Uxbridge and South Ruislip has long been a Conservative stronghold, but Boris Johnson’s numerous scandals and a strong local Labour Party have threatened to swing the constituency to the Left in the upcoming July 20th by-election. However, the expansion of the Ulez scheme in the area has caused alarm among local businesses and residents, presenting a clear trade-off between the environmental cost of pollution and a daily charge of £12.50, which will add further strain to households that are already struggling. Will the Labour Party prioritise the welfare of their struggling constituents or stick to their green agenda? The Telegraph has the story.
Carole MacKenzie’s bookstall has been a fixture of The Chimes Shopping Centre in Uxbridge for 28 years. For the past six months, though, long-standing customers have been visiting Bargain Books to bid her farewell and good luck.
They can no longer afford the modest £2 for a holiday paperback. Not when they factor in the £12.50 for driving in the newly extended Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez), and the cost of a parking ticket. “They tell me they won’t see me again,” says MacKenzie – who, like many of her fellow stall holders, is in despair about the expansion of the Ulez to include the London Borough of Hillingdon, due to take effect on August 29th. “Most of my customers come from just outside the M25. They can’t afford the Ulez and they can’t afford a new car.”
A policy that was introduced to create cleaner air in the city centre is proving ill-suited to the outer reaches of London. Loyal customers from leafy Buckinghamshire, just a five-minute drive away, will be forced to shop elsewhere.
Business owners feel that the Mayor of London has cut off their oxygen supply during an already challenging economic period. “Last Christmas I had people saying this would be their last tree they’d be buying from us,” says Sharon, who works at the florists, a family business of 50 years standing. “Many of our customers live in Iver and Langley, places that aren’t going to be in the Ulez. People can’t afford it.”
Their delivery van also isn’t Ulez-compliant, meaning that there’s £30,000 that needs to be found somewhere to replace it. Times were already tough. Half the lights on Marios Sergiou’s fabric stall, The Fabric Shop, have been switched off for the past six months. In September his fixed rate ends and he’s preparing for his bill to triple. After 25 years in the trade, business hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and Sergiou is using his personal savings to keep his stall going each week. “I can’t walk away because I’m tied to a lease that lasts another four years,” he says.
He is also thinking ahead to the impending by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip on July 20th and feels torn. Long a Conservative stronghold, Boris Johnson’s controversies, and a strong local Labour Party, had threatened to swing the constituency to the Left.
Sergiou says: “I was wavering. If Starmer stops Ulez from expanding I probably would vote for Labour. But if he doesn’t, he’s going to shoot himself in the foot.”
That Labour is out of touch with the lives of ordinary working people is evident in Uxbridge. Outside a Wenzel’s bakery a group of construction workers are finishing their lunch. “The Ulez is going to f–k every single construction worker that has to drive in and around the M25. Simple as that,” says Tommy Dale, without varnish.
“If it expands to this area it’s going to push people out of work. If you’ve got to factor in £12.50 a day, that’s £60 a week. It means you’re spending £240 a month when bills are higher and mortgages have gone up. People will end up being charged to go to work.” He has no intention of voting Labour: “They don’t support working people.”
Sadiq Khan’s bullish expansion has put Labour’s by-election candidate, Danny Beales, in a difficult position. As a local boy, born in Hillingdon Hospital, educated at a local comprehensive and raised by a single-mother in South Ruislip and Ruislip Manor, Beales was the first person in his family to go to university. The former charity worker’s campaign has been built upon his relatability; meeting constituents and sharing that he too is worried about his mortgage and the cost of his weekly shop.
This week he chose to speak out against the expansion, calling for it be delayed and reworked to avoid exacerbating the cost of living crisis. He said voters had told him “heart-wrenching” stories about the cost of the scheme and warned that it was not “socially just”.
Until now, Labour’s strategy has been to sell green policy as a way of using renewable energy to lower household bills. But Ulez runs completely counter to the narrative that you can help the environment and get economic benefit at the same time.
Worth reading in full.
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The only anti lockdown candidate standing that I am aware of is Laurence Fox and he will lose his deposit
He won’t if people vote for him. I know this is controversial to some but what have you to lose? A Labour or Conservative MP will have exactly the same pro-WEF, pro-Climate change, pro 15 minute cities, pro-lockdown policies, so why not vote for someone else?
Exactly.
Oh I totally agree
Just find it immensely sad and frustrating that support for mainstream parties on both sides of the political spectrum remains so high despite their obvious disregard for the support base they pretend to represent
The implication of the article is that support for the ULEZ will damage them at the expense of the Tories. While this may be true, I don’t see it as an especially good thing. Journalists from the political right need to come and and tell people they shouldn’t vote Conservative
As will the Lib Dems and Greens were they to win.
Exactly. There is nothing to gain whatsoever by voting for establishment parties- quite the reverse those voting for establishment parties are delusional fools who encourage the scoundrels to double down on their evil agendas.
UKIP wanted to talk about a strategy for all centre right challengers to come together but Reclaim and Reform UK are so far up their own backsides they refused to engage.
Aren’t all political parties a fair way up their own backsides? I’m suspicious of any party that didn’t firmly oppose lockdowns and fake vaccines from the start.
I think that Piers Corbyn is standing too….
I don’t know much about what his economic policies would be, but he was a star during covid.
He’s continuing to be a star in speaking out about the agenda – has a raft of unpaid ULEZ fines which he continues to refuse to pay.
Good to hear. I think I’d vote for him just for that.
You still think a by-election matters? Where have you been for the last three years? The entire political class of the Western world is moving in lockstep and gets its orders not from the party or the people but from the WEF at Davos.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it is a conspiracy FACT.
MP’s don’t need orders, just a keen sense of self-preservation, some proclivities that make them suggestible, or an ideological mindset that aligns with Other Interests. Less likely to generate incriminating documentation.
Then why do they go to Davos and why can’t you know what they are talking about with the global elite? Why is every major political party rep in every country saying they same things? I grew up wathing the politics of the 1970s, MPs had al the things you stated but completely differing views of even members of their own parties. Now you could most MPs in any rosette and they’d be fine with party policy.
Wake up my friend, time is getting short.
It was an observation that we’d be lucky to find any document making this explicitly clear. People can easily prove to themselves whether their MP will represent them. I have and he doesn’t.
Why is a candidate considered mofe favourably because they are/were:
born in Hillingdon Hospital
educated at a local comprehensive
raised by a single-mother
in South Ruislip and Ruislip Manor
the first person in his family to go to university
a former charity worker
I can think of several much more important qualities in a candidate.
As a comprehensive schooled pupil myself I would think that (and several other of those traits) would make them less suited in fact.
“A policy that was introduced to create cleaner air in the city centre”
No, it wasn’t. It was introduced to force the closure of shops, convert them to housing and create a 15 minute neighbourhood in which there would be few or zero cars. Read “Absolute Zero” by UK FIRES, page 5, for further details.
https://ukfires.org/absolute-zero/
Correct.
Absolutely, Allmouth.
Air “pollution” is at all-time record LOW levels. So the premise for this scheme is weapons grade bolix.
But we have “Conservatives” who conserve nothing, “Labour” who don’t care a fiddler’s fart about working people and “Liberal Democrats” who are absolutely illiberal and actively anti-democratic. Ony Gang”Green” stand out as having an appropriate name – albeit most of their policies are actually environmentally damaging.
Vote for ANYONE other than the LibLabCon artists. Or spoil the ballot.
A more emphatic response to the whole charade would be the best choice, but won’t happen.
Down with the Tories… but hold on, no… down with Labour even more! Let’s side with the underdogs… Vote REFORM!!! Oh, shucks, they’re pro-vaccination, where are we going to go from here? C’mon Nige, we need you to form another party, or Richard Tice to form a coalition with the Conservative party, yes that would be nice. But we’ve got to get rid of that pro-vax dogma somehow. You gotta be anti-lockdown, you gotta be pro-choice, you gotta be pro-personal freedom. Perhaps, just perchance, Westminster politics isn’t the best arena to satisfy all the above criteria. Maybe the punks of the 1960s were right all along, and maybe the hippies and beatniks to boot. It doesn’t matter which way you vote, you get the same greenwashed slime either way. I suspect Joseph Goebbels is turning in his grave as we speak, smugly and posthumously acknowledging the current establishment’s inability to match up to the best of 1940’s National Socialist Propagandists.
The woke, greenwashed left, as satirized and caricatured by Kier “What Is A Woman?” Starmer, was always doomed to face such a dilemma as this, as it has unthinkingly placed itself between a “rock” (the ULEZ scheme, part of the unchallenged Net Zero Sense agenda) and a “hard place” (the Labour Party’s supposed allegiance to those whom it represents – the struggling working class majority).
I’m not sure there is a shovel, nay, a JCB digger, large and powerful enough for Mr Starmer to dig himself out of the chasm he has dug himself by not challenging the ruling party and the prevailing agenda over the past three years.
The “Green Agenda”—- Central planning with the planet as the excuse.———– You can be sure that the fence sitter in chief (Starmer) who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before deciding if men are women or if children are foxes will squirm like the social justice pretend to save the planet parasite he is on this issue as on all others. ——-Starmer needs to be viewed through a microscope like all other parasites in the hope we can one day find a cure.
Dangerous Men