I remember being in London for a meeting near Downing Street on 4 February 2008 and crossing the road at the end of The Strand from Trafalgar Square to Whitehall. The date was memorable as it was the first day of the introduction of a low emission zone in London. The day was also memorable as the scheme had a palpable effect; the roads were nearly deserted and there was an eerie silence. Clearly, this policy introduced by Mayor Ken Livingstone as part of his communist manifesto for London worked. Well, you might think so.
I was down in Khan’s Kingdom this week and crossed the same stretch of road in a taxi on my way to another meeting in the same area. I took the taxi from King’s Cross station and the journey of 2.6 miles took me nearly 45 minutes. Notably, we crawled down the east side of Trafalgar Square in a queue of traffic three cars wide inching its way down to the traffic lights, many belching out fumes. It was good to be back in London.
The fact is that the low emission zones are a complete fantasy. After the initial introduction in 2008 when people were shocked at the thought of having to pay to drive in certain areas and it kept them off the roads, things gradually returned to normal. The ungrateful citizens of London did have the wonderful underground system, red buses and cabs to get around. But the reality is that the underground system is crowded, hot and full of beggars; the only respite being when the Tube is on strike, which seems to be nearly every month these days.
The buses run frequently, but too bad if you want to pay with cash – you must have an Oyster card or some form of contactless payment. They also take off at high speed before you are seated, with the risk of head injury or a broken neck of femur. And if you want your daily dose of unsolicited opinion, especially on people of a darkish hue, the cabs are the place for you. In the early days of low emission zones, the wonderful services of Uber were not available, and if Khan had his way they would not be available still.
Inevitably, the roads began to fill up again as the great socialist experiment to make us all do what we are told failed and continues to fail despite the low emission zones spreading, and some morphing into ultra-low emission zones (ULEZ) so beloved of the great Khant himself. If figures for March 2023 from the Mayor’s Office are to be believed then the measures have reduced the number of ‘polluting vehicles’ on the road in London, reduced emissions and made London a much cleaner place in which to get stabbed. Maybe so, but does it have any real effect on health? Nobody knows.
The reduction in polluting vehicles no doubt takes electric vehicles into account, and these are certainly more common. But many people are regretting the move to electric vehicles. In addition to the sheer cost of purchase and then having to charge them, the supporting infrastructure is not there. They are also not very safe, and the mere fact that someone had to make a video ‘How to survive an exploding electric car’ probably says it all. The obvious fact that the energy to power electric cars must be made somewhere escapes the e-car zealots. It is still largely made by burning fossil fuels. All that is happening is a redistribution of pollution from the city to rural areas with power stations. This, including some semantic fiddling around what constitutes home grown carbon emissions, is not a reduction by any means as Ross Clark’s excellent book Not Zero shows. It is inevitable that the number of cars will steadily increase and, as people flee their exploding electric cars and take up the gas guzzlers again, we will be back to where we started. Which is what most people wanted in the first place.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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