By Railing Against 15-Minute Cities Rishi Sunak Aligns U.K. Government With Conspiracy Theory Believers

Earlier this year a vandal cut through a 240V mains power cable to disable a data collection device in Jesmond, an upscale suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne. The cutter or cutters have not been caught, so their motives are unknown, but the criminal damage was likely done in an attempt to derail a low traffic neighborhood or LTN.

This traffic management trial has been the subject of real-world and online vilification from a surprising number of Jesmond residents, some of whom wrongly claim to have been “kettled” in their homes.

Threatening behavior was reported to police following ugly postings on a private anti-LTN Facebook group that has more than 700 members. (Jesmond is the last place in Newcastle you’d think harbored such anger: it has an upscale Waitrose supermarket, an achingly middle-class residents’ association, and is famously, if not entirely accurately, populated with fusty academics, wealthy students, and millionaire footballers.)

The traffic counter on Armstrong Bridge—a well-used active-travel conduit closed to cars since 1963—has nothing to do with the LTN. Still, it’s close to the bollards installed in March, and a non-specialist might assume the elevated camera-like device was integral to such a scheme.

Using machine vision to track and record the numbers of cyclists and pedestrians crossing the Victorian-era bridge, the traffic counter was commissioned by Newcastle City Council and installed last year by Newcastle-based Streets Systems, a national provider of bespoke movement-plotting equipment.

The damage done to one of his company’s high-tech cameras came as little surprise to Streets Systems’ director Tom Bailey. “We’ve been expecting this for a long time,” he told me as a staffer clambered up a ladder to inspect the cut cable.

“We work on LTNs, so we assumed we would get our equipment attacked at some point.”

In London, masked vigilantes styling themselves as “Blade Runners” have been felling ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) cameras at significant cost to taxpayers, yet receive glowing coverage in right-wing tabloids.

“We’ve been monitoring what’s going on in other parts of the country,” said Bailey.

“We’ve beefed up the security in our office, and I’ve beefed up security at home,” added Bailey with a resigned shrug.

“As a company director, my address details are not hard to find, and if people are unstable enough to attack equipment that they think forms part of an LTN, they could be capable of a lot worse,” he said.

Anti-LTN protests in Newcastle have been mostly benign including two roadside demos earlier in the summer. Thanks to Newcastle University’s rugby squad members, there were raucous scenes at the second of these demos when the tie-wearing students broke into song, loudly lamenting their slightly longer car journeys.

Joyous, perhaps, but anti-LTN sentiment in this leafy suburb has also been menacing. Jesmond’s local election hustings on May 4 were disrupted by angry, finger-pointing agitators from Gateshead, a city across the river from Newcastle.

One of the finger-pointers was a renowned conspiracy theorist who claims that the 5G mobile phone network has killed over 400 people. According to him, 5G is part of a “Kill Grid” which includes other street-furniture such as lamp-posts. He has accused Gateshead council officers and street maintenance workers of being “baby killers.”

Why did he travel across the River Tyne to shout at politicians he couldn’t vote for? Opposition to LTNs and 15-minute cities.

Nothing suggests this individual or his acolytes had anything to do with the damage to Streets System’s equipment. Nevertheless, this conspiracist is one of many who oppose LTNs, much to the annoyance of those anti-LTNers who do not believe in chemtrails or that the World Economic Forum is a shadow government running the world.

Non-conspiracist anti-LTNers do not go out of their way to decry those calling for vigilante action against residents who quite like the quiet and safety resulting from the placement of bollards and planters.

On Newcastle’s private Facebook group, calls to gather outside of the homes of LTN advocates telling them that “they and their ilk are not welcome in Jesmond” are still online despite complaints made to admins.

Together

Of course, most LTN opponents are not conspiracy theory believers. In London, the Social Environmental Justice (SEJ) body—a tiny lobby group created by London-based anti-LTNers in January 2023, and already much quoted by right-wing newspapers—was set up to distance the anti-LTN movement from the Together Declaration, an anti-LTN body with a $975 annual membership level (the “Freedom” tier comes with a Together branded hoodie and tote bag) that started life during the pandemic as an anti-vax group.

Alongside the anti-LTN stuff, Together still pumps out vaccine cynicism. SEJ might oppose the conspiracists, but the body isn’t afraid to use pejorative language. Its website says main thoroughfares adjacent to LTNs are “sacrificial roads” and those councils installing LTNs are guilty of “environmental classism, environmental racism and eco-ableism.”

The SEJ worries that anti-LTNers risk being portrayed “in a very bad light” and therefore cautions against criminal damage.

“Whatever you decide to do,” urges an SEJ leaflet, “never be tempted to damage or remove bollards, planters or measuring equipment,” an indication that such sentiments do indeed bubble up in anti-LTN circles.

The lobby group warns that such vandalism could not only “get you fined,” it is counterproductive because it “usually just extends the trial/monitoring process.”

But perhaps the biggest worry from the SEJ is that criminal damage can “lead to a loss of goodwill from many.”

And therein lies the dilemma for the non-conspiracist wing of the anti-LTN movement: wrecking bollards and ripping out cameras risks haemorrhaging support from the mainstream. Otherwise law-abiding citizens might balk at supporting a cause that often turns a blind eye to criminal damage, and sometimes even applauds it.

And, say pro-LTNers, who would want to be on the same side as those who believe Bill Gates is guilty of genocide?

This incredible belief, and many more as equally unhinged, can be found in The Light, a professionally-produced freesheet handed out at anti-LTN demos and more. In one recent issue, gifted to me at a Jesmond anti-LTN demo by a couple standing in the local elections (they tanked), there was a whole page claiming that nuclear weapons don’t exist and that Hiroshima was faked.

To conspiracists, LTNs and 15-minute cities—the two concepts are often conflated— are dystopian, climate-lockdown concentration camps with people electronically chained to their neighborhoods and fed on ground-up grasshoppers.

This is not an exaggeration. 15-minute cities are, to some, a Hunger Games-style imposition by Stalinists. A Tory MP told Parliament earlier this year that, in effect, living close to shops was an “international socialist concept.”

On Monday at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to join the conspiracists and denounce 15-minute cities even though the ability to live in close proximity to shops, cafes and other amenities is probably something most people support.

He will also announce plans to limit council powers to impose 20mph speed zones in England, levy fines from traffic cameras and restrict the number of hours a day that motorists are banned from bus lanes.

Sunak said: “For too long politicians have focused on the short-term decisions with little regard for the long-term impact on hard-working families.

“We’ve seen this consistently with people’s freedoms on transport. The clampdown on motorists is an attack on the day-to-day lives of most people across the U.K. who rely on cars to get to work or see their families.

“This week the U.K. Government will set out a long-term plan to back drivers, slamming the brakes on anti-car measures across England. We are taking the necessary decision to back the motorists who keep our country moving.”

The Prime Minister told The Sun today: “I’m slamming the brakes on the war on motorists – it’s as simple as that.”

Under Sunak’s guidance, the Department for Transport adds that it plans to stop councils implementing 15-minute city policies claiming that they “aggressively restrict where people can drive.”

World government

Out-and-out conspiracists claim that the 15-minute city urban planning model is a nefarious plan from the bankers and capitalists of the Davos-centred World Economic Forum.

The WEF is led by Klaus Schwab, who, with his Jewish-sounding surname, is frequently demonised with tropes similar to those long found in antisemitic literature.

Libertarian influencers Nigel Farage and Neil Oliver rant against 15-minute cities, and Canadian psychologist turned hard-right culture warrior Jordan Peterson tweeted earlier this year that “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats [will] decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive,” as if city traffic departments have not done this very thing for at least the last one hundred years.

Actor turned political TV pundit Laurence Fox, currently suspended by the GB News TV channel because of hateful misogynistic remarks he made earlier in the week, is one of the founding signatories of Not Our Future, an organisation founded by David Fleming, a marketing specialist who also set up the anti-vax Covid19 Assembly and co-founded the Together Declaration to “fight for the survival of our way of life as we know it.”

Ahead of an anti-LTN, anti-15-minute-city protest in Oxford earlier this year, Not Our Future distributed leaflets warning that the council was coming for residents’ cars.

“The reality is that in 2024 you, the people of Oxford, will be guinea pigs,” the leaflet claimed.

“You will all be subjects of a scheme known as 15-Minute Neighbourhoods. This sounds cute but it’s anything but. It’s a controlled system to restrict people from driving freely around the city,” it said, misrepresenting the planned traffic measures.

“All this is coming from the United Nations Agenda 30,” continued the leaflet.

“This includes the ultimate aim of moving the majority of the public to smart cities where all activity can be monitored to control people’s Personal Carbon Allowance,” it lied.

Investigative journalists at the DeSmog climate adaptation news website say Not Our Future is backed by a “high-profile climate deniers and conspiracy theorists based in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia.”

On its website, Not Our Future warns: “The draconian and destructive response to Covid-19, involving the lockdown of entire populations, mandated injections and mask-wearing, and aggressive suppression of freedom of expression, could be a harbinger of things to come.”

And LTNs, it further warns, are also part of that future, as is going cashless.

“Central Bank Digital Currencies … have the potential to lock humanity in a dystopian control grid,” exaggerates the body, claiming that this grid would be a “de facto prison.”

Back in Newcastle, an otherwise liberal local news website warned its readers that the LTN had led to the “ghettoization and sterilization of Jesmond.”

North East Bylines, part of the anti-Brexit Byline network, claimed that the LTN had been imposed on an “unwilling population” and had turned Jesmond “into a sterile and characterless environment.”

The article also claimed that a pro-LTN campaign group was said to have produced a document featuring a cover image of “children playing in traffic free streets” that “would not be out in place in Soviet era propaganda posters.”

Some in the anti-LTN Facebook group lauded this article, but its conspiracist language was also a turn off to many. Perhaps one positive to have come out of the demonisation of LTNs and 15-minute cities is that those opposing such long-used traffic reduction measures might now think twice for fear of being associated with those comfortable with the unsavoury use of Holocaust references.

It dilutes your argument when some fellow travelers are chemtrail chancers, out-and-out racists, and moon-landings-were-faked grifters.

However, calling a spade a spade has its risks. London mayor Sadiq Khan was barracked at a public meeting earlier this year after he claimed that some of those opposed to the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone were “Far Right” and “Covid deniers.”

Some are, but Khan’s political opponents portrayed his descriptions as a slur on all ULEZ/LTN/15-minute-city opponents.

“What I find unacceptable,” countered Khan, “is those who’ve got legitimate objections joining hands with some of those … who are part of a Far-Right group.”

At the meeting, this claim was met with jeers. The rightwing press subsequently monstered Khan for adding that “some of you have good reasons to oppose ULEZ, but you are in coalition with Covid deniers. You may not like it [but] you are in coalition with the Far-Right.”

In a follow-up tweet, Khan doubled down on his criticisms. “To the conspiracy theorists who tried to disrupt [the meeting], Londoners have no time for your dangerous misinformation.”

And it’s this misinformation—and worse—that appears to be repelling existing and would-be opponents of LTNs and more.

In April, The Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wrote that she used to be against LTNs, but then she looked at who also opposed them.

“I woke up one day to find myself on the same side as Laurence Fox,” she mused. “I cannot travel with this fellow,” she wrote.

“I will U-turn in literally any other direction.”

Surprisingly, Rishi Sunak’s much-trailed “plan for motorists” contains many of the same policies demanded by conspiracists. Surprising, because it was only three years ago, during the pandemic, that previous prime minister Boris Johnson told parliament that the near future “should be a new golden age for cycling.”

England, promised Johnson, was to be threaded with thousands of miles of curb-protected cycleways built to newly-published high standards. This “revolutionary” $2.5 billion plan aimed to “kick off the most radical change to our cities since the arrival of mass motoring.”

In an unusually hard-hitting Department for Transport letter sent to English local authorities in May 2020, council were urged to “show us that you have a swift and meaningful plan to reallocate road space to cyclists and pedestrians, including strategic corridors.”

The Tory government also pledged to help local authorities create LTNs to reduce rat running. This same Tory government now paints itself as bitterly opposed to LTNs.

The former Transport Secretary Grant Shapps (he’s now in charge of Defense) said in 2020 that England would be transformed into a “great cycling nation.”

He added: “We’ve got a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a shift in attitudes for generations to come, and get more people choosing to cycle or walk as part of their daily routine.”

“Climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,” wrote Shapps in the 2020 government report Decarbonising transport: setting the challenge.

“There is no plausible path to net zero without major transport emissions reductions,” said the report adding that “reductions need to start being delivered soon.”

The supposed “war against the motorist”—with pop-up cycleways, widened sidewalks and other measures aimed at encouraging active travel and discouraging car journeys—was, at the time, official government policy.

Shapps said he would oversee measures that would “permanently [change] the way we use transport.”

He stressed that the government would be “speeding up the cycling revolution, helping individuals become fitter and healthier. And reducing air pollution, which remains a hidden killer.”

Shapps wrote that, in the future, “we will use our cars less.”

Now, to curry favor with some voters in the hope the Tory party is not totally wiped out at the next election—which must be held by January 2025—the Tory government has reneged on promises and policies made during the pandemic and is now closely aligned to the UK Independence Party, conspiracists and other radical groups.

Three years is a very long time in politics.