months.
So did the lollipops, as Bexley failed to pony up).
A late-2022
Freedom of Information request for Bexley’s latest Air Quality
Action Plan was met, incredibly, with “We don’t have one yet”. Why “incredibly”? The Bexley Air Quality Management
Area has been in place for 15 years, and devising and maintaining an AQAP is, to all appearances, a
legal requirement. One can only wonder if Bexley is breaking the law (and
Defra doesn’t care), or if the senior officer who responded to the FOI did not have a clue. Either way,
it tells you something about the council’s - and its Conservative leadership’s - attention to air
quality. Asking these people to react to the ICL study that put Sidcup, Bexleyheath, Crook Log and
Blackfen and Lamorbey in the top 20 of London’s wards most affected by air pollution seems to be a pointless exercise.
As confirmed by another FOI request, Bexley did not carry out a formal
analysis of the impact of ULEZ expansion before publishing anti-ULEZ articles in The Bexley Magazine, and
did not even ask TfL how many Bexley-registered vehicles would be caught out by ULEZ. (I did - and
was shocked to find that just over half of Bexley vans were non-compliant).
Two Sidcup residents and stars of the Bexley Conservative scene, Louie
French MP and Gareth Bacon MP, made YouTube speeches against ULEZ expansion, and ran
HQ-supplied
anti-ULEZ petitions on their HQ-supplied web sites. Louie never answered an email question about a
claim in one of his anti-ULEZ videos. In fairness, he never answered any question I have emailed
him - while a made-up “Fluke Kelso” received a prompt response to his adoring email. Our MP
appears to operate a “black list” of undeserving constituents. If I weren’t on it, I could ask Louie
about AQAP - after all, as Bexley’s Cabinet Member for Growth, he was likely responsible for it before moving to Westminster.
Most of the anti-ULEZ noise has appeared to originate with the Conservative
members of the London Assembly. There is a Russian expression about someone “getting fired from
the Gestapo for cruelty”; adapting this saying to British realities, I could say that most Tory
Assembly members could be fired from Boris Johnson’s cabinet for lying. The small group spent months
inflating what they called #ULEZScandal, based on a set of falsehoods which spread across the Tory
anti-ULEZ discourse. In the next post, let’s look at some of these lies.
55% of light commercial vehicles registered in Bexley are not ULEZ compliant.
Seven years ago pollution levels on Bexley were not especially good.
I promised myself that I would avoid further comment so will confine myself to saying that Louie French should seriously consider firing his office assistant.