“Air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health.” So says the government’s stark guidance on its own official website. It warns that “between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year” are due to “human-made air pollution”, and yes, that’s official. London is one of the cities with the worst air, with its poorest people living in the most air-polluted zones in the country. But now the role played by ultra-low emission zones (Ulez) in the byelection in the west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip risks poisoning green politics.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has so far gone furthest, putting squalid political posturing as the motorists’ friend before clean air, but there’s no morally acceptable excuse for any party to retreat on this. As a young child who suffered repeated bronchitis attacks, I remember the dramatic effects of the 1956 Clean Air Act, banning domestic burning of coal, which stopped pea-souper smogs so thick that you couldn’t see the bus arriving at the bus stop. After that legislation, there was no smog, and I never had bronchitis again.
