Mayor of London Sadiq Khan [@SadiqKhan]

• THE view that with the ULEZ, ultra low emission zone, that the big companies get off scot free is half right.

But sympathy for the “little people” who are the drivers of high-emission vehicles, and who claim to find it an intolerable burden to pay a small fee for the privilege of continuing to poison London children’s lungs, is misplaced.

It is obviously ridiculous to let anyone continue to poison by paying, but that’s another issue.

It is a human right to breathe clean air; it is not a universal human right to drive a car in London. If you can’t afford a ULEZ-compliant car, you’ll have to make other arrangements for your travel, as very many people do anyway.

Whatever its merits, the hard right has chosen ULEZ as its cause. When Rishi Sunak, and the Tories, and The Daily Mail, and the rest, speak of “hard-pressed motorists” they don’t mean anyone who drives: they mean the sociopathic minority who believe that their having to increase their journey times by a quarter-of-an-hour or so would be an outrage, and to whom the damage to children’s lungs doesn’t matter at all.

This minority cannot be conciliated; no consensus with them is possible.

To stop the right and save ULEZ will require a vigorous and even aggressive campaign to isolate the ultras, who will have to be coerced into doing the right thing about vehicle pollution.

So who’s going to organise and lead such a campaign? Obviously not Sir Keir Starmer, who is already trying futilely to appease the polluters who can never be satisfied.

This would seem a natural for the Green Party. Have they actually said nothing about ULEZ, or have they taken a stand that has not been widely reported?

Are Greens the bold and uncompromising pro-environment party that London needs? Will mayor Sadiq Khan, betrayed by his own Labour Party leadership, be saved by the Greens?

JOHN WILSON
Address supplied