Letters: Ulez advocates ignore the realities of life on the outskirts of London

SIR – Shirley Rodrigues, London Deputy Mayor for Transport and Energy (Letters, February 14), makes some important points about the environmental benefits of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez).

However, both she and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, are ignoring the potentially detrimental aspects of the imminent Ulez extension. As a former resident of Chessington – situated in the finger of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames that extends into Surrey – I can foresee the financial, physical and mental impact that the scheme will have on residents.

Unlike inner London, Chessington does not have a shop on every road, and many people are up to half a mile from a bus route. Many, too, are elderly and in poor health. Shopping and visits to the medical centre or hospital necessitate the use of a car. The Ulez extension will place an additional financial burden on them.

We are told that the Ulez revenue will be hypothecated for better public transport and cycle routes (of little use to a 70-year-old with bags of shopping). Of course, this will be at an undefined point in the future, and it is likely that in many areas the alternatives to a car will still be unviable.

Dr Alf Crossman
Rudgwick, West Sussex

SIR – Shirley Rodrigues says that 4,000 Londoners are dying every year because of air pollution, but how much of that comes from other sources, such as air traffic?

In fact, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide vehicle emissions have fallen progressively thanks to engine design – and with electric vehicles in the ascendant, why impose draconian restrictions now?

The London economy is worth more than £450 billion per annum, and the loss in business rate revenue alone is likely to outweigh gains in Ulez revenue.

Roger J Arthur
Pulborough, West Sussex

SIR – Apparently, Transport for London has a shortfall in funds of £740 million. Is the Ulez expansion simply a device  for making up this shortfall (despite Sadiq Khan’s protestations to  the contrary)?

Geoffrey Grimwood
Rhos-on-Sea, Denbighshire

SIR – In dismissing those who refuse to  surrender to Sadiq Khan’s Ulez proposals as science deniers, and suggesting that “world-leading experts  at Imperial College London” can’t be wrong, Shirley Rodrigues appears not to have learnt the lessons of the pandemic.

Tim Coles
Carlton, Bedfordshire

SIR – If, as Shirley Rodrigues says, Sadiq Khan sees the expansion of Ulez as a “moral issue”, surely he should be considering the less prosperous residents of outer London boroughs.

There is a clear moral case not to impose further charges on them.

Trevor Pitman
Beckenham, Kent

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What Brexit means

SIR – Sherelle Jacobs is wrong to claim that “Brexit is finally dead” (Comment, February 14). She is, however, right in her criticism of Theresa May, whose expression that “Brexit means Brexit” was meaningless, and whose farcical negotiations, combined with the utter failure of the Chequers proposals, meant that she did not last long.

Ms Jacobs mentions neither the impact of Covid on our economy, costing around £400 billion, nor the energy and cost of living crises, which are the direct consequences of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. These are uncontrollable global factors, and were not the fault of the Government or the policy of leaving the EU.

Nowhere does she identify the real reason for leaving the EU, which is that we were subjugated for 45 years to a law-making process, ultimately run by the undemocratic Council of Ministers, which relied on a majority vote among 27 other countries, behind closed doors, without even a transcript.

The EU was, and remains, a democratic failure, only interested in its own political objective of greater EU integration, and never in British sovereign economic or political interests and competitiveness.

Sir Bill Cash MP (Con)
London SW1

Land lost to solar farms

SIR – It would be a mistake for the Government to allow the development of vast solar farms (report, February 12).

Thousands of acres of valuable farming land would be given over to miles of glass screens connected to the National Grid, justified by the vague and unconvincing promise of cheap electricity. Not only does this model incorporate the same drawbacks as existing power stations by requiring transmission of the generated energy, but it is also strategically unsound in a political climate that is moving towards future conflict, not away from it. Both the connections to the grid and the screens themselves are easily identifiable, and can be disrupted by a determined malefactor.

The effort, funding and time currently being spent by the newly established Department for Energy Security and Net Zero would be better employed providing a more attractive package for a distributed network of domestic and local industrial solar installations that would generate the electricity where it is used and be an economic driver for smaller businesses to the benefit of the wider economy.

Chris Benn
Grantham, Lincolnshire

Car of many colours

SIR – As a battalion commander in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, I was considered to be an IRA target. I was therefore issued with an Austin 1800 staff car, with bulletproof armour and hardened glass windows. The number plate was changed every six weeks and the colour (Letters, February 14) every three months. Thus, in two years, I had the same car in seven different colours. My favourite was light blue.

As an added precaution, my driver persuaded me that, if he drove fast enough, we could get through any ambush before it was sprung. We drove for 24,000 miles without incident.

Colonel Dion Beard
Sunningdale, Berkshire

SIR – We chose a beautiful iridescent blue for our new Mini.

The bonus is that, driving around narrow country lanes here in north Devon, when the rich red of the Devonian soil is spattered on to the rich blue of the Mini, the two colours complement and enhance each other.

Marion Elmes
Ilfracombe, Devon

Aid to China

SIR – Britain sends up to £50 million in foreign aid to China annually (Leading Article, February 14). Apparently, a good proportion of this goes towards scholarships for Chinese students to attend British universities. It is said that without Chinese students’ fees some universities could fail. So it seems that, in this case, our foreign aid is being regurgitated.

Meanwhile Jingye, the Chinese company that in 2020 took over British Steel in Scunthorpe, is seeking £300 million of UK taxpayers’ money.

Who allows this?

Jeremy Biggin
Sheffield, South Yorkshire

The ultimate penalty

SIR – Roy Perry (Letters, February 13) asks why America, which is largely pro-capital punishment, has a higher murder rate than Britain. Simple: guns.

Canada, which has far tougher firearms regulations, has a third of the murder rate, while Mexico, with no effective gun laws or capital punishment, is off the scale.

Matt Walter (Letters, February 13) says that it costs more to execute a murderer than to detain them for life, but this includes leaving them on death row and the cost of litigation before sentencing is carried out.

With the increase in mass murder by terrorism and the vastly improved methods of detection since the abolition of capital punishment here, it is time to review the situation.

Steve Haynes
Sidmouth, Devon

SIR – Kim Potter (Letters, February 11), arguing against the death penalty, refers to “life imprisonment”.

Harold Wilson’s government said that life would mean life, but this has rarely been the case. How many released killers have killed again?

Rod Enderby
King’s Sutton, Northamptonshire

England’s emperor

SIR – Napoleon III (Letters, February 13) was better loved in England than in France at the time of his death.

After Bismarck’s Prussia brought his empire to an end in 1870, they took down the signs on every Parisian street named after him. But he was a very popular exile in Chislehurst, where he became a human tourist attraction.

French politicians calling for the return of his remains are simply seeking publicity.

Tony Boullemier
Boughton, Northamptonshire

A country that values keeping its water clean

SIR – I have just returned from a short break at the Wörthersee lake in Carinthia, Austria.

The water is so clean you can drink it as you swim. Almost 90 per cent of the swimming locations in this beautiful country were found to be of “excellent” quality after the state invested more than €50 billion in the last decade.

It is now reported (February 14) that Thérèse Coffey, the Environment Secretary, may be backing away from plans to hit British water companies with fines of up to £250 million for spilling sewage into rivers and seas.

Whose side is she on?

Mark Macauley
Heytesbury, Wiltshire

SIR – Attempts to address gendered language in the Bible (Letters, February 9) are not new.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), Mary Baker Eddy suggested “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” as her spiritual interpretation of the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer, and this is still read at Christian Science services today.

In later editions, she also used the feminine pronoun for God in her chapter on creation, but she reverted to the masculine pronoun from 1886. She viewed God (and indeed “man”) as spiritual and non-gendered, and presumably came to feel that it didn’t matter which pronoun was used.

The Church of England could do the  same and save itself a lot of time and effort.

V Bremner
Bristol

SIR – Judith Barnes (Letters, February 9) asks if the Devil will also be gender-neutral. In 2011 Alice Cooper, a proud Christian, includes these lines in his album Welcome 2 My Nightmare:

Spent the night with the devil, she was

such a bad guy,

And if he has her way I will eternally fry.

Ian Blackburn
Heathfield, East Sussex

SIR – The Archbishop of Canterbury is  busy dispelling notions that God has a gender.

However, he recently created a bishopric in the Diocese of Lichfield to pander specifically to those who are unable to accept women priests.

If God has no gender, surely the sex of his ministers is irrelevant.

Patricia Empsall
Lichfield, Staffordshire

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