RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Better-off drivers with low-emissions vehicles will be exempt from Labour’s green road tax… It will hit the poor, the old and the squeezed middle
Keir Starmer is always banging on about the cost of living crisis, laying the blame squarely at the door of the evil Tories and their rich non-dom mates.
So perhaps he’d like to explain why he’s 100 per cent behind London’s Labour Mayor Genghis Khan’s plans to soak the poor, the self-employed and the squeezed middle class.
From the end of August, countless motorists in London’s outer boroughs will be hit with a £12.50-a-day charge simply for the privilege of driving their cars and vans.
Khan, desperate to plug the black hole in his budget, has decided to extend the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) tax beyond the inner city to the Home Counties borders around the M25.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Keir Starmer, pictured on January 26, is always banging on about the cost of living crisis, laying the blame squarely at the door of the evil Tories and their rich non-dom mates
It is estimated that those with non-compliant vehicles, especially diesels registered before 2015, will be £3,000 a year worse off, out of taxed income.
Already motorists who cross into the central area are hit not just with the ULEZ levy but must also pay the £15 congestion charge.
From August, even those living beyond the M25 will have to cough up if they have to enter outer London to work, shop or visit friends and family.
While better-off drivers who can afford new hybrids, Teslas and other low-emissions vehicles will be exempt, the effect on those with modest incomes and older vehicles will be devastating. It won’t be just the cost, it’ll be the disruption to their daily lives.
No wonder people are worried sick. Here’s just a couple of examples from my postbag.
The first from a single mum I’ll call Angie, who works at Heathrow Airport and lives in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Angie writes: ‘I earn on average £1,800 a month and I don’t receive any help or benefits. My childcare costs are £600-700 a month. My rent and bills £500. My car insurance is £120. As you can see, I’m left with very little money after everything is paid.
‘My car is a 2014 diesel, just a year under being exempt from the charge. I love my job and need my car. I can’t use public transport because I would have to get three buses to drop my daughter off to childcare, then another bus to work and the same again to pick her up and take her home.
‘I am either going to have to quit my job or get myself into debt to buy a new car. The stress and anxiety it’s causing is through the roof.’
From the end of August, countless motorists in London’s outer boroughs will be hit with a £12.50-a-day charge simply for the privilege of driving their cars and vans
Another comes from John and Pat, in their 80s, who live on the edge of Greater London, in Essex. Their well-maintained, low-mileage car is 17 years old, and they rely on it to visit relatives in the new ULEZ, for shopping, and for hospital and other medical appointments.
They are both on pension credits and will now have to dip into the money they have saved for their funeral expenses to buy a compliant vehicle.
I could fill this column with similar tales of woe. Four years ago, almost to the day, when the ULEZ plans were first announced, the headline on this column read: ‘This isn’t saving the planet, it’s the road to ruin.’
This vindictive policy seemed a long way off then, but has been creeping up ever since, like slowly boiling a frog.
At first, it’s no big deal. But when the point of no return approaches, the frog realises it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s now dawning on people just how painful Khan’s money-grab is going to be. The extortionate new charge will cripple many self-employed tradesmen, forcing them out of business.
As I asked back in 2019, what’s a gas fitter supposed to do — lug a new boiler and half a dozen radiators on the Underground? Are window cleaners and gardeners supposed to go round on bikes?
According to Labour’s gormless David Lammy, that’s exactly what they are supposed to do. He told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that London had ‘fantastic buses, fantastic Tubes’. Not when they’re on strike, it doesn’t. And not if you want to go East-West. And not if you’re carrying a hod of bricks and two bags of cement.
Lammy said that’s why Khan was giving people time to upgrade their vehicles. Really?
As an enraged plumber from Enfield who called LBC said: Where’s he going to find £15,000 for a new van between now and August? And why would he bother taking a £30 job fixing a leaky tap when £12.50 of it would go straight to Khan?
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosts cabinet at Chequers on January 26
These are the questions Labour can’t or won’t answer. Nor do they care. They’re more interested in virtue-signalling and sucking up to the Thunberg Tendency.
Starmer wants to win back Red Wall seats in the North of England. But by supporting Khan, he’s demonstrated that he doesn’t even understand life beyond the North Circular Road.
Which is hardly surprising because he lives in inner city Kentish Town, next door to Islington — spiritual home of the Guardianistas — and represents Holborn and St Pancras. From there he could walk to work or hop on a bus.
If Starmer really cared about the cost of living, he’d urge the mayor to scrap this malicious scheme immediately.
It’s nothing more than highway robbery, dressed up as saving the polar bears. The war on the motorist is in full swing everywhere. ULEZ zones and congestion charges are already in force or on the way across Britain, from Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Dundee to Cardiff, Southampton and York.
In yesterday’s Mail, David Leafe’s brilliant dispatch highlighted the chaos being caused by anti-car zealots on Oxfordshire council, run in coalition by Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens.
Yes, we all want better air quality. But most of the congestion and pollution has been deliberately manufactured by the imposition of empty bike lanes, 20mph limits on main roads and hated Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
Labour’s Hackney Council is now planning to close 75 per cent of all roads in the borough to through traffic.
Meanwhile, Khan swans round in a £300,000, armour-plated Range Rover, provided by the police for his ‘protection’. If ever he ventures outside his Left-wing inner-city stronghold, he may discover he’s going to need it.
And, as I wrote last week, if you want to know what life in Starmer’s Britain would look like, look no further than Genghis Khan’s London.
Deputy PM Dominic Raab is accused of ‘bullying’ civil servants — in other words telling them to do the job they are paid for.
Given so few Whitehall staff turn up for work these days, I’m surprised he can find anyone to bully.
It’s Judith Iscariot
A new, gender-neutral production of Jesus Christ Superstar is being staged in Edinburgh, featuring a non-binary Jesus and a female Judas Iscariot.
Presumably the lyrics will have to be changed, too. Mary Magdalene will sing They Don’t Know How To Love They. And the main number will go . . .
Jesus Christ, Superstar,
Walks Like A Man,
But they wear a bra . . .
Drones will soon have to be fitted with number plates so they can be tracked by the police and security services, under plans being drawn up by regulators.
How long before they work out how to put speed cameras and humps in the sky?
A top law firm, Vardags, has told staff to stop wearing traditional suits, and dress as if they’re going to nightclubs like Annabel’s, in Mayfair. The new policy is intended to ‘encourage individuality’ and shake off the legal profession’s stuffy image.
Suggestions include ‘electric blue sequinned jackets, gold leather trousers’ and scarlet Doc Martens.
I can’t imagine this kind of thing catching on at Horace Rumpole’s Equity Court.
Certainly, I can see Guthrie Featherstone QC in full John Travolta mode throwing a few shapes on the dance floor at Annabel’s. And the Lovely Portia would look splendid with pink hair in some kind of Lady Gaga outfit.
But how would She Who Must Be Obeyed react if Horace stumbled home from Pomeroy’s Wine Bar in an electric blue sequinned jacket and gold leather trousers? She’d assume he’d been hitting the Chateau Thames Embankment a little too hard, and banish him to the spare room.
Rum-POLE!
A top law firm, Vardags, has told staff to stop wearing traditional suits, and dress
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