Yes "they" voted for Johnson...
You'll find the "they" in question were the extremely affluent outer London boroughs, not the inner city which ironically is where this measure would actually apply. People living in the inner city are 90% exempt anyway and, as someone else here pointed out, if you are running a car in central London you're not so poor anyway!
Boris is a bumbling cretin surrounded by far worse cronies than Ken, I cringe when I think of the bloody mess he's going to make of London in the next four years. The only downside I can see to the congestion charge is that it's original incarnation was as a regressive tax, this was just in the middle of being fixed when along comes Worzel fucking Gummidge and shits it all up. Yes you guessed, I'm still finding it difficult to accept he won :-/
Ironically, after having the balls to make some very strong and controversial moves over the environment I reckon it was the greens and the puritanical left that lost it for Ken. Those that I've spoke to all voted for someone else or abstained, despite the fact Kens stance was probably closer to theirs than any of the other mainstream candidates.
There was also the horrific 2 year right wing press sleaze campaign but what, (short of lynching those nasty little fuckers, anyone?) can we do about that eh?
I mean the idiots barely been in power 5 minutes and he's rolling over and paying Porsche, an Italian luxury car maker, half a MILLION pounds of Londoners money! Whatever you reckon to Ken this wouldn't have happened on his watch, he'd tear their bleeding gizzards out before breakfast.
BTW: To the person earlier who was trying to infer some anti-semitic motivation to the higher charges... I live on Stamford Hill and A) Some of those enormous decrepit smoke beltching Volvo's ARE an environmental hazard and B) The congestion charging zone doesn't start for another 2 miles anyway.
Really this law should be a no brainer... CO2 emissions to one side the air quality here is terrible esp round rush hour, so what should we do about it?
A) Levy a charge on the 30,000 dirtiest least efficient most polluting vehicles, get them off the road and re-invest the money in better public transport?* or
B) Scrap the charges so the environmental costs of Tarquin's Aston Martin can be externalised directly into the lungs of the - often poor - inner city residents.
Not only do I think they should bring the extended charge in, I think they should at least double it for those selfish morons you see navigating Picadilly Circus in their Humvees! If you don't like that, get a f****** bike!
Roger Heathcote
* What makes it so sad is that It was working so well... congestion has gone down over 15% and we've got 3 new bus routes in my area. The revenue this would have generated could have made an enormous difference to London's public transport infrastructure in the coming years. If you're driving a Porsche in central London you CAN afford £25 a day to do it and at the end of the day you might feel a bit less of a selfish c*** if you knew you were helping subsidise something a bit more eco-righteous while you were screetching and roaring about trying to look important.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
