London’s Blade Runners: Climate, Class War and the Corruption of Science

The UK papers carried stories recently about the punishing penalties that London’s drivers have paid under Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ulez (ultra-low emission zone) scheme. Under this scheme, a daily fee of £12.50 is charged on older petrol and diesel cars which enter the zone. The GB News headline reads: ‘Sadiq Khan’s Ulez sees motorists fork out millions in penalties despite pleas it’s “not about making money”.’ A Freedom of Information request revealed that more than £70 million has been raised through Ulez penalties from drivers living in London.

The Ulez scheme was introduced in 2019 covering Central London. The increase in Ulez penalties followed the expansion of the scheme in 2021, to include both the North and South Circular roads covering an area of 3.8 million people. Ulez coverage then grew further in 2023 to include the whole of Greater London. It now covers over 1,500 square kilometres and approximately nine million people.

A search on X – the least censored of social media outlets by far — on ‘Blade Runners’ yields many entries with videos of activists in London, who sabotage, vandalise or remove Ulez cameras, sometimes in broad daylight. Gadfly social media commentator Katie Hopkins made a parody that went viral on YouTube about how people are using cheap filling foam to vandalise Ulez cameras.

Sadiq Khan claims that he is fighting for climate justice, Londoners’ health and a better future for everyone.

Do you believe him?

Follow the Science

The Nobel Laureate for Physics in 2022 John Clauser said that “[t]he popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”. With Elon Musk’s DOGE revelations, the corruption of science by USAID and other agencies channelling US taxpayers’ money for climate agencies and NGOs is now documented with receipts.

In an increasingly technocratic age, policies under governments get justified by the mantra of ‘following the science‘. The most drastic public policies in the West, curtailing civil rights ranging from the right to travel to the right to free speech, were imposed only a few short years ago. This was for the ‘novel’ Covid virus pandemic, which caused not much harsher fatalities than a severe flu, with a median infection fatality rate of 0.24% (0.05% for people under the age of 70).

Mayor Sadiq Khan is an avowed environmentalist and co-chair of C40, an organisation that “has consistently prioritised the support for cities in the Global South, which are often most acutely affected by the climate crisis”. In the ‘fight against climate change’, a similar posture of ‘following the science’ is taken against all criticism by sceptical constituents and dissident experts who are vilified as climate deniers.

The war on private cars is in keeping with the World Economic Forum’s ambitions for governments to reduce the number of automobiles in the world by 75% by 2050 to reduce carbon emissions from the transport sector. In the WEF’s deep green agenda, there is little if any recognition of what the loss of affordable private transport entails for ordinary people. Tradesmen like plumbers and electricians who depend on their vans for work, mothers who drive their children to and from school or go shopping, disabled or older people who need to visit their loved ones or go to hospital matter little in the elite’s war on cars.

Claiming global climate change and an alleged impending climate catastrophe was too broad and amorphous it seems for the introduction of London’s anti-motorist policies that put such an onerous burden on the little people of Greater London. The London Mayor’s office required a more effective and plausible public relations approach in justifying its Ulez and other urban transport regulations. The public relations approach of the Mayor’s office in pushing for the Ulez expansion along with all the other secondary anti-car actions have focused on the health effects of polluted air.

It’s not just Ulez but the entire repertoire of actions in the war against working- and middle-class motorists that needed justification. This includes the imposition of low traffic neighbourhoods, raising the cost of parking, the narrowing of roads for bicycle lanes, the putting up of bollards and planters to restrict car traffic altogether and experimenting with zoning restrictions for ‘15-minute cities‘. These regulations are now ubiquitous across towns and cities in England such as Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Glasgow and Oxford.

The average speed of cars in London during a typical weekday averages eight miles per hour in central London, 12 in inner London and 20 in outer London. According to AI ChatGPT, “based on historical accounts and estimations”, the speed of a Roman chariot was likely around 20 to 25 miles per hour on well-maintained roads in ancient Londinium. Would it be unfair to blame Mayor Khan and his fellow climate alarmists for the lack of progress in the speed of London urban transport over two millennia?

The Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model is used by the World Health Organisation (WHO), an agency of the United Nations, as a guiding principle in setting urban air pollution limits. The model assumes that any exposure to a pollutant, no matter how small, carries health risks that require a public policy response. The model accords with the deep ecology instincts of the Church of Climate according to which the only tolerable ‘sustainable’ environment is one which is pristine and free from the cancer that is human civilisation. 

The LNT model is commonly applied in radiation protection and toxicology, but it also influences air quality regulations, particularly for pollutants that allegedly have no known safe threshold. The model undergirds the WHO fact sheet which lists the policies recommended to reduce air pollution such as making us walk, cycle or use public transport instead of cars and cramming us into compact ’15-minute’ cities and high-rises.

For Mayor Khan, urban air pollution is a social justice issue: “For me the issue is very simple: it’s one of social justice. … It’s the poorest people, least likely to own a car, least likely to cause the toxic air problems, who are most likely to suffer the consequences.” Khan’s office claims that since 2019, there has been a fall of 46% in nitrogen oxides and a 41% reduction in PM 2.5 (particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter).

Yet this comparison is based on questionable counterfactual modelling of what “would have occurred” if there were no Ulez in operation. Ross Clark of the Spectator “smells a rat” here and refers to a study by Imperial College which examined air pollution data for 12 weeks before and 12 weeks after the original Ulez was implemented in 2019. It found that there was no significant reduction in PM 2.5 pollution and nitrogen oxides fell by a mere 3%.

A report by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants claimed that air at Hampstead station, the deepest Tube station in London, had a particulate matter concentration 30 times worse than that of standing by a busy road in the capital. A 2017 estimate of the social costs of air pollution from cars in the UK found that it amounted to £25 a year or less for each car. In other words, just two entry fees for the Central London Ulez would cover the social cost of this pollution for a whole year.

The constant refrain from the London mayor’s office that the city has a toxic air quality ’emergency’ that is dangerous to people’s health is questionable. Like much of the propaganda that pervades mainstream media coverage of the ‘climate emergency’” it is unconvincing. London’s air pollution levels have dramatically declined over the past few decades, along with that of other major cities such as Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York, which were known for their smog-filled skies in the 1950s and 1960s.

The reduction of coal burning in households and old power plants, more efficient vehicles using better quality diesel and petrol and the use of natural gas for power generation, home heating and cooking are among some of the factors that have led to far cleaner air in most cities in the developed OECD countries. These cities have cleaner air now than ever before in their histories. This is in keeping with the broader generalisation that never has the world’s population lived longer or healthier or been less poor than now (with the exceptional blip caused by the hysteria-induced Covid lockdowns).

London’s Class Warfare

It would seem that some sort of urban class war has been waging in London over the past few years. This includes both passive resistance in the form of the non-payment of fines by penalised drivers and active sabotage and vandalism of Ulez cameras by activists across the boroughs of London. Political opposition to virtue-signalling green schemes has been growing across Europe and London’s motorists are leading the country’s first real anti-green citizen’s revolt. 

According to a report by the BBC, TfL had installed 1,900 cameras in outer London and there were some 3,400 cameras across the Ulez in August 2023. A FOI request reported that there were more than 3,700 Ulez cameras in London as of July 2024. The SWLondoner reported in May 2024 that “There have been more than 4,500 counts of vandalisation of Ulez cameras in little over a year, according to data crowd-sourced by the minds behind one of Facebook’s biggest anti-Ulez groups.” According to an anonymous spokesman of ‘Julie’s map’, an anti-Ulez group, “he feels he was forced to retire when Ulez’s expansion would have forced him to buy a new van in order to avoid fines for work related travel”.

A more passive form of resistance is in the form of non-payment of Ulez fines. A recent story by the Express cites critics of Mr Khan, who “has not listened to sense or reason as he faces a backlog of nearly half a billion pounds in unpaid Ulez fines”. According to the paper, new research suggests that only one in five drivers are paying the fee on time. Keith Prince, the Conservative Group’s transport spokesperson on the London Assembly, told the Express that “By the time you finish reading this quote, TfL will have issued another fine to a Londoner struggling to afford to upgrade their car, who is four times more likely to not be able to pay it on time”.

Joe Couglin of MyLondon reports that a single car has been fined over 1,000 times since the Ulez expansion was introduced in 2023, racking up a massive bill for the driver. He cites recent data that show that over 100,000 cars have garnered five or more unpaid fines since the expansion of Ulez. Sir Sadiq Khan, it seems, has little time to listen to his middle- and working-class constituents about the onerous burdens imposed by Ulez and other anti-motorist regulations.

The Robin Hood of legend used superior archery and detailed knowledge of local forests to rob from the rich to distribute to the poor against the depredations of the ruling class and its representative, the corrupt and tyrannical Sheriff of Nottingham. The common folk of London today seem to face a similar oppression, this time under an environmentalist sheriff (Mayor). The contexts are vastly different — one from medieval England, the other from contemporary London — but the fight against perceived injustices is universal.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.