Labour should have won Uxbridge

Yesterday three by-elections were held to replace three Tory MPs, including the former prime minister Boris Johnson, who resigned last month for reasons including the ‘partygate’ scandal (involving politicians who held parties while everyone else was observing Covid restrictions in 2020). Johnson’s seat was Uxbridge and South Ruislip in west London; the others up for grabs were Somerton and Frome in Somerset and Selby and Ainsty in east Yorkshire. The first and last of these had always been held by the Tories; the second was one of the seats in south-western England that had been held by the Lib Dems, in this case from 1997 until 2015, when that party lost all the seats it had held south of Bath because of a mixture of factors including their participation in the coalition, support for the EU referendum and (allegedly) fear of a Labour-SNP coalition as a result of Labour’s collapse in Scotland. That victory might well stick at the next election although it is unlikely that they will regain all the seats they lost; the one in Selby probably will not. But Uxbridge is within Labour’s grasp and is one they could and should have won last night.

The Tory candidate was quick to credit his victory to the Ultra Low Emission Zone which is due to go into operation in outer London, including much of Uxbridge, in late August and which is unpopular there. (Outer London for these purposes includes much of what would normally be called inner London south of the river, including Streatham, Catford and much of Wandsworth; the South Circular Road passes much closer to central London than the North Circular does.) This was echoed by Keir Starmer, who opined that ULEZ was why Labour lost and “we all need to reflect on that, including the mayor” (so much for the loyalty Labour expects from ordinary members). Uxbridge’s public transport (unlike that of Labour-voting Hayes, also in Hillingdon borough) is poor by London standards; it has a Tube line, but this offers a choice of two stopping services along circuitous routes into London via Harrow or Acton (the Tube map makes the latter look more circuitous than it is, but it’s still a stopping service). The area has more of a car culture than many other parts of London and it has been suggested that many car owners thought they would be affected by it when they in fact would not, and the details of which cars are compliant and which are not are not that well known (TfL’s website has an app where you can enter the registration number to find out). In fact, ULEZ was first introduced in central London by Boris Johnson when he was mayor, and its extension was something that was agreed to by Sadiq Khan with the then PM, Boris Johnson, as a way of paying off debts Transport for London incurred by running free buses during the first Covid lockdown. While Sadiq Khan promotes the scheme’s environmental benefits, the policy is one that originates with a Tory mayor and one he was forced into by the Tories.

I live in one of the outer boroughs the scheme is going to be extended to next month. My car is compliant, and the majority of cars that are not are diesels from before 2014. This will affect a lot of people who bought diesels when they were being promoted as more economical than petrol cars before their high nitrous oxide emissions became known of. The difference in this part of London is that the Greater London boundary cuts across communities and families, including mine, and those living outside the border will not benefit from the scrappage scheme. People have said that ULEZ would be easy to sell: they just have to tell people that there will be fewer dead children because of the improved air quality, but some families will have to tell their children that their aunt cannot come to visit anymore because her car is too old and she cannot afford another. Many of these districts (not all) are affluent, but not everyone living there is very rich. If Labour want to have a hope of winning other seats in similar positions, they should be extending the scrappage scheme to districts on the outer side of the boundary where there is much traffic into and out of neighbouring London boroughs. (Maybe their political calculations tell them they do not have to; Kingston and Richmond oscillate between the Tories and Lib Dems, and neighbouring parts of Surrey are generally safe Tory territory.)

That said, the three-figure difference between the Labour and Tory candidates’ voting tallies suggests that Labour could have won this if they had run a more inspiring campaign and if their leader offered a bit more hope that his party would change some of the Tories’ more destructive policies of the past thirteen years. Over the past few months we have heard one announcement after another from the Labour leader that the pledges on which he won the leadership were being abandoned, and that on one issue after another, Labour would not make anything better. He acquired the nickname “Sir Kid Starver” after announcing that he would not end the two-child limit for Child Benefit, for example. Starmer assumes young and minority voters are “in the bag”, a quite misplaced assumption, while treating them with contempt in his desperation to win back the Red Wall and the provincial lower middle class. Failing governments often lose by-elections in seats they would otherwise win comfortably, as we saw at Christchurch and Newbury in the 1990s; Selby is a good example in our time. The failure to gain Uxbridge by a few hundred votes reflects an uninspiring leader who has no ideas, only tells us what he will not do and never what he will, and offers no real hope other than of a temporary brake on the Tories’ destruction of our civilisation, while the destroyers regroup.

Image source: Doyle of London, via Wikimedia. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

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