“The government has given financial assistance to Birmingham, Bristol and Portsmouth to help fund their clean air zones but has refused to support London’s scheme, arguing that powers over transport and air quality are devolved to the capital.”
The problem with No. 10 is that there’s no one in there old enough to remember walking to school through winter smog. Pollution kills and legislation saves lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956
Standard behaviour across all disciplines sadly; people no longer see the problem that the rules / processes in place were designed to mitigate against, and then they conclude that the rules / processes that are in place must be unnecessary. Never seems to occur to them that the reason the problems have gone away or are getting better is because of the rules / processes, or that to continue to see improvement the rules / processes need to be built upon.
Examples include speed limits, vaccination programmes and, topical these days, well-resourced IT departments.
“It’s 'elf and safety gone mad!” is the cry of the idiot who doesn’t understand what the world was like before that rule was in place. Yes, you might fancy your chances climbing up a rotten wooden ladder balancing on a bucket, but you should be fucking grateful that years of intense campaigning has made it that your employer needs to give you a proper ladder instead.
