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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We are paying the wages of these despicable arseholes.
The Davos Deviants are taking the world to hell in an EV and useless, grubby leeches like Charlotte are concerned that the dead might be given the wrong pronoun. I strongly doubt that even the bloody dead would G a F about how they should be addressed as the hearse carries them away. Even if they were able.
I am bloody furious that the wan#ers in Parliament can be so conceited as to believe this subject is worthy of discussion even over a cup of tea in one of their subsidised cafes. Is this glorified idiot of a retard not aware how utterly, depressingly stupid she sounds to the decent people currently occupying this country?
And whoever was Speaker at the time this matter was raised should hang their head in shame for the sheer insult this subject and this woman has given to the British people.
Nuke the damned lot of them.
Unbelievable!
Thanks Freddy
Next time, why not say what you really think of them!!
I hope to God such an asinine commentary is not repeated by this lazy, corrupt, idiotic cohort of sheer deplorables, disgracing the decent people of this country.
Bravo, hux!
What a disgusting sign of the times and a shocking indictment of the state of British politicians if they’re even seeing fit to raise such a non-issue and utter bilge in parliament. As if there’s nothing more pressing going on right now, effecting every man, woman and child in society than talking about this complete bloody garbage! Talk about priorities.. 
Thanks Mogs
If there is a bolder, brighter, more in our faces way to confirm how much these rank nobodies could affirm their sheer ignorance I hope I never have to see it.
If there is a more obvious way of ramming their contempt of their employers down our throats we are fortunate to have not yet witnessed it.
Surely to God a more sick and deplorable crew of unemployables could ever be gathered together under one roof.
As a defining moment that surely demands the abolition of this caricature of a parliament and democracy this must be it.
For pity’s sake please let this be the nadir.
Sadly, I think these insane nobody’s can and will sink yet further, in ways we just can’t yet fathom.
Not fit to run a bath, and the US is even worse!
Go go go——-You must have a had a power breakfast his morning. ——That was certainly one of your best and most invigorating tirades my friend
Thanks varmint.
Top class HP!!
Thanks Spycatcher.
Funnier than the “Dead Parrot” sketch. ——–“Can I help you at all?——I’ve come to change me parrots gender”—“But it looks like it might be dead sir”————“Nope it’s alive and just sleeping and he wants to be a girl” ——-“I am afraid your LGBT parrot is deceased sir, it’s gone to meet it’s maker”——“But it wants to wear a dress”——“But how does it know it wants to wear a frock if it’s dead”?
Very good
There is no such thing as a “transgender person”. There are men and women, some of whom choose to claim they are the opposite sex to their actual sex.
Exactamondo. There’s male, female then confused/mentally ill. I think there’s a lot of normalising of mental illness and anti-social behaviour going on nowadays, which would not have been tolerated years gone by. And yes, transsexuals have always been with us and they’ve never been any bother or been plastered all over the news, but it’s like now there’s a new breed and they’re a danger to kids and a threat to society as a whole. Now any old pervert man can don a dress, proclaim he’s a *she* just so he can gain access to the women’s changing room or enter a female sports event. That shit never used to happen. Craziness…
SSSHHHHHHHH ——You will be dragged to the Gender Race Equality Diversity and Climate Gulag
She’s not a looker, and cow dung for brains.
Maybe she will look better dead and she can then go on the Dead People Dating Site.
Why doesn’t the stupid b**ch read new the WHO treaty and amendments that are going to toss away our sovereign rights to the WHO and the cronies that control it and do something about that instead of pissing away her time on stupid delusional crap that affects a minuscule percentage of people and even then is straight out of Alice in Wonderland?
And then they wonder why people’s opinion of politicians is low.
Nice one Stewart.
Such an unfortunate photo suggesting an irreversible brain implant.
I.D.G.A.F who you think you are. You could claim to be a flying unicorn for all I care, but once you impose your views over mine, we will most certainly clash. Guaranteed.
And I won’t crumble.
Much love.
Your lifelong, implacable & impertinent opponent.
GDA
In order to avoid being an outlier in the political class, the Conservative Party will now claim this Labour MP is being extreme. The Tories will propose, instead, a regulator to ensure the corpse cannot make this change less than 2 days nor more than 6 weeks after death and a fee has to be paid. Furthermore, it will absolutely be prohibited to make two changes; only one is to be allowed.
I fear we will all be requyired to change our gender and at that point I’m leaving.
Maybe helpline for the dead where they can be advised best how to look wearing a frock in their urn.
‘course they can. All they need to do is complete form XA96a and the record will be changed forever – or until either one of their children complete form XA96b or their parents complete XA96c. If both forms XA96b and XA96c are submitted then whichever was submitted first will be deemed invalid. In cases where multiple copies of XA96b are completed they will be weighted by the ratio of numbers of children (acknowledged or not) of the deceased to numbers of acknowledged parents.
Of course, if there is a valid marriage certificate it will need to be amended and substituted with a retrospective civil partnership certificate. In its absence any pension entitlements which the deceased accrued will revert to any surviving parents or grandparents or to the deceased’s dog or to the state.
Simple.
Marvellous
This article has disappeared
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/02/04/ex-whitehall-mandarin-led-premier-league-stasi-that-banned-newcastle-fan
What article?
I see no article…
Crikey tof. What’s going on?
A glitch in the matrix…
They’re coming…
Run!
Thank you – I thought I was going doolally (if that’s not offensive to the doolally community).
Methinks the legal department of the Prem might have been in touch.
Looks like it – as per below, article has disappeared from Telegraph.
Look forward to hearing from DS as to what’s going on there.
Yep ——–Toby come clean mate. ——-I notice the article about the Newcastle fan is still there though.
Has the Telegraph article (to which it referred) suffered the same fate?
Good spot – yes!
I would put on her tombstone. Here lies a man with two ar*eholes.
People cannot pay their mortgage or their energy bill. They are being treated like aliens in their own country and our daughters will soon have to wear a headscarf to school. We have men being told it is ok to use the womens loo. We are governed by a political class of WEF and UN lackeys, yet here is a squirming twerp worrying about the rights of dead people. ——-Are there actually any votes in that by the way?
Cool! The bishops can then remember Jesus of Nazareth as a transgender Person of the Trinity, alongside God our Mother, on account of the description of Him wearing ankle-length female attire, ‘tied under the paps’ (Revelation.i.13).
I started a list of things that are important to get fixed. I got to 50 and this still doesn’t make the list!
Brilliant idea. I intend to declare I’m still alive after I’ve “passed” and carry on claiming my pensions.