Last Friday, a retired appliance engineer named Kevin Rees was jailed for 15 years at the Old Bailey for blowing up a Ulez camera in a London street in December 2023. The judge found that the offence was motivated by terrorism; the blast damaged cars and property up to 100 metres away, including a child’s bedroom. Of course, building a bomb and detonating it on a residential street is a grave crime, and nothing below excuses it.
But it is fair to ask how a roadside charging scheme became a cause that drove one man to explosives, and why as many as 1,500 cameras are said to have been attacked in some way. Despite an FOI request for an update on how many cameras and other sensors had been attacked or removed, the authorities withheld year-by-year vandalism counts and repair costs, citing public safety and criminal investigations in February 2026.
The extension of the zone to all 32 boroughs in 2023 was imposed on millions of people who had no meaningful say in it. Labour’s loss of the Uxbridge by-election that July was widely blamed on it, and London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan himself has acknowledged that when the original zone was launched, “all the mainstream political parties, including my own, were opposed”. What we are looking at is less a public-health measure than a moral crusade with a revenue stream.
Moving goalposts and modelled deaths
The standard defence is that Ulez and related measures (
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Of course, it could also be argued that the motor industry is a beneficiary of ULEZ. Some people.are all but compelled to change their vehicles for the flimsiest of reasons. That adds layers of complexity to any true ‘net environmental gain’ sum. Where are the vehicles and their components being made? What happens to the old ones? What is the environmental cost of manufacture and disposal? It’s part of the treadmill that keeps the economy moving, although not necessarily forward.