The ballots are in, the votes have been tallied, and the defining issue of the next General Election has been determined by 495 voters in Uxbridge & South Ruislip.
Is it the Cost of Living, the NHS or the imminent breakdown of the global climate system? No. To paraphrase Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville (drum roll please): “It’s the automobile, stupid.”
Tories and Labour alike have rushed to endorse the new zeitgeist, the Tories because it distracts voters from those issues that really matter and Labour because they are timid and always let the Tories set the agenda.
As issues go for the Tories, it’s a corker. It can be spun as a ‘civil liberties’ issue, it won’t cost much which is handy because the Tories have holed the public finances below the waterline, and it pleases the financiers and petro-billionaires who finance their party.
For Labour, it’s an opportunity to ape the Tories and say, see, we can be just as stupid as them. To say that the Labour Party has bought into the idea that Uxbridge is the new bellwether constituency would be an understatement. They dragged Sadiq Khan from City Hall and pinned him up on the washing line, in another classic example of red-on-red warfare, driven by the fact that they only managed to achieve a 6% swing to Labour.
The lovely thing about ‘It’s the automobile, stupid’ as a slogan is that not only can the party faithful have it tattooed on their foreheads, but it would fit neatly on the side of a bus. Of course, we all know how effective buses are in selling dodgy political slogans, so it won’t be long before we see these magnificent red beasts rumbling through our low-traffic neighbourhoods, tearing out modal filters and road humps as they go.
Members of both of the main rueful parties are duty bound to salute as these behemoths wheeze past and sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the car” as fumes are belched in their face.
People of a nervous disposition – by which I mean, those of us who recognise that our planet is running a fever and it’s only getting worse – can only stand and marvel at the hypocrisy of political parties who have pledged to achieve net zero at some point in the future, hopefully before the ice caps melt and it’s too late to do anything anyway.
But they say, no, no, the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from this most important of by-elections – even more important than the other two in Selby & Ainsty and Somerton & Frome which saw far more dramatic swings away from the Tories – is anything that curbs the motor car will lead to the collapse of civilisation as we know it.
Never mind that cars have only been around for a blink of an eye in human history, and that somehow, before the advent of the infernal combustion engine, we managed to drag our sorry selves from the sofa to the shops and back again.
In the final analysis, what’s surprising is not that the Tories turned the election into a fable about freedom to drive but that the Labour Party so readily bought into the narrative during the election and after. Labour seemed incapable of even recognising, let alone countering, the Tory candidate’s narrative, and appeared genuinely surprised when they lost.
Not surprisingly, Sunak’s takeaway from the byelection is that consistency doesn’t matter. If the lines worked in Uxbridge, they could work elsewhere. So let’s dismantle LTNs, even though we’re the party which invented them, and let’s pledge more car-positive policies even while we remain committed to eliminating the internal combustion engine by 2030.
For the freshly-minted constituency MP, Steve Tuckwell, his genius was effectively ignoring Tory climate policy – and even the party itself – to make up his own policies. He has presaged, before the rest of his party has recognised the inevitable, that the party is already in the Wilderness, when candidates are free to tell voters anything they like because there is no effective party apparatus to prevent them.
This style of postcode politics is the minority party playbook, something that you can only get away with when no one really cares what your policies are.
Here’s wishing the Tories luck with that strategy!
* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames
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11 Comments
For 62 years, I have travelled to Denmark to see my wife’s family. The extraordinary changes this year are the continuous stretches along the autobahn which have had wide strips of solar panels installed on both sides and the clusters of 12 wind turbines wherever one looks. I have suggested to a LibDem MP that covering the military areas on Salisbury Plain with solar panels and wind turbines would generate the equivalent of a year’s alternative electricity. The land was recently up for sale as there were other military areas available in the UK. Please could a film be made from a Battle Bus illustrating how the Germans are solving Russia’s assault on their energy supply. In one corner of the bus’s outside we could show the amount of the tiny land based alternative energy generated in England.
Might our party stand up for Britain by making it clear that the present Conservative leadership is keen to sacrifice the deep, long term wellbeing of our nation and the world for temporary party political advantage?
How analytical and objective has the mainstream media been in this matter?
The real issues over car usage are far harder to resolve than this post would suggest. Yes, society would be a better place in many ways if there were increasingly fewer of them. But using the threat of apocalypse to justify any measure wears out quickly, and the habit of arguing in this manner, once established, is vulnerable to having the tables turned on it in uncomfortable ways. Similarly, dismissing the self styled defenders of motorists as cheap point scorers (though many are) risks ignoring the very real issues that have given them their opportunity.
The fact is that ULEZ is a regressive Poll Tax, plain and simple. It may be a regressive Poll Tax in support of a good cause, but it is a Poll Tax nonetheless. We ought to face up to that. If it is a tax on pollution, then why is it levied only at point of travel? Car pollution reaches right back into production. If we’re serious about it, we ought to consider that too.
What we’re left with is a greenwashed Poll Tax on travel. If we’re serious about not hurting the disadvantaged, that’s not good enough. If you look into the detail of how and where CO2 emissions come from, it’s not really good enough for the environment either.
@James Fowler
“If it is a tax on pollution, then why is it levied only at point of travel? ”
It’s a tax on one particular type of pollution which seems to be having a serious impact in major urban areas – affecting its victims at the point of travel.
I agree with you that it is regressive – it hits most those who need their transport but can’t afford to upgrade it.
The emphasis has been on cars, with claims that 90% of those in the outer London boroughs are compliant. That might be so.
But given that diesel vehicles have a much smaller age range for compliance there’ll be masses of vans used by micro businesses and sole traders which are over that age range – say 10 – 15 years old, but which otherwise work perfectly well (if properly maintained). That sector is hit hard by ULEZ. And believe it or not there was always a good reason for using a diesel vehicle in preference to an othewise similar petrol one – it’s a great deal more fuel efficient.
“at our planet is running a fever and it’s only getting worse – can only stand and marvel at the hypocrisy of political parties who have pledged to achieve net zero at some point in the future, hopefully before the ice caps melt”
As I understand it, ULEZ isn’t about reducing CO2 emissions. It it were then “Chelsea Tractor” SUVs, even new ones, wouldn’t be exempt. They have a fuel consumption of typically 20 mpg at best. London driving is far from ‘at best’ in terms of what is possible. Any vehicle burning a lot of fossil fuel is going to emit a lot of CO2. There’s no getting around that.
The purpose of ULEZ is to reduce particulate and NO2 emissions which do have a detrimental effect on the health of Londoners but they aren’t Greenhouse gases, like CO2 and CH4 (methane) and so do not to cause global warming. Particulates, ie smoke, can cause global cooling.
So, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have ULEZ but rather than we shouldn’t link it to CO2 reduction in the atmosphere. It’s not going to help in the slightest in this respect.
The problem with ULEZ in its current form is it takes no account of the actual emissions of a car, only whether it was awarded EURO 4 (petrol) or EURO 6 (diesel) status at the point of manufacture.
I completely agree we have to take urgent action on climate change but ULEZ is not about climate change but air quality and, as such, is not fair. Someone driving a 56 plate car with the same engine as a 51 model is exempt, even if the engine emissions are the same.
I downloaded emissions data for 50 cars from the DVLA for petrol cars manufactured in the year 2000. All but 4 of them had emissions that were lower than the required EURO 4 standard.
The solution would be to link ULEZ compliance to the emissions check carried out during an MOT test. All drivers understand that if their car is too polluting it gets taken off the road, so would be more likely to accept a nuance on whether their vehicle was fit for London. This would allow for many more older cars to stay on the road now, and for the GLA to tighten up the standards over time.
@ Paul,
“The solution would be to link ULEZ compliance to the emissions check carried out during an MOT test.”
Good idea. This is the way to do it. At least for now and until some way of factoring in the distance travelled in the ULEZ zone can be devised.
The ULEZ charge can then be proportional to the emissions rating of the car when it is tested maybe on a band system. Electric and hydrogen powered cars could be zero rated.
“The solution would be to link ULEZ compliance to the emissions check carried out during an MOT test.”
Agree good idea.
Admittedly, I am not disinterested, I have a Euro 5 car; a factor in choosing it was its ultra low emissions, I am likely to visit friends and family in London two or three times a year.
With that caveat, perhaps we have alighted on a fair, Liberal policy for which vehicles without the necessary certificates can, if they think their car does meet the emissions standards can have it tested and certified at registered centres.
If the issue were about climate change, my car would be rated less ecologically damaging than most, but in fact the ULEZ policy is more about particulates and nitrogen oxides, the latter can be corrected with a better catalytic converter in the exhaust system; for particulates, it could well be that some engines are intrinsically higher emitters.
Particulates are a tricky issue: it is increasingly recognised that vehicle tyres are more significant sources, but neither this is straightforward because there are different categories of particulates and some categories are understood to be more of a risk to health than others.
“for particulates, it could well be that some engines are intrinsically higher emitters.”
On Diesel cars from Euro5 onwards a diesel particulate filter is mandatory.
This debacle would not have happened under a fairer electoral voting system. We should look for causes rather than simplistic solutions to unwanted electoral results. Few people seem to realise how essential it is to change our voting system to a fairer proportional one, preferably with preferential voting.