Take Oxford. If you say Oxford is turning itself into a ‘
15-minute city’ – that is, a hyper-localised city in which you can get what you need within a 15-minute walk from your home – you’ll be mocked as a gullible fool. Oxford’s plans are being ‘jumped on by conspiracy theorists’ who are ‘falsely conflat[ing]’ different things,
says one report.
Slate calls it the ‘
15-minute city conspiracy theory’ (why are American publications so bad at covering British issues?). As for the claim that Oxford is trialling a kind of ‘
climate lockdown’, that’s yet another ‘conspiracy theory’, say the city’s councillors. And we’ve received a ‘torrent of abuse’ as a result of this ‘conspiracy theory’, they say. In short, everyone needs to calm down and pipe down.
Hold on a minute.
Oxford really is bringing in ‘traffic filters’, though. And the intention really is to ‘reduce traffic levels in Oxford by targeting unnecessary journeys by cars’. Motorists really will be fined if they drive through the traffic filters during certain times of the day. And the aim really is to socially re-engineer the city’s populace out of using their cars – the road restrictions and financial punishments are designed to ‘make walking, cycling, public and shared transport the
natural first choice’, boasts Oxfordshire County Council (my emphasis). That is, it’s a kind of sin tax, to use John Stuart Mill’s phrase, where you’ll be fined for the sin of driving in the hope that you’ll eventually feel so economically punished that you’ll choose walking instead. And all of this really is about protecting the climate from the fumes of Oxford’s motoring masses. It’s about ‘help[ing] tackle climate change’, Oxford says of its sinister traffic filters, which will be enforced by ‘automatic number plate recognition cameras’.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/24/ukraine-nationhood-matters/