Voters are rebelling against expensive climate zealotry

SOMETHING unusual happened on Tuesday: the Tories won an election. Not only that, but they did so in a place that has been as arid as Death Valley for Conservative candidates for more than a decade, the ultra-Woke university city of Cambridge.

- Patrick O'Flynn

For the first time since 2012, the Conservatives now boast a seat on Cambridge City Council after winning a by-election in the relatively deprived Kings Hedges ward. What, you may ask, possessed the longstanding Labour voters of that locality to turn to the blue team given its many divisions, plummeting living standards, soaring NHS waiting lists and the rest of it?

The answer could not have been clearer: there was an uprising against a proposed radical car-charging scheme being backed by local climate zealots from Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens. Under the plan, car-owners would have to pay £5 a day to drive within a new "Sustainable Travel Zone" covering nearly all of the city.

As Anthony Browne, the Tory MP for South Cambridgeshire next door, put it, the result marked "a massive voter rebellion against the hated Lib Dem and Labour congestion charge".