Will the Online Safety Bill target moths?

As is now well-known, Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone) will expand from 29 August, taking in suburban parts of Kent, Surrey, Essex, Herts. This fact gave Richard Lofthouse, an editor and motoring journalist, an idea. He has done much to help car4Ukraine.com, a volunteer group within Ukraine which seeks gifts of 4×4 pickups abroad and repurposes them to help the war effort. Some are armour-plated, for instance, and fitted with a gun turret at the back. Others can be turned into field ambulances, and so on. There is an endless need for wheels in Ukraine, the life of each pick-up ‘in theatre’ being a matter of weeks. As I write, nearly 300 such vehicles have been contributed, well over half from British donors. These include five given – and in some cases driven over – by Dr Lofthouse personally. From 29 August, thousands of 4x4s will come forward for scrappage. His thought was that Transport for London should therefore give car4Ukraine some of these vehicles. There would be no compromise of Ulez’s purpose – which is the dispersal of polluting vehicles, not global carbon reduction. Owners of the 4x4s handing them in would still be paid by TfL but they could, if they wanted, tick a box which would send them to Ukraine rather than the scrapheap. This idea was taken up with enthusiasm by Vitali Klitschko, the dynamic mayor of Kyiv. He had been much encouraged, after the invasion last year, by Sadiq Khan’s announcement that Londoners ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’ with Ukraine. Klitschko’s office therefore wrote to that of the Mayor of London suggesting the scheme. How disappointing that it received a dusty answer from the Mayor’s people: ‘In practice there are some barriers that would make this impossible…’ The main one, apparently, is that, to earn a grant, ‘the scheme requires proof that the vehicle has been scrapped at an Authorised Treatment Facility’.