, road-narrowing and the excessive expansion of 20mph zones – while mismanaging London Underground, presiding over a decline in buses, acting as a demagogue over Covid, squandering money on propaganda, jacking up taxes and failing to grip the calamity that is the Met Police. The good news is that there is now a clear alternative to Khan's arrogance. The Tories have selected their mayoral candidate, and despite the party establishment's best efforts at imposing a technocratic, Remainer type, ended up choosing Susan Hall, a true-blue activist who is committed to scrapping the Ulez extension and is a standard bearer for modern suburban values. She proposes a genuine alternative vision for London, a rupture with the dominant Left-wing urbanism, and would be the first mayor that hails from outer, rather than inner, London. Sh){kind=link}
The Tories should urgently pull out the stops to back Susan Hall, the one woman who can defeat Sadiq Khan
When I wrote in April that Sadiq Khan could be ousted because of his persecution of motorists, my suggestion was widely panned as delusional. Didn’t I realise that nobody owns a car in our capital city, that London is a Labour rotten borough and that the Tories are finished?
My argument doesn’t look so silly today. The mayor’s nasty, vindictive Ulez cash grab has triggered a wave of French-style civil disobedience, radicalised an outer suburbia that the snooty inner London elite had long forgotten even existed, lost Labour a parliamentary seat it could otherwise have won, and exposed the exorbitant cost to our pocketbooks and freedom of the rush to net zero.
It turns out that there are, in fact, almost 9 million Londoners, and the vast majority don’t live in Islington or Hackney, don’t commute by bike and don’t work in a Left-wing think tank. Some 69 per cent of households in outer London have access to or own a car or van, and even in inner London some 42 per cent do so.
It was thus a terrible mistake for Khan, an incompetent mayor obsessed with virtue-signalling, to declare all-out war on motorists – via Ulez, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), road-narrowing and the excessive expansion of 20mph zones – while mismanaging London Underground, presiding over a decline in buses, acting as a demagogue over Covid, squandering money on propaganda, jacking up taxes and failing to grip the calamity that is the Met Police.