A seasoned anti-fuel tax campaigner has been picked as Reform U.K.’s candidate to be London Mayor and will vow to scrap all of the capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ) and other hated anti-car policies. The Telegraph has the story.
Howard Cox’s attempt to enter the political frontline follows years of success as a campaigner when he has repeatedly helped convince the Treasury not to increase fuel duty.
Mr. Cox will promise not just to stop proposals by the current London Mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, to expand the current ULEZ program but get rid of it all together.
Other policies will include ending the so-called Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) scheme and scaling back the number of 20 mile-an-hour limits in London, according to a Reform source.
Reform faces an uphill struggle in the race. A nationwide poll on the Politico website has the party on 5%, behind the Liberal Democrats on 11%, the Tories on 29% and Labour on 44%.
But by putting helping drivers in London at the heart of its campaign Reform could influence the debate in the contest, including bouncing the Conservatives into a tougher position.
Mr. Khan is running for a third term. The Conservatives are yet to announce a formal candidate, with a decision expected to be made in the summer.
Howard Cox said: “Anyone who lives or travels in and out of London under Mr Khan’s regime can see the vast social and economic damage he has done to our brilliant capital.
“Today, millions struggle to get a doctor’s appointment, have seen their communities infested with rising crime and violence and can’t afford to drive into their city.
“We’ve seen low-income families, workers, sole traders, and businesses fleeced by this Mayor’s anti-growth agenda.
“It’s time someone stood up for millions of ordinary Londoners who are the heartbeat of our capital. They don’t need another elitist politician only interested in self-promotion through baseless virtue signalling.
“Now is the time to tackle the issues that really matter. As mayor I will listen to Londoners and guarantee to act on their behalf. London deserves better.”
Worth reading in full.
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Just to do a ‘Captain Obvious’ here and point out that education, before we even include the disastrous mess that is higher ed, has changed dramatically since the decades mention above. So it seems a no-brainer to me that “education has zero causal effect on fertility” and it’s more to do with the woke ideological crapola kids are being brainwashed with these days. Kids should be attending school to get educated, not indoctrinated.
I would say that western civilisations have much more choice about having children or having a career than most poorer countries, this can be put down to a better education.
Not so much choice in places like Niger so they just do what is nessasary
They will probably never have a career to pay for a pension so children are their insurance policy for old age, the more the merrier as upto 50% of their children may not make it to adulthood.
I certainly agree with your ideological element though, just look at that self important little git Rachel Zegler!
Yes and you raise a good point which is the difference in *motivation* between cultures for having children. Women in some poor country in Africa won’t have any of the opportunities or resources of their counterparts in rich Western countries, therefore their motivation will be based more on necessity, as you say, plus cultural norms/pressure and gender stereotypes will be way more rigid. Over here, women can afford to wait and have kids later in life, have fewer kids or none at all, because they’re no longer deemed an “insurance policy”, unlike generations ago.
Let’s be honest, many in the so-called ‘rich West’ literally can’t ‘afford’ kids anyway because they’re unable to even get on the property ladder, which is the norm before putting down roots and starting a family. And people don’t typically live in multi-generational households, which is normal in other cultures, so childcare is presumably a non-issue compared with here.
Increased wealth.
More live births, lower infant/child mortality, children no longer required as a labour source for the family economy requires reduced birth rates to maintain the “stock”.
Plus sending children to school instead of to work = a cost, not a contributor to parental fortunes.
Parents work fewer hours, have more leisure time and disposable income which they prefer to spend on that rather than children.
Maybe has something to do with it?
Maybe material prosperity has led us to overthink things
I don’t think education is a primary cause of low fertility, though it may be a secondary cause. I think a primary cause of low fertility is little or no religious faith due to increasing wealth. Look at the chart of where high birth rates are found. This cause and effect are summed up by the bible phrase “you can’t worship God and mannon (money)”.
I don’t think it is education per se that makes a person rich. There are many examples that everyone knows of people who left school with few or no exams thar have become rich through hard work.
Increasing wealth includes many factors that would tend to increase birth rates such as improved nutrition and healthcare but the low birth rates in rich countries run counter to this.
Decreasing wealth does seem to encourage higher birth rates. My father’s parents in the 1930s had around 10 children but 3 or 4 died in childhood of diseases that are easily cured today. They were poor but had many children perhaps because unconsciously they knew some would die.
I agree with your point but it’s mammon not ‘mannon’.
Once upon a time, I grew up in an avenue of newly-built 1950’s semis, where at one time up to 30 of us played out in the street, offspring of married couples born before the Second World War.
Then along came “-isms,” “-ists” and “-ism-ist ism-isms,” and the old order changed – for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but nowadays up to half the time certainly not until death us do part.
The increased cost of housing is also a practical deterrent. Meanwhile on another forum…
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/immigration-is-not-the-answer-to
“…What’s the solution to Britain’s fertility crisis? There are, broadly, three schools of thought:
One is that you can, through carefully structured incentives and social changes, encourage birth rates to rise to replacement levels.
Another is that the ageing population is, given the potential for automation, robotics and AI, actually not *that* much of an issue.
The final school of thought is that nothing can be done about the Western fertility crisis, and that the only solution is to supplement the working age-population with immigration. This, sadly, is the school which currently governs Great Britain.”
Take your pick – bad luck, the Party has already chosen for you.
No, but abortion does.
See this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?facet=entity&uniformYAxis=0&country=~GBR
1950 total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.22
1961 introduction of birth control pills on the NHS, TFR 2.79
1964 late post-war baby boom peak of TFR of 2.93
1967 Abortion Act, TFR 2.68
1974 introduction of birth control clinics, TFR 1.92
1977 a TFR low of 1.69
2001 a TFR low of 1.61
2010 TFR recovered to 1.92
2020 TFR dropped to 1.57 and leveling off through to 2023.
TFR seems to have stopped falling recently – perhaps it will rise again.
If fertility is reducing and climate change adaptation becomes the preferred policy then fewer people will make the social adjustments easier. We might need robot careers for the old, but even that issue will eventually reduce.
Picking one variable which happens to correlate with another from a whole variety of others which interact, is certain to lead to the wrong conclusion except by chance. See: Climageddon (Arctic disappearing, London, New York, submerged, annual droughts and scorching Summers, etc) perpetually being delayed; predicted 1970s world over-population by year 2 000.