Tories are ‘seriously barking up the wrong tree’ on ULEZ, says Stanley Johnson

STANLEY Johnson has warned that opposing ULEZ schemes is not going to help the party win the next General Election.

The former MEP told GB News: “I think the Tories are seriously barking up the wrong tree if they think that attacking ULEZ is going to be the secret to success of the next election…

“It would be really, really crazy for the Conservatives to say, ‘okay for electoral gain we are going to dump quite a lot of our environmental policies, including this’.

“Today for me is a moment of great rejoicing. Instead of saying this expanded ULEZ zone is our largest charging centre, why not call it the largest anti-pollution exercise?”

In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he continued: “We are still way above WHO guidelines for air pollution, we really are, so yes, we’ve had huge improvements…in air quality over the last decades in London but there’s a long, long way to go.

“This charge, this policy is absolutely vital and the Tories will be betraying themselves, betraying their own environmental record if they dump it.”

He added: “There is a case for helping people at the margin…but actually if you look at the number of cars which are non-compliant, it is a very, very small number relatively speaking.

“What the Government and in this case what the local government has to, TfL ought to be doing, is really looking again at some of its compensation schemes, the scrappage scheme.”