Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization. And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.

People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.

I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.

View on HN

> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)

Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.

And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.

Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.

Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.

Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!

This is, of course, not what happened. It's not even all that unpopular. Only about half of Londoners even have a car in the first place.

When I say radicalized, I mean this guy: https://www.cps.gov.uk/national-news/news/updated-sentence-m...

There's also this:

    > "The ULEZ camera had already been cut down"

The camera was already useless. Detonating an IED served no purposeful protest, and endangered property and lives.

There's also a huge racial undertone to the whole London anti-ULEZ 'debate' as Sadiq Khan is a muslim

Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic

Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion

> huge

I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".

Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.

> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic

Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!

> some

"some" indeed.

> “some” indeed

Well he flipped one of them from Conservative and didn’t lose any of the ones that had previously voted for him and his vote was up overall

On the other hand, the Uxbridge and Ruislip by-election. Should've been a shoo-in for Labour, given it was disgraced Partygate BoJo stepping down. Labour won another by-election on the same day. But not this one. Reason? Most likely local anger over ULEZ expansion, even though that's the responsibility of the (Labour) Mayor, not the Labour Party generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...

> Both Labour's leader, Keir Starmer, and deputy leader, Angela Rayner, blamed opposition to ULEZ, with Starmer suggesting the Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan should rethink the policy. Khan defended the policy and Starmer soon sought to heal the rift. The defeated Labour candidate, Beales, also criticised the ULEZ policy.

So someone paid the electoral price for Khan's policy, it just wasn't him.

Labour increased their vote in the 2023 Uxbridge and South Ruislip by election but not by enough to win… they then won it a year later

Yes, in 2023 ULEZ was a campaign issue but so was it when Khan was reelected mayor and Labour won a general election

ULEZ is fundamentally a good thing whether you like it or not

What kind of car/van was it? Since you said car/van and not car or van, I assume there's more than one?

They're referring to LEZ (Low Emission Zone) legislation where a fee is charged for vehicles which exceed a defined emission threshold.

In general, diesel vehicles are more likely to exceed the emission threshold.

Diesel cars/vans. In 2001, the government cut yearly road tax to £20 for cars/vans emitting less than 110g/km of CO2. Many car/van diesel engines can meet this but few petrol engines can. The road tax normally costs £180-£300, so a £160+ saving every year.

So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.

Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:

- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)

- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)

This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.

What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.

You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.

There wasn't 'much opprobrium', there were a bunch of radicalised mainly white men opposing it who made a lot of noise backed by right wing newspapers who want to criticise Kahn for Tory government policy

Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion

https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/04/map-reveals-london-mayor-elec...

I don't know why you want to bring race into this. The split is along car ownership/non-ownership, or city-oriented vs countryside-oriented. The outer boroughs more often need to use cars, and work/visit outside the M25, than the people in inner boroughs. Uxbridge is 85% white, so you can expect an issue facing everyone there to be "mainly white".

What the election map on your article shows is a bunch of outer boroughs ("some"?) choosing the Tory candidate over the Labour one, there just weren't enough of them overall. Elections aren't usually single-issue, and there's probably enough value in reelecting Kahn (or his opponents are odious enough), that forcing a large number of people to set their money on fire didn't entirely wreck his chances.

But you'll note that lessons have been learned. Back in 2019, the IEA were demanding the complete ban of gas boilers by 2026. The government never adopted such a policy, it's only too well aware at how much needless cost and effort it'd put the entire country through by making 80% of households throw out their heating system and buy another one, for the sake of the planet. So that's why the closest the government got to that was proposing in 2020/2021 maybe banning them by 2035. And now? The government is reassuring people that it won't ban gas boilers; not in 2026, not in 2035, not in 2050, not ever. It saw what banning cars in London kicked off. It doesn't want that for itself.

I didn’t bring race into it… all the right wingers who’ve talked about Kahn being a Muslim and his heritage did!

Reduced fuel duty for diesel came in in 2001 (25yrs ago) and was removed following the scandal of manufacturers cheating the emissions tests in 2015 (11 yrs ago)

We've known diesel emissions are bad for health for a long time and ULEZ schemes improve people's health, particularly children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l1r1zne1ro

But some selfish people still think it's their right to drive highly polluting vehicles and let everyone else bear the cost

ULEZ / LEZ zones are a good thing

> And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.

It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.

Considering the number of people involved in the hotel arson attacks who have "previous", including domestic violence convictions, I think you can say that they themselves are unhappy, but that's not quite the same thing.

> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves

I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.

Meh, economic excuse is jist that - excuse so that the perpetrators sound better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com