Apologies for the radio silence since early September. I have not dropped this issue!
In the background, I have been lobbying various London Assembly members, been quoted in the Evening Standard and interviewed by the BBC on this serious matter. I had entered a deadline of 1st September for the closure of the petition but since then, people have continued to sign the petition. Now over 31,500 people have signed.
I do fear that many public representatives consider this issue closed due to the legacy of a former Mayor and Conservative Prime Minister (the former MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip) who came up with this idea of tolling East London river crossings and convinced Parliament to enact laws enabling the tolls.
This is not closed by any means yet from our perspective, and therefore I raise the following.
Civil Disobedience - while I am loathe to resort to similar strategies as have been deployed by other high profile protest groups but, we have a message to send to City Hall. Unless this is taken very seriously, then there may be other strategies to deploy which will cause inconvenience to commuters. But nonetheless, it signals peoples’ anger over this issue. Do we really want to see people superglued to the tarmac at the entrance of the Blackwall Tunnel on a Monday morning? Or God forbid, there should be smoke emanating from the tunnel at some point which could prevent access. I very much doubt that any actions preventing commuters from accessing the Blackwall tunnel would be palatable. However, unless public outrage is felt, what power do we really have? Tolls for Thames crossings, west of Woolwich Ferry and east of Rotherhithe, from what the Mayor has said, appears to be a done deal (even prior to the consultation period ending, the Mayor said tolls are mandatory, as quoted in the article by Ross Lydall in the Evening Standard!). No Mayor has ever asked our explicit consent to proceed with charging us to cross the river. Now that is taking liberties!
Funding for expanding public awareness: I am setting up a GoFundMe page that will be used to fund expenses such as Billboards, Google Ads etc and other extraneous expenses to give this campaign more prominence. To date, I have funded all of the expenses personally but we need more muscle to raise awareness and fight the issue.
I also need volunteers to help share the workload as I cannot continue to do this is on my own.
I have created a gmail account for communication purposes. If you would like to volunteer, then please send an email to this address:
➡️ blackwallandsilvertowntolls@gmail.com
You can also message me on WhatsApp via: 0780 955 6785