Teetering on the wedge

Rishi Sunak is ordering a government review into LTNs, the contoversial low traffic neighbourhoods schemes that have been introduced by local councils in many towns and cities throughout the UK in an attempt to curb motor traffic in residential areas.

Sunak has obviously been emboldened by how well the Labour Mayor of London's extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to include all of Greater London played out for the Conservatives in the recent by-election in Boris Johnson's old parliamentary seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Labour was tipped to win but lost to the Tories by 495 votes due, in large part, to the unpopularity of the scheme in this outer-London borough, where car and van ownership is high and public transport infrastructure woefully inadequate.

The Labour leadership, understandably shocked and upset by this near-miss in so uniquely high-profile and winnable a seat, has turned its ire on its own Mayor, Sadiq Khan, blaming his policy for the loss. Quick to spot a 'wedge' issue, Sunak is exploiting yet another internicine struggle within the Labour hierarchy to the advantage of his own party in the run-up to the next general election, the starting gun for which the recent three by-elections have fired. ULEZ, though, has presented a defining theme for the forthcoming election campaign and, in a similar way to Brexit before it, seems set to be highly divisive. That theme is credibility.

I was a councillor in the London Borough of Waltham Forest at the time when the Labour council was rolling out its pioneering 'Mini Holland' cycle lanes scheme for which it had obtained government-backed trial funding. The scheme was highly controversial and polarised public opinion, with the environment portfolio holder responsible for the scheme making himself highly unpopular by his determination to stick to his guns. Nevertheless, he did, and the scheme remains in place. In announcing his review Sunak will have to weigh up the electoral consequences of abolishing such well-established schemes across the country. He could find the outcome more evenly balanced than he imagines.

In the borough where I now reside (the London Borough of Tower Hamlets) a Labour-implemented LTN scheme cost the incumbent Labour administration the election last year after the local Aspire Party ran an effectively single-issue campaign on abolishing it. Mindful that he won largely with the support of Uber taxi drivers, Aspire Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, moved rapidly to dismantle elements of the scheme already rolled out, in the process wasting millions of pounds of public money already invested in it. Like it or not, at least Rahman carried out his manifesto pledge to his electorate.

As with Brexit, car ownership and usage looks likely to catch Labour on the back foot locally and nationally, presenting a potentially irreconcilable policy quandry. This will be exacerbated by its own spending commitments limiting its scope to promise enhanced scrappage funding for polluting vehicles to sweeten the bitter pill.  As it struggles to square its green credentials with its anxiety not to alienate the wider electorate at a time when every vote is vital to its efforts to oust the Tories, this is a dilemma Labour could well do without. 

Just as it scents victory after thirteen years in opposition this issue could put Labour's aspirations to govern in serious jeopardy. After all, the party has an uncanny knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. As he wrestles with this conundrum Keir Starmer risks looking shifty and, as with Brexit, while he struggles to square this self-inflicted policy circle, the electorate is likely to sense prevarication and inauthenticty and punish him for it at the polls. Rather as they did in Uxbridge.

As Groucho Marx put it, "Those are my principles and if you don't like them...well, I have others". The electorate is unlikely to forgive what it will rightly see as a flagrant attempt to gain power at any cost - the cost being to Labour's key environmental targets. As the fall of Boris Johnson surely proves, integrity in politics still counts for something.

Maybe not much, but something.

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