“Do you want your daughter to catch asthma?” – David Lammy asked a caller, John, who called to complain about Sadiq Khan’s Ulez.
A livid caller tells David Lammy that the ULEZ announcement has ‘had my wife in tears on the phone, this has done us…This is the final nail in the coffin.’
His family won’t be able to afford the £200 extra a month and David Lammy’s response is to ask him if he wants his daughter to catch asthma?
David embodies how out of touch Labour are on ULEZ here. Shameful.
Sadiq Khan was interviewed on BBC News earlier. He was asked about comments by Rachel Reeves who said it was not the time to “clobber” Londoners with the Ulez charge and said it wasn’t a progressive tax.
The mayor of London said:
I’ve been quite clear from when we first launched this policy in 2017, but also when I announced the expansion of this scheme, that it’s a difficult decision. It’s not one I take lightly. But it’s essential that we take steps to address the air pollution crisis in London, the public health crisis.
“We have around 4,000 premature deaths in London. The vast majority of those deaths are in outer London. We’ve seen from the NHS, a reduction by a third, of those children admitted to hospital attributable to air pollution because of our policies in central London.
Clean air is a human right not a privilege. We wouldn’t accept dirty water. Why dirty air?”
Nuffield Trust has reported the UK has a worse death rate for asthma in children and young people than 14 other European countries including Spain and France.
It is the responsibility of government to clean up our air. It shouldn’t be down to volunteers to support residents affected by poor air quality.
Over the past year it has been astounding to watch some local residents and local politicians claim air pollution isn’t a problem in Bromley.
This doesn’t reflect the actual concerns of residents of boroughs where ULEZ is being expanded. Polling from Clean Air Wins shows over 75% of residents believe tackling toxic air should be a priority for their boroughs.
Of course there is air pollution in Bromley. You can smell it every time you walk past the traffic jam on the main road going through Shortlands village and you can smell it on the rat-run route through quiet residential streets which SatNavs direct drivers to use to avoid that traffic jam on the main road.
You can’t see the air pollution in the way you could see pollution in a river, but if you look at the maps on londonair.org.uk you can see clearly that air pollution levels on Bromley’s main roads are really high.
Doing nothing is not an option: we’re breathing polluted air every day in Bromley. But in cleaning up our air we need to spread the costs fairly. We need to listen to each other and reject attempts to pit one section of the population against another.
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