Why the Tories are a class act

Hope you all enjoyed Xmas.

But today as we all travel back to work, Boris Johnson has a nasty little surprise for London's less well off.

Single bus journies using your Oyster card will rise 20% from £1 to £1.20. An extra 20p - perhaps that's what Cameron meant by the Year for Change!

£1.20 might not seem a lot. But London buses are the cheapest form of public transport to get around the capital. That single bus journey was only 90p under Ken. 

Luckily, I have a pensioner's freedom pass. But when I travel on the bus, especially in the morning, it's plain to see a lot of working class people rely on that £1 journey to make their money go further, especially during a recession. In fact, according to TfL's London Travel Demand Survey black people's usage of the bus is twice the London average.

Thanks to Boris, the average couple will now have to shell out an extra £263 a year. That might be chicken feed to people like Boris, but not the majority of people in the capital.

Why do working class Londoners have to pay more? Because Boris is looking after his own in West London. The western extension to the congestion charge zone, which would have provided an extra £70m a year, was scrapped by Johnson.

He also axed the £25 charge for the most polluting cars driving into central London, protecting the Chelsea tractors and Porsches but costing London a projected £50million a year.

So the poorest in London are now effectively subsidising Boris, Dave, George and their Notting Hill friends to clog up the roads with their 4X4s on the school run.

Combined with Ken Clarke's admission that the Tories won't rule out putting up VAT further (a regressive tax which hits the poorest hardest) and their determination to offer tax breaks to the richest 3,000 estates in Britain and it's quite clear who will foot the bill under a Cameron Government.

No wonder the Tories don't want to talk about class war.

They're already waging it on the streets of London.