1 November 2021
The Greens are critical of Gerald McGregor’s recent blog “Creeping Apartheid for Chiswick” and believe the Conservatives need to raise their game and provide solutions to traffic problems. Mr McGregor wrote, “Chiswick residents are daily becoming more and more of a form of creeping apartheid”during his criticism of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN) schemes.
Stephen Clark, the Green Party candidate for Brentford West in next year’s local elections said “The Tories are at it again. We have seen Mr Giles, a prominent Chiswick Tory, suspended from his own party for referring to Brentford Labour as the ‘Brentford Taliban’. Now we have another weird and totally inaccurate historical comparison from Mr McGregor.”
“In the Borough of Hounslow traffic pollution, high CO2 emissions from motor vehicles and occasional gridlock are all problems. Do the Tories have any solutions to these problems? Because Mr McGregor does not provide any in his blog. The ULEZ and LTN schemes are not perfect and could be improved by discussion with the council and Transport for London, not by lashing out wildly from the side-lines like Mr Giles and Mr McGregor. When will the Tories raise their game and give sensible proposals”?
Jon Elkon, the Hounslow Green Party co-ordinator and author of the novel “Umfaan’s Heroes”, set in South Africa at the time of apartheid, said “During apartheid millions of people in South Africa were denied proper medical treatment and education and deprived of their human rights, not because of where they lived, but because of their race.
Jon, who lives in Chiswick, continues “For Mr McGregor to compare Chiswick residents with the victims of apartheid in South Africa is not only profoundly inaccurate but an insult to millions of South Africans whose lives were blighted by apartheid, including thousands who were detained, tortured and in some cases murdered.”
