Crosswords0 min ago
Interesting.......
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Quite a swing from a Labour to the Tories.....
It may only be a Council by-election but perhaps the perceived 'disatisfaction' with the Tories, at all levels of government, is actually stronger against Labour and some of its, quite frankly bonkers, rhetoric than some realise or are prepared to admit?
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The seat was a marginal. Labour won it by 253 seats beating Ian Sharer the LibDem candidate. The winner was elected Mayor of Hackney which meant her seat had to be recontested in a by election.
The beaten LibDem candidate in the meantime had swapped parties and became a conservative (he had prevously also stood for the Labour Party).
And was duly elected yesterday.
“He was a previous Lib Dem councillor for the wonderfully named ward.”
The ward is named after one of the principle thoroughfares running through it, namely Cazenove Road. The road was named after Philip Cazenove, an early 19th Century Huguenot banker and stockbroker who co-founded Cazenove & Co. The company became one of the leading stockbroking partnerships in London and gained a reputation as a preeminent investment banker, reputedly the appointed stockbroker to the late Queen.
The Cazenove ward is on the borders of Stamford Hill, home to the largest concentration of Haredi Jews in Europe, many of whom can be seen walking to or from the synagogue beneath large flat fur hats. But it is a very diverse area. I can’t quite make out why it should suddenly have elected a Conservative Councillor, especially by such a large margin. But the turnout was only 31%. However, council by-elections are strange critters. This one particularly so when the defeated Labour Candidate, Laura Pascal, was suspended by the Labour Party (and reinstated just prior to polling day). Among her alleged transgressions was to declare (on “X” – where else?) that “You can believe what you want but I believe that biological sex is a real thing and neither law or some kind of new scientific consensus would change that.” She also declared in another tweet that “trans women are not female”. This caused outrage among the “trans community” (and no doubt even more so among those suffering “third party” offence) and Ms Pascal apologised if her remarks had caused any offence. She may have garnered more votes had she stood by her honestly held beliefs and defended her remarks instead of offering an apology clearly for the sake of expediency.
Funny that it is being hailed as a victory for Conservative ideology.
The winning candidate was ex-Labour and ex-LibDem.
// I can’t quite make out why it should suddenly have elected a Conservative Councillor //
The fact that the Labour candidate had been suspended by the party, and pary members were instructed not to work for her campaign, might have helped.
“Did you deliberately skip the part where I pointed out that it was Boris's idea? One of the few Boris ideas that make sense, too!”
Perhaps we should get the facts straight about London’s Low emission Zone and Ultra Low Emission Zone.
The Low Emission Zone was introduced in 2008 when Ken Livingstone was still London’s Mayor. It has, from its inception, covered the entire Greater London area (very roughly, the area inside the M25). Although there have been changes to the emission levels permitted, that area has remained unchanged.
The Ultra Low Emission Zone (“ULEZ”) was planned by Boris Johnson in 2015 and he planned to introduce it in September 2020. It was to cover the same area of inner London as the Congestion Charge – very roughly the area inside London Underground’s Circle Line. However, Mr Johnson did not stand in the 2016 Mayoral election (having been elected as an MP) and Sadiq Khan was his successor. Mayor Khan introduced the ULEZ in April 2019.
In October 2021 the ULEZ zone was expanded to encompass the area inside London’s North and South Circular Roads. The Cazenove Ward in Hackney – where the by-election which is the topic of this thread is located – falls into this zone. This expansion was solely the decision of Mayor Khan.
In August 2023 the ULEZ zone was further extended to encompass the whole of greater London, out to the M25 orbital motorway. It is this extension that has led to the greatest controversy. Despite rumours suggesting that it was the Conservative government that forced this decision onto the Mayor as a condition of providing additional post-Covid funding for TfL, it was again entirely a decision of Mayor Khan. The Mayor confirmed this when and this assertion by him is recorded in tha minutes of GLA meetings.
A possible reason why the extension has caused so much controversy is that it encompasses areas such as this, on the edge of the London Borough of Bromley:
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The photograph is taken from neighbouring Kent, but note the “Welcome to Bromley” sign on the junction. Follow either of the roads on GSV and see how far you get before you would consider you are in “London” and where there might be a problem of vehicle pollution.
Similarly, it encompasses this road on the edge of the London Borough of Havering:
https:/
This is actually beyond the M25 (in the only part of Greater London that extends beyond that motorway) and is around 25 miles from Oxford Circus.
There are many places such as this on the periphery of the Greater London area which should not really be part of London at all (but that’s another argument). However, to suggest that people in these areas were “choking” prior to the introduction of the expanded ULEZ zone is frankly ludicrous.
