ANDREW PIERCE: Motorists defy mayor's 'poll tax on wheels'

By ANDREW PIERCE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:31, 20 October 2024 | UPDATED: 23:50, 20 October 2024

It’s his most universally hated policy. Yet Labour mayor Sadiq Khan has doggedly pursued his Ultra-Low Emission Zone in London, having expanded the scheme to all boroughs last year.

Now it seems the controversial charge has turned into a battle of wills between motorists and City Hall. Though Ulez is estimated to have generated around £500 million since 2019, new data from the London Assembly shows a staggering £376 million is still owed in unpaid fines – up by £300 million in three years.

Thousands of drivers are either refusing to pay the £12.50 daily tax on older polluting cars, or can’t afford to. Others are also ignoring the £180 fines for those who fail to pay the charge.

Out of the 1.3 million penalties issued since the expansion of the scheme in August 2023, almost 975,000 have still not been paid – that’s three out of four drivers failing to cough up.

My Tory London mole says: ‘This is proof Ulez is Labour’s poll tax on wheels. Labour’s at war with the motorist but the driver is fighting back.’

Father of the House Sir Edward Leigh has pledged to ‘lie down on the line’ if the proposed Grimsby to London train service doesn’t stop at Market Rasen in his constituency. 

One snarky fellow Tory MP was overheard saying: ‘That is not as persuasive an argument as Edward thinks.’

ALEX TRIED TO BOLDLY GO

Alex Salmond, who died this month, was a devotee of Star Trek and liked to travel under the alias Captain James T Kirk for security. 

But the former SNP first minister was once prevented from boarding a flight at Heathrow. 

Though the matter was resolved, Salmond declared: ‘I just wanted BA to utter the immortal line: “Beam me up, Scotty.”’

To the Lords for the launch of the thriller The Durian Pact by Tory researcher Christopher Howarth. Delivered to his publisher months ago, the book predicts Kamala Harris standing in the US presidential election and a Tory leadership riddled with accusations of foul play. Some might think his predictions are eerily accurate. But Howarth also writes about the murder of a Tory Brexiteer called ‘Jon’. So did Lord ‘Jon’ Moynihan, Eurosceptic cheerleader for Liz Truss, mind? ‘Not at all,’ Howarth assures me. ‘He just wishes his end had been more gruesome.’

In his underwhelming speech at last week’s International Investment Summit, Sir Keir Starmer listed several ministers that venture capitalists might like to speak to. They were chancellor Rachel Reeves, business secretary Jonathan Reynolds and energy secretary Ed Miliband. But no mention of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, who attended the summit and was one of three Cabinet ministers who wrote to No 10 expressing fears over the Budget. I see trouble ahead. . . 

Still not a squeak in the Commons from new Labour MP Liam Conlon. The member for Beckenham – son of Starmer’s ousted chief of staff Sue Gray – is not the only newbie yet to make a speech or ask a question. Neither has Imogen Walker (Hamilton & Clyde Valley). Walker is married to Morgan McSweeney, who replaced Gray at No 10. Why so shy, you two?

LUVVIE WHO FEELS FOR MRS T

At last, a luvvie with something good to say about Mrs Thatcher.

Dame Harriet Walter, who is playing the Iron Lady in Channel 4 drama Brian And Margaret, says: ‘In her day I turned the telly off the moment she opened her mouth.’ But Walter says that when she got the Thatcher role she studied hours of TV footage of the former PM. ‘It did make me more sympathetic. This was a woman facing a wall of grey-suited, privileged men.’ Quite.