Ulez – Learning (the right) lessons from Uxbridge

JVL Introduction

Labour’s failure to take Uxbridge and South Ruislip is attributed by Labour and Tories alike to its Ulez policy. Richard Kuper argues that it wasn’t even tested because Labour refused to defend it. All the evidence shows it is the right policy.

And in the second posting below Michael Calderbank offers an explanation of the Party’s failure which goes beyond Ulez.

He asks why the Tory vote held up to a greater extent than anticipated, while potential Labour voters stayed at home or else voted for other opposition parties.

Those who voted Green could easily have swung it for Labour – but had no incentive to do so, not attracted by Labour’s new-found hostility to “tree huggers” nor by candidate Danny Beales’s hostility to Ulez.

And other socialists were not attracted by Labour’s promise to retain the two child limit on benefit payments or to rule out extending universal free school meals…

Labour, says Calderbank, “is attempting to win by default as the Tories get demoralised”. The result suggests that this is a very dangerous strategy.

Starmer is committed to learning the wrong lessons from Uxbridge

Richard Kuper, 23 July 2023

It is clear from Starmer’s reaction to the by-election failure to take Uxbridge and Ruislip South from the Tories that Labour lacks both principle and moral courage.

There are two important lessons, one relating to how the party’s internal regime, the other to the importance of the Ulez policy.

The party stitch-up

Briefly on the first.

Uxbridge and South Ruislip is yet another constituency in which the wishes of the local constituency party have been ridden-over roughshod.

As LabourList reported in December last year:

The local selection committee in Uxbridge and South Ruislip has been disbanded with “immediate effect” and the results of ward nomination meetings declared “null and void”, with control of the remainder of the process passing to London region.

The reason? The leading candidate for selection, Connor Liberty, favoured by 6 branches as prospective candidate to 1 each for the other two candidates, was thanked in a CLP Facebook post for his work relating to CLP’s annual Christmas food bank fundraiser. This was used as an excuse to disband the election committee for having “campaigned” in favour of one of the candidates.

As one local member was quoted as saying:

“If an email about a food bank fundraiser is being used by regional to overturn a democratically run process because their handpicked candidate has fallen flat, that is a cynical and spurious move that will harm our local party in the long run.”

All this contributed to a very unhappy local CLP and a low level of commitment to campaigning in the by-election. And indeed,the day after the election we had the shock  of the local CLP chair David Williams tweeting:

“I have resigned as chair of Uxbridge and South Ruislip CLP. I am also resigning my membership of the Labour Party.

“Politics needs to have principles or we end up with people like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss running the country, Jeremy Corbyn gave a huge boost to the Labour Party.”

As a local source told LabourList:

“David’s been a loyal member of the CLP for years and years, and has been a fantastic chair.

“Regional’s selection-fixing in December, which was personally horrible for the selection committee to go through, on top of Starmer’s ditching of his ten pledges, has made so much of the membership locally feel unwelcome in their own party. David’s a principled man, and he doesn’t feel that Labour is a principled party right now.”

Hearsay evidence suggests that a hugely disproportionate number of those canvassing in the constituency were Labour MPs, councillors and Party officials. They may have had plenty to offer by way of criticism of the Tory government but nothing by way of policies to appeal positively to the electorate. And on Sadiq Khan’s Ulez policy they simply flubbed it.

So let’s turn to that issue which is now being blamed for having lost Labour the by-election.

Ulez

Ulez, The Ultra-Low Emission Zone policy, is clearly desirable from a public health perspective as well as economically in saving the NHS billions of pounds.

A major new report published by the Greater London Authority in February reveals “the transformational impact “of the expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone so far, showing that:

• harmful pollution emissions have reduced by 26 per cent within the expanded ULEZ area – compared with what they would have been without the ULEZ coming into force.
• in its first 10 months of the central London ULEZ operation, it had helped reduce road transport nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions by 35 per cent and CO2 emissions by 6 percent in the zone.
• the ULEZ expansion has built on these benefits, with harmful nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels 46 per cent lower in central London and 21 per cent lower in inner London than they would have been without the scheme.
• NOx emissions have reduced by 23 per cent (13,500 tonnes) across London cumulatively since 2019 compared with what they would have been without the ULEZ.

The number of older, more polluting vehicles in the zone had dropped by 60 per cent since the inner London expansion came into operation in October 2021 – an average reduction of 74,000 polluting vehicles every day seen driving in the zone.

Here is Keir Starmer but two months ago telling of his shock on a visit to the Crick Institute laboratories in his constituency in May:

“They blew up for me an incredibly detailed photograph of a lung with very dark marks on it which were all the air pollution from our roads which were causing cancer in that and many other patients,” he told LBC Radio.

As a result he argued strongly that people could not “sit out” action to tackle it, such as the ULEZ extension.

Comes the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election campaign and all is changed. The evidence is ignored, and the defeat blamed on Ulez. Even in its own terms the argument is faulty. Labour not only failed to make the arguments in favour of Sadiq Khan’s flagship policy but, at a time of maximum unpopularity of the Tories, managed to blow it, failing to turn out many of those who had voted Labour in the general election, sowing confusion among its supporters, and failing to attract those who understand and value the clean air policy by disavowing the Ulez policy. How can this be seen as a defeat for Ulez when no-one was making the case for it? The only thing wrong with the proposal is the underfunded scrappage scheme accompanying it, making it unnecessarily difficult and costly for those most affected to make the transition to cleaner transport.

Undisturbed by evidence of the desirability of Ulez (which he has so often asserted) we now have Starmer saying after the election that “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet. We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”

His immediate reaction was to urge Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to “reflect” on the impact of extending the ultra-low emission zone to every borough, including Uxbridge and South Ruislip. This is now hardening into an unchallengeable assumption that it was Ulez and Ulez alone that lost Labour an eminently winnable seat.

It is clear that from an environmental and a public health point of view Ulez has to be the right way to go. Even the government’s environmental tsar Chris Skidmore, Conservative MP for Kingswood, who led a recent net zero review of the UK’s climate goals, is quite clear, saying in January that “It helps no one in politics if we are not honest about the reality of pollution in our cities and the health consequences of this, but we also need to be honest about what investments are needed to deliver policies with public support.

One issue mentioned throughout the report is a lack of policy commitment. Skidmore said:

“The overwhelming impression I got was we will make net zero more affordable if we are able to deliver further and faster, which requires certainty and consistency of approach. We need to de-risk investment, which will actually drive down the costs of net zero, and if the recommendations put forward by my review are followed we will create incentives to invest in renewables.”

Hard to put it better, and we would have expected Labour to embrace Skidmore’s criticism and his approach, and pillory Sunak for his inconsistencies and vacillations.

But no, instead of arguing for Ulez in Uxbridge and South  Ruislip you have the Labour candidate Danny Beales opposing the Labour mayor’s policy during his campaign and appearing at Labour’s National Policy Forum after the election to assert that ULEZ had “cut us off at the knees”. “ULEZ is bad policy. It must be rethought.”

Sadiq Khan immediately after the election expressed his regret about losing the seat but saying rightly: “I’m quite clear though, the policy to expand the ultra low emission zone is the right one. It was a difficult decision to take. But, just like nobody would accept drinking dirty water, why accept dirty air? We know the ULEZ has cleaned the air in Central London by almost 50 per cent.”

Under enormous pressure from Labour HQ he is now appearing to buckle, hinting that he could delay hinted that delay the expansion of Ulez. Let us hope it is merely a tactical move to weather the storm and not prove to be a capitulation on the issue.

Surely now is the time for Labour to stand up for its principles and argue for its policies not to trim in the face of a self-fulfilling defeatism.

Learning (the right) lessons from Uxbridge

Michael Calderbank, Labour Hub, 21 July 2023

There’s no doubt that Labour achieved a big byelection win in Selby and Ainsty, although given the dire straits in which the Sunak’s Tories find themselves it’s perhaps not entirely surprising.  The surprising and disappointing failure to win Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip stands in need of greater explanation. We can all agree that Labour needs to learn lessons from this failure.  But what are the right lessons to be learnt?

Figures supportive of the Starmer leadership and on the Party’s ‘moderate’ wing more broadly have already started to make their excuses, and most of them focus around the local unpopularity of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) scheme to improve air quality by raising charges on polluting vehicles. It appears that the Tories successfully motivated their own core vote in opposition to ULEZ, and avoided a collapse in turnout.  Fatally, Labour’s candidate appeared to concede ground on the issue rather than make the positive case for the policy.

This monocausal explanation doesn’t quite work, so additional factors are thrown in the mix.  ULEZ allegedly allowed the Tories to spin a whole ‘anti-woke’ culture war narrative around the contest, and fostered a wider series of resentments against Labour as too liberal and out-of-touch with the concerns of older voters, car drivers, and non-graduates more generally.

Or, apologists for the leadership point to the specific operation of ‘very local’ factors as somehow responsible – not just ULEZ, playing up to the antagonism of outer London boroughs towards the inner London Labour strongholds (“We are Middlesex, not London”), but also other specific issues such as HS2, or Labour’s attitude to the Modi regime in India.

If we’re looking at local factors, we might also want to ask whether Labour suffered from replacing Ali Milani, who was building a local base, in favour of a candidate favoured by the Party leadership who was parachuted in from outside, without having significant connections to the area. The apparent blocking of a Muslim candidate is unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the local Asian community.

To understand what happened in Uxbridge, we need to look at  differential turnout; why the Tory vote held up to a greater extent than anticipated, while more potential Labour voters stayed at home or else voted for other opposition parties.  The Tories won with a 495 vote majority, but 893 people chose to vote for the Green Party. So the hard question Labour should be asking itself is why it failed to motivate enough of its own support to counteract the Tory vote holding up?

It’s almost as if the announcement that Labour would retain the two child limit on benefit payments – once described as “obscene” by Angela Rayner and “heinous” by Jonathan Ashworth – wasn’t too popular, meaning, as it would, keeping an additional 250,000 children in poverty?   Or maybe those who chose to vote Green didn’t appreciate Labour’s apparent new-found hostility to ‘tree huggers’ and the decision to delay urgent new investment in the green economy?  Or weren’t inspired by the decision to rule out extending universal free school meals?

The list could go on and on. Labour isn’t inspiring its own supporters, it is attempting to win by default as the Tories get demoralised.

The Uxbridge result suggests that this is a very dangerous strategy.  Nothing can be taken for granted, and Starmer may yet clutch defeat from the jaws of victory. The landslide victory of 1997 saw Labour appeal to both the young urban graduates/liberal middle classes and the working class from the former industrial heartlands.  Unless Labour changes course, there’s a danger that it will appeal to neither in sufficient numbers, allowing the Tories to stage an unlikely recovery.

So as the great and good of the Party get ready to meet in Nottingham for the National Policy Forum, minds need to concentrate on motivating potential Labour voters with positive reasons to turn out at the General Election. The idea that success is already in the bag and therefore the party needs to be disciplined into accepting the rigours of puritanical fiscal prudence is a dangerous and presumptuous one.

But Labour risks learning entirely the wrong lessons from the Uxbridge defeat, not inspiring young voters with a radical and ambitious social, economic and environmental agenda, but trying to appease Tory-leaning voters by watering down existing green commitments.  This would not only be wrong in principle, it might also be disastrous electorally.

Michael Calderbank is Political Education Officer of Tottenham CLP.