While Sadiq Khan Frolics on Billionaire Pal’s Gas-Guzzling Superyacht, Ulez is Exposed as a Money-Making Scheme at the Expense of Hardworking Londoners

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

In a damning indictment published in Wednesday’s Daily Mail, researchers from the University of Birmingham have laid bare the futility of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (Ulez) expansion, concluding that the scheme has delivered zero tangible benefits to London’s ambient air quality.

Analysing data pre- and post the August 2023 Ulez rollout, which blanketed Greater London with a £12.50 daily levy on older vehicles, the study found no statistically significant dips in nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) or particulate matter (PM2.5) levels. This revelation strips away the veneer of environmental virtue from Khan’s project, exposing it as yet another assault on ordinary motorists. Ulez epitomises the corruption of science in service of predatory revenue extraction and class war.

The Ulez Expansion: A Timeline of Overreach

Ulez’s origins trace back to 2019, when Khan started the scheme in central London, ostensibly to curb emissions from diesel and petrol cars and trucks to alleviate respiratory health. By 2021, it sprawled to the North and South Circular roads, ensnaring 3.8 million residents. The 2023 mega-expansion to all of Greater London where pollution was even less of a problem — spanning 1,500 square kilometres and nine million people — ignited fury, manifesting in protests and sabotage.

This wasn’t mere policy tweak; it was the punitive imposition of burdensome taxes and fines on the car-dependent masses.

London’s ‘Blade Runners’—a nod to the dystopian film — emerged as folk heroes in this resistance. These activists armed with tools from angle grinders to filling foam have vandalised over 4,500 Ulez enforcement cameras since March 2023. Videos on X show them toppling poles in daylight, while passive resisters rack up fines they refuse to pay — a backlog now nearing half a billion pounds, with only one in five drivers settling on time.

This revolt echoes broader European pushback against green mandates, from farmer uprisings to voter revolts against eco-zealotry. Mayor Khan peddles Ulez as a lifeline against ‘toxic air’, claiming 46% reductions in NO₂ and 41% in PM2.5 since inception. But these figures stem from dubious counterfactual modelling, i.e., hypothetical conjectures as to what ‘would have occurred’ if there were no Ulez in operation, not real-world evidence.

The Birmingham study echoes earlier Imperial College findings: post-2019, PM2.5 barely budged, and NO₂ fell by a paltry 3% — hardly the salvation promised.

London’s air has improved dramatically over decades, thanks to a combination of deindustrialisation, cleaner fuels and better internal combustion engines – not Khan’s cash-grab. DEFRA data shows pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, PM10 and PM2.5 since 1970 plunging, rendering Ulez’s marginal impact invisible amid given trends.

The Dodgy Foundations of ‘No Linear Threshold’ Science

At Ulez’s core lies the ‘no linear threshold’ (NLT) model — borrowed from radiation risk and applied to air pollution. This assumes that every bit of pollutant, down to almost zero, inflicts harm. This extreme metric has fuelled WHO guidelines that deem even trace PM2.5 deadly.

Such an approach to ‘safety’ has more to do with belief in a misanthropic deep ecology where man’s presence can only detract from a pristine unsullied nature.

The Ulez scheme is scientific sleight of hand, metastasising into pseudoscience that threatens economies and livelihoods. Nobel laureate John Clauser calls it a “dangerous corruption“, echoing the climate and Covid hysterias — both instilling fear to justify centralised state control.

WHO assessments, far from rigorous, rely on arbitrary thresholds unsupported by robust epidemiology. Studies tout thousands of premature deaths from pollution but ignore confounders like poverty or lifestyle choices involved in those deaths they count. Real toxicological evidence suggests the potential of hormesis — low doses may even benefit health — yet the NLT standard persists, propping up policies like Ulez.

Khan’s team cites it to claim ‘social justice’, arguing the poor suffer most from dirty air. But as Ross Clark noted in the Spectator, the data don’t stack up; Tube stations like Hampstead which are deep underground harbour air 30 times worse than roads yet escape scrutiny.

Worse, the Mayor’s office funds its own research by commissioning Imperial College reports that conveniently affirm Ulez’s virtues. Emails obtained by the Conservative Party under the Freedom of Information Act showed Professor Frank Kelly of Imperial College London and Shirley Rodrigues, Deputy Mayor for the Environment, apparently working together to “fight back” against other research published by the same university that was not supportive of Ulez. The Conservatives accused Professor Kelly and Mr Khan’s office of having “an alarmingly cosy relationship”.

The pay-to-play dynamic reeks of bias. When the policymaker bankrolls the ‘science’, objectivity evaporates. Independent probes, like the University of Birmingham’s, reveal the emperor’s nakedness: no air quality wins, just economic pain.

Revenue Racket: The True Driver Behind Ulez

If not health, then what? Follow the money. Ulez has hauled in over £70 million in penalties alone since it was introduced in 2019, according to FOI-requested data, despite Khan’s protestation that it’s “not about making money“. Transport for London (TfL) faces a £15 billion shortfall, and Ulez helps fill it by fining the vulnerable. In its first year post-expansion it netted £450 million, much from the £180 non-payment fines hitting low-income drivers hardest.

Tradesmen — plumbers, electricians — face ruinous costs for non-compliant vans; mothers shuttling kids as well as the elderly and disabled are stranded without affordable transport. Outer London’s sparse public transport amplifies the harshness. While Ulez conducts war on the poor with its highly regressive taxes, elites in their electric Teslas or high-end cars see no problem in maintaining their luxury beliefs.

Khan, Co-Chair of C40 Cities, preaches ‘climate justice’ for the Global South while squeezing London’s working and middle classes. C40 is focused, in its own words, on “fighting the climate crisis and driving urban action that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks”. Khan’s 2024 book Breathe: How to Win a Greener World sounds as sanctimonious as most of the Mayor’s other utterances on things ‘green’. But the Mayor’s sanctimony crumbles under scrutiny of his lifestyle. While Londoners fork over for an aged diesel car, Khan enjoys a birthday bash on a £268 million superyacht – a gas-guzzling behemoth with a carbon footprint rivalling fleets of cars – owned by his billionaire tycoon friend.

How does one champion ‘social justice’ from onboard a superyacht deck? It’s a stark reminder: rules for thee, but not for me. Ulez dovetails with the whole repertoire of actions in the war against Britain’s motorists: low-traffic neighbourhoods, bike-lane encroachments, high costs of parking, 20 mph speed limits, the putting up of bollards and planters to restrict car traffic altogether and experimenting with zoning restrictions for 15-minute cities — all curtailing freedom under green pretexts.

London’s traffic crawls at 8-20 mph, comparable to the speed of Roman chariots in the streets of Londinium, a regression over two millennia blamed on climate alarmism. Khan’s plans for London align with the World Economic Forum vision of slashing the global car fleet by 75% by 2050. In this coming neo-feudalism dreamt up by WEF technocrats, the 25% of remaining cars will be the preserve of the ruling philosopher kings and their apparatchiks.

The Human Toll

Over the years as more stringent environmental regulations for motor vehicles come into operation, millions of perfectly good functioning cars, vans and trucks are forced on to the scrapheap and owners who are already struggling find they need a new bank loan to buy another vehicle just to get to work to pay the bank back for the last one. Ulez’s regressive bite is profound: gig workers, small businesses and families teeter on financial edge while meeting bills made astronomical by ever higher energy costs brought on by subsidies and green policy costs.

A 2017 study, untainted by green ideology and focused on health impacts, gave an estimate of the social costs of air pollution from cars in the UK. “Social costs” here refer to costs which include the damage on human health caused by car pollution. It found that it amounted to £25 a year or less for each car. In other words, just two entry fees for the Central London ULEZ would cover the social cost of this pollution for a whole year.

This mirrors Covid-era follies: low-fatality risks hyped to sow fear and erode liberties. Climate ‘science’ follows suit, with the ‘no linear threshold’ model as the new pseudo-scientific dogma. But as global air quality trends over the past half century show — smog cleared in Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York City in the 1970s — that hysteria is unwarranted. Lifespans lengthen and health improves absent green meddling.

Ulez isn’t salvation for respiratory disease; it’s a revenue ruse cloaked in corrupted science, waging a punitive assault on motorists. As London’s Blade Runners symbolise, resistance grows. While Khan gambols in his buddy’s superyacht, London’s average motorist chokes on fines. It’s time to dismantle London’s Ulez edifice. The Daily Mail exposé, amplifying longstanding critiques by sceptics, demands accountability.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.