Neil Oliver discusses the state of London today, soon to spread throughout the UK, and what it is REALLY about. If you haven’t heard of ULEZ, it stands for Ultra Low Emission Zone.

I wonder when it will be coming here. Actually, our cities are already riddled with CCTV cameras. Fortunately, the USA has a lot more open countryside than in the UK. Here’s an article about

CCTV surveillance in the most populated cities in the United States

The stated goal of ULEZ is to decrease air pollution by charging small vehicles that are “heavy polluters” from driving on London roads. Enforcement is by a network of cameras that read the license plates of vehicles and charge them a tax of £12.50 daily to drive in the zone if their car does not meet emissions standards.

Almost 700,000 cars in London are no longer Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) compliant. ULEZ emissions standards are based on Euro standards – regulations that are imposed on new cars. [I thought that the UK was no longer a part of the European Union?]

I sometimes watch UK mystery or crime dramas, and I was struck by the use of cameras throughout the country to track the movements of criminals (or anybody else, let’s be real.) According to Wikipedia:

The combination of CCTV and facial recognition could be considered a form of mass surveillance, and is starting to be widely used. This type of system has been trialled at airports to compare faces with biometric passports, but such an application is comparable to existing identification checks at borders.

In 2005, the City of Westminster trialled microphones fitted next to CCTV cameras. Westminster council explained that the microphones were part of an initiative to tackle urban noise and would not “be used to snoop”, but comments from a council spokesman appeared to imply they could capture an audio stream alongside the video stream, rather than simply reporting noise levels. The trials were discontinued in 2008 with no further plans for use.

[. . .] An article published in CCTV Image magazine estimated the number of private and local government operated cameras in the United Kingdom was 1.85M in 2011. The estimate was based on extrapolating from a comprehensive survey of public and private cameras within the Cheshire Constabulary jurisdiction. This works out as an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK, although the density of cameras varies greatly from place to place. The Cheshire report also claims that the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras.