Labour & Lib Dem are itching to see if Sadiq Khan gets away with ideological eco panic — and if they can follow suit

Sadiq karma

GIVEN Sadiq Khan’s praise for Just Stop Oil he can hardly complain at protesters trashing his loathed Ulez cameras.

Not that we condone illegal vandalism. But most people will sympathise with the motivation.

Here is a power-crazed Labour mayor, seeing that the lowest-paid are suffering worst in the cost-of-living crisis but pricing them off the roads too.

He justifies his lucrative new tax on the poor with repeated platitudes about “cleaning the air” — though London’s has not been cleaner in three centuries — plus the statistical quackery of a claim about “4,000 pollution deaths a year”.

Khan appears to be a fan of unlawful protest. So there is a wonderful irony in him seeing his own cameras toppled.

But we live in a democracy.

The backlash he richly deserves must come at the ballot box, not in the destruction of the infrastructure he installed to penalise hard-up pensioners and families.

Voters can boot him out next May for a rival not driven by fashionable, ideological eco panic. And that holds true for the rest of the country.

Because Labour and Lib Dem authorities are all itching to see if Khan gets away with it — and if they can safely follow suit.

Air farce

WHY is our air traffic control system so fragile that a simple technical hitch can unleash hell on 200,000 holidaymakers?

If its decrepitude was so notorious as to be mentioned in the annual report of the National Air Traffic Services, why wasn’t its lavishly paid boss busting a gut to upgrade it?

If confirmed that it was tripped up solely by one airline inputting the wrong flight plan, heads must roll at NATS.

The ordeal families are being put through — sleeping on floors with precious little food up to 12 DAYS from the next available flight — is a traveller’s worst nightmare and utterly shameful.

Someone must carry the can.

Free to build

NITPICKING EU rules are not the chief cause of our failure to build homes . . . but they haven’t helped.

The ludicrous complexity of our planning system and the power wielded by Nimby voters are the biggest problems.

But Brussels’ edicts on pollution from building sites, and their over-zealous enforcement by Natural England, have halted many developments.

Brexit allows us to relax them and unlock perhaps 100,000-plus new homes, starting in months. Great.

Environment groups, with customary hyperbole, claim our rivers now face “total ecological collapse”. Rubbish. These rules did not exist before 2017.

The Government says it will fully fund action to tackle any increased pollution.

It is vital it does so.