‘We’re renegades now. We’re outlaws. Bandits.’ This was my assessment as the builder boyfriend pulled up outside the house in his old truck with a load of wood hanging off the back.
White van man and dirty great pick-up truck man, in the case of the BB, have found a way around paying the Ulez. Mostly, they present their customer with the £12.50 a day charge, which is what they have been doing since the Ulez first started in more central areas of London.
Now it has been expanded to all London boroughs, including where a lot of these chaps live and have their work yards, they have had a go at being more inventive by way of protest. We know this, because it is all over the news, and Iain Duncan Smith has said he supports the men who are pouring cement into the cameras and putting bags over the top of them.
One of the builder boyfriend’s mates had smeared jam and Marmite on his registration plates
The builder b has not done that, though he has said he would really, really like to. He feels he ought to, in order to do his bit for his country, but he has restrained himself because we just want to give up and leave quietly.
On the first day of the charge coming into force where his builder’s yard is, he drove to work with an essential consignment of timber hanging off the back of the truck. ‘Unfortunately, officer, someone has just smashed it and it’s in for repair later,’ he was ready to explain regarding the front end of things. But no one asked him, and the computer was down anyway, crashed by all the owners of old bangers trying to pay. The system could not cope because so many had not scrapped their old cars, even though they were offered £2,000 to do so by Mr Khan, who is very generous in that respect with taxpayers’ money.
The BB does not want to scrap his old truck because we want to take it to Ireland to use on the land that comes with the house we are buying. We like the old pick-up. It’s reliable. We don’t want a new one loaded with electrics that he can’t crawl underneath and fix, like he does now.
Plus, he’s got this old-fashioned, romantic idea that his truck is his property and that his builder’s yard on the very outskirts of south-west London, where he and his dad have worked for most of their lives, is somewhere he ought to be able to go freely, without having a fee imposed on him by someone who has set himself up as the Decider in Chief of Who Gets To Earn Money in London.
So he got into the Mitsubishi L200 on the first day of the Ulez expansion and drove it to his yard, along with many others like him, as it turned out.
He was sitting in traffic surrounded by white vans with old rags hanging off the back driven by tattooed working men revving their engines. One of his mates had smeared jam and Marmite on his registration plates.
While queueing at some lights, he realised the driver of an electric VW was giving him filthy looks, pointing at his truck and coughing theatrically. The builder b gave him the thumbs up and shouted: ‘All right, mate? Nice car you got there. What did that cost you? £50k?’
And as the lights changed, he put his foot on the accelerator of the Warrior and sent smoke billowing out, as did all the white van men.
The BB came home very buoyed up by this and many other tales of Blitz-like spirit as down-at-heel south London came together to rev their old diesel engines for the rights of the common man.
For the lady whose job he was on as the Ulez was rolled out, it was not so jolly. Because aside from this symbolic day of protest, it was business as usual – the customer pays. This lady received her bill for a week of his charges together with a week of four other workmen, who also billed her £12.50 a day. They all wrote down their registrations and tasked her up with the bother of going online to sort it out.
She agreed, before going on holiday to Spain. They rang her a few days later to check and she confessed, from her sun bed, that she had forgotten.
They insisted that this was not their problem. She plaintively told the BB the Ulez fines were more than the job had cost her.
‘That’s Sadiq Khan for you,’ said the builder b, knowing full well she had voted for Khan, and was a supporter of emissions charging, being a prosperous sort and the owner of an electric Audi.
To be fair to the lady, she didn’t argue.
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