CONSERVATIVE MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith has branded the ULEZ plans in London as a money-making scheme by London Mayor Sadiq Khan
Speaking to GB News on Camilla Tominey Today, Mr Duncan Smith said: “My (constituency) area is one of the outer boroughs that is going to be hit by ULEZ. I think it’s an utter disaster, there’s no need for it.
“We have environmentally much cleaner air, and so to bring it up there is this terrible Mayor’s idea about raising money. Whenever there’s a problem, he seems to slow his shoulders and disappear, and whenever there’s something to raise money, he’s out there everywhere.
“Again, he’s very anti car and he forgets that businesses need their cars and their vans to run their businesses. They’ll all get hit by this charge.
“Right now, I’ve got constituents who are having to pay extra money just to cross the North Circular to go to their main hospital. All of this is a problem.
“If you’re a person on your retirement, about to retire or having retired, you’ll have bought your last car probably. Now what’s going to happen is progressively you’re going to find yourself having to pay more money, because the choice you made was there would be no ULEZ in your area.
“People come into London for work. So, any of those builders, the plumbers, all the various people that have got to come in to do work in my area, will actually have to pay more money.
“It just shows how far away and distant are some of these people that run City Hall as to exactly what is going on in London. We need business and we need lower taxes, we don’t need higher charges.”
Meanwhile Mr Duncan Smith also commented on a sting reported today which snared MP’s Matt Hancock, Graham Brady and Kwasi Kwarteng.
He said: “I just think all in all that people should smell a rat when somebody comes to them unannounced, starts talking to them on a video link about how much money do you want? I think people need to have a little bit of a signal going off in the back of their head that says something very strange about this.
“I can’t comment on how much they’re worth. All I would say is that by and large, people should recognise that when somebody comes to you offering gold you should ask the question “why?”
Highlighting the recent Budget announcement by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Mr Smith continued: “I think inflation is going to be coming down and quite rapidly fairly shortly. The Bank of England put up the interest rates just recently because of a problem that happened last year, which is that all the growing prices for all the crops went up because of fuel costs and all the fertilisers went massively up so you’re paying that now.
“I believe now we should be having interest rates coming down. I’m pretty certain that will happen. The inflation will probably drop by half, but I think it will be more than that.
“My general view is right now we’ve got to start looking at growth. We’ve got to get growth going.
“[The budget] paved the way to be able to put the stuff in place for growth particularly. There are some issues that he’s done well on.. I want lower taxes. I want lower taxes to help the young man that was actually asking the question and starting out in life. We need those taxes to come down because they’re already paying off student fees.”
Focusing on recent data from the CSJ highlighting that 60,000 children came off the school register before the pandemic and are still left unaccounted for, Mr Duncan-Smith added: “The pandemic caused a lot of damage to young people. First of all, kids starting into businesses, young people learning – how do they learn the ropes when people are not in their offices anymore? All of those things are damaging to them.
“Now we find school children, so many schools shut down and so many kids were not protected. These come from often lower income groups, sometimes the at-risk groups, many of them weren’t.
“I mean, if you are a harassed single mother in a tower block – a 10 story or a 19 storey building – you’ve got kids back at home, you’re having to work by the way but all the others that didn’t go to work; they went to work to do the deliveries, to do the Amazon stuff, everything else.
“We forget about them. They have a struggle. 140,000 kids, that’s 138% rise on where we were before the pandemic.
“This is shocking, it’s something like 137 schools having literally nobody in them anymore. They call them the ghost kids, because they’ve disappeared.
