London Mayor Sadiq Khan has apparently softened his stance on the controversial Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) scheme, which contributed to Labour’s recent Uxbridge by-election defeat. Khan’s previous staunch support for the anti-pollution tax has given way to a “constructive listening mode” after private discussions with Labour leader, Keir Starmer. The Sunday Times has the story.
Starmer and his shadow cabinet blame the Ulez for their failure to win Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip in northwest London on Thursday.
The leader called Khan on the day of the defeat to urge him to fall into line. Aides for both men said the talks were “positive” and “constructive”.
Allies of Starmer claim Khan has now promised to review the policy in what would amount to a significant U-turn. A senior Labour source said: “It’s clear Sadiq is going to be reviewing it.”
Khan and Starmer are exploring how to limit the financial impact of the policy on drivers while cleaning up the capital’s pollution problem, according to sources. In a sign of the growing pressure on the mayor, yesterday he deleted a tweet about “bold action” being required to protect the environment.
The Ulez is due to expand at the end of August from the boundary of the north and south circular roads to throughout Greater London, requiring drivers of the most polluting vehicles to pay £12.50 a day in the midst of soaring inflation and a cost of living crisis.
The revolt over the Ulez expansion also poses questions over the future of other low emissions zones which have been established across the UK.
While London has led the way with such schemes, other cities have begun adopting them, including Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford and Bath.
Some MPs suggest the debate in both Labour and the Conservative Party over the policies could now lead many local authorities to pause plans to expand or introduce further schemes.
Labour has been divided over its green agenda for months amid fears among those in the top echelons of the party that its commitment to a plethora of unpopular, expensive green policies, could cost it the election.
For example, they see the party’s pledge to end all North Sea gas and oil licences as an “unhelpful distraction” after a backlash by the unions and industry.
One critic called for the policies, many of which have been masterminded by the shadow climate secretary Ed Miliband, to be junked, adding: “This is the moment Labour should ditch the green crap.”
Starmer’s most senior advisers, including Deborah Mattison, his Director of Strategy, and Morgan McSweeney, the party’s election chief, had predicted the Ulez would be a vote loser and have spent months locked in a bitter battle with Khan.
One party insider said: “At the start of the campaign, there was a lot of talk about it [Ulez] being scrapped. Of course, this time last year, Deborah was among those who wanted Labour’s logo to be turned green so I can understand why Sadiq is a bit bemused by being told that by her.”
The Uxbridge result saw the civil war being fought behind the scenes erupt into public with Danny Beales, Labour’s defeated candidate, saying the policy had “cut us off at the knees” and handed the seat to the Tories, albeit with a significantly reduced majority of 495 votes, down from 7,210.
Beales, who had been given permission to speak at the gathering by Starmer’s team, added: “This isn’t complicated. You cannot tell working people you are laser-focused on the cost of living … on the difficulties facing them … of making life easier … and then also penalise them, simply for driving their car to work. Ulez is bad policy. It must be rethought.”
The Labour leader ratcheted up pressure further when he told activists gathered at the party’s national policy forum in Nottingham: “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet.”
Starmer also repeated his calls on Khan to “reflect” on the policy and specifically “how” the expansion plans are being carried out.
A senior party insider said: “Keir is entirely right to be focused on throwing all these dead weights off the electoral ship. There is no way Ulez [expansion] is going to survive, even if we had won Uxbridge.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“James Delingpole and I express disbelief that Boris still wants to introduce vaccine passports,”
Who’s Boris? Do you mean Alexander “Boris” Johnson, well-known closet sceptic and libertarian, Prime Minister of the UK? He might be your mate, but he’s not mine. He’s trying to bully my daughters into undergoing a probably dangerous medical treatment they don’t need (and he knows it), to further his political career. The only disbelief I am experiencing is that anyone with half a brain still thinks of him as “Boris” and still expresses surprise when he doubles down on the latest bit of the power grab. So take your Boris and fuck off.
As for the “return of the old Michael Gove” I’m not sure which one you mean. The only one I’ve noticed is the one who has been pushing the Big Lie for all he’s worth, while clearly not believing it. So take your old Michael Gove and fuck even futher off.
“So take your Boris and fuck off.
So take your old Michael Gove and fuck even further off.“
Seconded.
These men are not worth of the rather desperate respect Young gives them. The longer it goes on, the stronger the presumption becomes that his denial is motivated by a hope of retaining his vestigial elite respectability.
I suppose being charitable one could think the denial was self defence because the alternative – that people he once admired and considered friends, with whom he shared core beliefs, have either gone way off the rails or are not the people he thought they were. It’s tough to realise you don’t live in the world you thought you did. It’s a bit like how the Cambridge Five got away with it for so long, despite being suspected – because those around them couldn’t believe that people from the same backgrounds as them, who had gone to the same schools and universities, could possibly betray their countries.
If you are feeling charitable.
Which I suppose we should be towards Toby Young, since he is our host here and he has certainly done a lot of excellent work (Sceptic, FSU) in the most vital causes of today, at significant personal cost.
That would be my default position, yes.
He is allowed to go so far and no further, otherwise this site is no more.
I strongly doubt that this is the limiting factor.
Johnson may want me to have a ‘vaccine’ passport aka digital ID, but that does not mean I will have one, nor will I frequent or asociate with any organisation that insists upon them, for entry or for services offered. I’ll go elsewhere thanks, and associate with like-minded people, and who have a genuine libertarian mind-set. Unlike Johnson.
Daily Sceptic readers express disbelief that Toby Young and James Delingpole persist in believing the Prime Minister (not ‘Boris’) to be anything other than an instrument of the NWO oligarchy, and wonder why, after eighteen months, the penny hasn’t dropped.
Yes – very east to believe of TY, but I rather doubt that JD is fooled into such a view!
Your expressions of disbelief seem disingenuous, given that it has long since become clear that the last 18 months have had very little to do with the Chinese Virus, and very much to do with centralising power and control, terrorising, brainwashing and programming the populace, and preparing us for the social credit scores which will end all opposition to the Great Reset and our frigid, starvation-rations New Normal.
You can’t resist something if you’re not even prepared to identify it and speak the truth about it.
I was personally hoping to hear of the ultimate demise of Gove (and preferably the rest of them too), but I think that’s too much to hope for…
I wonder if his separation from his wife was caused or greatly contributed to by the revelation of his true colours in the covid panic?
I think she was/is something of a lockdown sceptic, at least compared to him.
That’s been my impression as well.
Normally I prefer to avoid discusson of marital and personal relationship issues as personal, even for celebrities, but I make exception for power couples where one or both have acted as badly as Gove has on the coronapanic.
Fortunately me and the Mrs are on the same page regarding covid. If I’d been just a bedwetter I think she may have stood by me but if I had been actively pushing lockdowns and vaccine fascism I think she’d have ditched me by now.
Same for me. I think it’s a divide that makes it very hard to tolerate the hardliners of the opposite side.
That is very likely the reason I think.
Telling exchange between Delingpole and Young after 39m, on Afghanistan, where Young reveals his determination to cling to the mainstream respectable narrative that is what we are constantly bombarded with by the mainstream media, while Delingpole has had his eyes opened to how our opinions are manipulated on these topics.
To anyone who has observed the deluge of covid panic propaganda in the mainstream since about Feb/March 2020, the sharp switch to war propaganda over Afghanistan after the news of the disastrously mismanaged (but long overdue) US pullout should have been immediately obvious, but Young has swallowed it wholesale.
We should never have been in Afghanistan. Though “worse than a crime, it was a blunder”, nevertheless it was a crime. A nation’s government has no business organising the governance of a foreign country. Anything the UK regime did in Afghanistan was by definition ultra vires and as far as any British citizen not directly complicit is concerned it was not in our name, and we owe no duty as a result.
We owe nothing to those who collaborated with our forces but sympathy and perhaps a promise to bring the perpetrators in our government and media to account somehow.
Not a single Afghan deserves or should be given entry to this country unless adjudged to be beneficial to the country in the normal course of business, marriage etc.
And Delingpole of course is absolutely correct about the dangers of importing foreigners en mass, no matter how loyal or grateful they might appear to be. The fact is that when you import culturally distinct foreigners en mass you are importing not just them, but their descendants (many of the most radicalised anti-western fanatics have been second generation immigrants), and you are importing social and cultural division, storing up conflict for the future and bringing the world’s fights inside your national doors.
This is not because of any inherent nastiness or inferiority on the part of said foreigners – as individuals they are doubtless admirable, but because they have different cultural assumptions, different beliefs, different loyalties, and family and other ties that will sustain those loyalties or can revive them generations hence.
It’s a crime, and one our rulers have been committing against the nation for a century now, and we have paid a heavy price for it already, but Young is either too gullible to the flood of media propaganda or too frightened of being on the wrong side of the pc police again, that he fails to see it, or refuses to do so.
By the way, James, for future reference the most direct response to people like Toby coming out with the infantile “but they’re good, loyal people who would never turn against their adopted country” apologetics for mass immigration is to give examples like:
Nidal Hasan
Hasan was born in Arlington County, Virginia at Virginia Hospital Center to American parents of Palestinian descent; they immigrated years earlier
Omar Mateen
Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique[2] on November 16, 1986,[8] at Long Island Jewish Medical Center[9][10] in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents. His father, Mir Seddique Mateen, is from Herat[11] who emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s[12][13][14] and became a naturalized US citizen on November 17, 1989.[10] Seddique Mateen was a secret informant for the FBI at times between January 2005 and June 2016…….His family was described as being moderate Muslims and “all-American.”
Does anyone know if there will be a definition of a nightclub? Or will it just be anywhere that has more than x amount of people attending at a certain time of day? These places could hopefully readvertise as something slightly different maybe a garden centre and therefore no Covidiot passport required.