It's 20 years today since the War On The Motorist kicked off with the introduction of the Congestion Charge. On Sunday 16th February 2003 you could drive round central London like you were king of the road but on Monday 17th Red Ken Livingstone sprung his road tax trap and it's been downhill for car owners ever since. No other global city had imposed sadistic road charges on its citizens but that didn't stop Lefty Livingstone from imposing his hardwired Singaporean tendencies on the streets of the capital. His evil plot to destabilise right-thinking drivers has since spread around the world and no doubt before long the tofu-eating wokerati will be charging us just to breathe.
Initially the Congestion Charge was just £5 but Ken swiftly raised it to £8, proving conspiracy theorists correct, and today every flash of the camera rakes in £15 for the coffers of Londonistan. What's worse a lot of this socialist levy was initially wasted on paying for additional bus services, infrastructure for pedestrians and pro-cyclist propaganda, and none of it spent on providing essential parking spaces outside the shops people occasionally use. It's estimated that the Congestion Charge has raised two billion pounds of unjustified funding for TfL over the last 20 years, and yet they still cannot fill the potholes on our streets or make the Woolwich Ferry run on time.
Red Ken was unable to contain his greed so swiftly extended his charging zone to encompass the streets of Kensington and Chelsea, where literally thousands of residents were suddenly driven into poverty by the imposition of a penalty they could not afford. It was this cavalier attitude to suburban motorists which ultimately led to Ken's inevitable defeat in the Mayoral election of 2008, after which Man Of The People Boris Johnson swept in on his diesel chariot and returned the mean streets of west London to public use. But to this day the callous central exclusion zone remains in operation, except of course on Christmas Day when hardcore drivers head for the West End so they can belch their toxic fumes with impunity.
The War On Motorists alas didn't end there. The land grab for our roadspace is never-ending as councils delight in closing existing lanes of traffic simply so that namby-pamby cyclists have more chance of reaching their destination in one piece. They delay our traffic lights so that occasional buses take priority, despite the fact that no self-respecting motorist would be seen dead sharing germs on public transport. They introduce cash-cow cameras in unavoidable locations with invisible signage and fine us for accidentally clipping the edge of a restricted lane. And they impose 20mph speed limits on our roads, especially the fast ones, even though this only makes journeys longer and ends up pumping more pollutants into the air. That's the problem with the left-wing idealist cabal, they never think things through.
The most despicable crusade is the increasing dominance of so-called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. These barriers to progress have shot up across thousands of quiet streets, mostly thanks to Labour councils, forcing many salt-of-the-earth taxi drivers to detour miles out of their way. What happens is that contractors sneak into the streets where you live overnight and block off roads with wooden planters - thankfully flammable - then erect snooping cameras so that Big Brother can check his database and send you a whopping fine. These woke schemes help nobody except those who live in the affected area, and turn much-loved rat-runs into tortuous labyrinths making entire estates entirely inaccessible. Each blockage could one day delay an ambulance by several precious minutes, indeed nobody wants a preventable death on their conscience, and yet the LTN plague spreads uncontrollably across our once-proud nation.
The latest diabolical scheme is the imposition of the Ultra Low Emission Zone, or FKOF for short. This draconian fraud taxes hardworking residents who have the misfortune to drive an old vehicle by introducing a whopping daily charge which prevents them from saving up for a new one. The plague started small affecting just the Congestion Charge zone, which everyone had already learned to avoid, then spread to the North and South Circulars affecting mostly carless millennials and buspass-owning freeriders. But the zone's imminent stretch to the edge of the Home Counties will affect proper Londoners, not to mention thousands of people who don't even live in the capital but simply choose to drive into it. Residents of Kingston in Surrey, Romford in Essex and Bexley in Kent are the true innocent victims in all this.
It's no good claiming your scrappage scheme will save us, Mayor Khan, because nobody wants to buy our vehicles now you've made them non-compliant. Your undemocratic fee is being introduced far too quickly with entirely inadequate consultation, and will simply act to bankrupt families, cripple pensioners, destroy communities and cause van owners to weep. You should instead be focusing on getting your beloved Silvertown Tunnel dug because that's going to be a proper gamechanger, increasing traffic density on both sides of the river simultaneously. What's more traffic speeds in London are actually slower than they were 20 years ago when the Congestion Charge was first introduced, proving that not only was it pointless but it also discriminates unfairly against the average citizen.
It's a sad state of affairs when a hard-pressed family can't hop into their car for the three minute journey to the shops without being forced to reflect on the impact on their neighbours and the wider planet. Children should be safely strapped into the back seat dreaming of buying a Maserati, not attempting to ride a deathtrap bike on a public highway or jaywalking across a busy street. Instead virtue-signalling politicians obsessed by race and gender continue to force innocent Englishmen to pay for the privilege of driving instead of embracing our Brexit freedoms and letting London flow free. Every car owner should have the right to congest and pollute without the nanny state nagging them for money at every turn, and my word this blinkered tosh is easy to write, and alas even easier to believe.
