On a drab, rainy afternoon in an outer London car park, the need for climate action was clear as day for 60-year-old Clement Laurence. “Something has to be done. It’s almost August, look at the weather!” he said, jesting.
Laurence, a retired train driver, lives in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Conservatives clung to victory by 495 votes in a byelection last Thursday. The race turned into a de facto referendum on the controversial Ulez (ultra-low emission zone) policy.
In the week and a half since, Keir Starmer has urged the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to “rethink” the policy, while Rishi Sunak has banned councils from imposing new 20mph zones and approved more than 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences.
For those in the constituency, the response to the Tory win has not been greeted kindly. “It’s rubbish. The anti-Ulez candidates who stood only got 400 votes. They used it as an excuse against Sadiq Khan and the Labour party,” said Laurence, who owns a Ulez-compliant Mercedes and voted for Labour in last Thursday’s byelection.
He voted for the Liberal Democrats in the 2019 general election. The Tories have “gone all Trumpist. They’re desperate,” he said.
Laurence was not pleased with Keir Starmer’s response to the loss, either. “Not very good. I never really liked him much. Bring back Blair … or somebody like Andy Burnham or Lisa Nandy, in fact anyone’s better, but I’ll still vote for him,” he said.
He supported the Ulez. “I think it’s a good thing and it’s a Tory policy. Ulez doesn’t affect most people. In this area it’s mostly the elderly, I don’t think they even care about Ulez, they just don’t like Labour … or Sadiq [Khan].”
Philip Jones, 56, a sound system engineer, often works through the night. “I have to pay twice because it goes from midnight to midnight,” he said.
He voted for Labour at the byelection. However, he thinks the Ulez policy is poorly conceived. He said: “It’s very hard to vote for air pollution, but my least-worst option is to keep driving my van, so I have to pay and keep polluting. It doesn’t offer any kind of solution to me or for the endgame, which is to reduce pollution.
“If you’re middle-class you can embark on these issues. If you’re struggling with your day to day survivability it’s a much more difficult proposition to embrace net zero and get rid of your boiler or car that’s perfectly working.
“It’s just another poverty tax, it’s a tax for poor people.”
Despite voting for Labour at the byelection, saying Ulez “wasn’t anything to do with them”, Jones called Khan “the worst occupant of mayoral office since Dick Whittington’s cat”.
Lauren Cakalli, 35, a mother of three, voted for Labour last Friday “because the Conservative government is a joke”. She moved to the constituency from Crystal Palace a year and a half ago.
She said: “There’s a lot of hate for Ulez but I’ve already gone through it and moved on. People are looking at the smaller picture. They need to look at the bigger picture. There are kids that can’t afford to eat, that’s the bigger picture.”
Despite her approval of Ulez, the climate crisis is not her top concern. “I’m more interested in how the country can provide for its people immediately than I am about the climate,” she said. “Obviously I want there to be a planet for my children and grandchildren but I don’t think that’s what we should be focusing on.”
On the constituency she has only recently called home, she said: “I don’t think it’s part of London. For me this is the countryside, you have to drive everywhere, it’s Middlesex! It’s even got a different name.”
She added: “People here have the money to pay for Ulez, look at the cars, people are fine in this town.”
Steven Grimmond, 42, who works in grounds maintenance, voted for the first time in 2019. “My friends were telling me to vote Conservative because that’s the way forward, which I did, but it all turned into lies,” he said, adding that he had voted Labour last Thursday.
He does not drive but is supportive of the Ulez. “I wouldn’t know where to stand on the environment but I think things could be done better, like what Sadiq Khan is doing with the Ulez and bringing emissions down.”
