In the last 15 years, Transport for London with its bicycle-obsessed leader, has deliberately, with the strident aid of the last three London mayors, made life for cab drivers unbearable
January 22, 2026 15:37
I‘m a fan, as some of you may know, of London taxis. To me, more than anything else, they say iconic London. My late husband Jack wrote arguably his best play, The Knowledge (Prix Italia prize), in 1979, when I would occasionally come home to find four taxis at the gate, their drivers ensconced around my kitchen table, eating bagels and spilling stories.
Driving a cab was always a working-class occupation, a way out of East-End poverty for the children of immigrants. Jewish cabbies made up a sizeable percentage of the Knowledge boys and Jack loved a tale of failure and injustice. Added to which, from the moment he came down from Manchester to live here, he had a love affair not just with me but with the great city of London.
Uber drivers do not possess the PhD in the geography and topography of a vast capital city as cabbies do. They do not have to. They rely on sat-nav. They also sit with their engines on 24/7, polluting the airways in a way Mayor Khan does not normally countenance. They may be a morsel cheaper but they don’t always appear to be very accountable.
In Jack’s play, the actor and director Jonathan Lynn played the role of the Jewish Knowledge boy, who sailed through the famously hard tests, or Appearances as they are called, with ease to attain, in less than two years, his precious Green Badge, only to be found tipsy in charge of his vehicle after a celebration of his achievement. At the end of the play he is once again showing his prowess by rapidly learning Hebrew to facilitate his aliyah.
Jonny also wrote Yes Minister, Maggie Thatcher’s sit-com of choice, bringing intelligence and brilliant plotting to the tired old world of sit-com and showing our farcical, civil service-controlled government. Like Dad’s Army and Only Fools and Horses, the comedy never dates.
Mysteriously, although his co-writer Antony Jay and leading men Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington were knighted for their contribution to the world of arts and entertainment, Jonny Lynn was not similarly honoured. Hmmm… thinks…? England lost a fine Renaissance man when he left our shores to direct films in the US.
“Your old man wrote The Knowledge, dinn’e Maureen?” Forty-seven years later, not a week goes by that I am not greeted by a black cab driver who watched the play more times than he or she can remember and knows the script backwards. Today, Jonny, and Lesley Joseph and me are sadly the few players alive and still plying our trade.
I stand up for cabbies wherever and whenever I can and directed a stage version of The Knowledge at the Charing Cross Theatre a couple of years ago, with Stephen Pacey playing examiner Mr Burgess, “the Vampire,” effortlessly acted on TV by Hawthorne. It was a joy to work on and my favourite moment was when, in an audience jam-packed with cabbies and their partners, I stood at the back of the theatre and watched all the wifely elbows going into cabby ribs when, on stage, the Jewish couple lay in bed, with her testing him on his runs and routes.
“That’s me, that’s us!” could be clearly heard all over the theatre.
In the past 15 years, Transport for London, with its bicycle-obsessed leader, has deliberately, with the strident aid of the last three London mayors, made life for cab drivers unbearable. They have closed off their historic short cuts, like the Embankment, turned Park Lane into a grinding one-lane parade, dug up every suburban road they can get their hands on and created more unnecessary diversions than a game of Snakes and Ladders. I have seen the future and it is orange and cone-shaped.
If you live in north London, may I suggest you stay home, permanently. They seem to despise car owners, despite making millions out of us in taxes, fuel and fines.
And don’t get me going on their favoured and precious cyclists. The powers that – shouldn’t – be, have forced buses and taxis into one lane, thereby creating the hideous, ill-designed mess of pottage that is now our roads. Meanwhile, these same wretched bicycle lanes are empty of the one thing they were created for – bikes!
Twice a day a trickle of ghastly Lime bikes and a brave mother with a kid on the back and a cockerpoo on the front, brave the lanes. Westbourne Terrace – empty. Haverstock Hill, ditto. It is sickening. The only time I see a bike from my windscreen is as the rider disappears across a red light with a box on his back saying EATS.
This is London, mate, not flipping Amsterdam. We don’t have a cycle friendly layout and our two-wheeled friends are not encouraged to use the canal paths. Furthermore, while TfL is banking the money from Lime bikes and the rest, we oldies, of tri-focal glasses and worse, macular degeneration, are tripping over the ponderous abandoned machines as they lie rusting on wet pavements, so that we often end up clogging up the corridors of A&E. And I wouldn’t be spitting these attacks if any of that banked revenue was being used to straighten the cracked pavements or, God forbid, fill in the potholes. I did say don’t get me going…
They have fluctuated between extolling diesel as a preference over petrol, then changing their preference to electric, without, of course, commissioning enough charging stations. Then they are forcing through the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, which will kill the cabbies’ major pick-up points. Now they are adding insult to more insult for actually charging drivers 20 per cent of a fare to pick up customers at airports – from actual cab ranks. This is rank (pun intended) favouritism against the black cab industry.
My heart breaks for my salt-of-the-earth comrades who must work longer and longer self-employed hours just to make a living. They have adapted warily to accepting cards over cash, which means a huge loss in revenue for them. London cabbies have also had to accept being called on Apps, who take a large percentage off their fares. May I heartily recommend JUMP which is the taxi driver-run app of my choice.
So, peripatetic reader, when you see that bright yellow light on that beautiful black cab, do spare a thought for the driver, who has paid at least 65,000 quid to get it taxed and on the road, and is happy to lug your portmanteau on wheels or enable a disability ramp to roll forth from their cab – and just throw Uber back to its erstwhile founder, Mr Kalanick – with or without his Jewish mother – stick out your arm and sit comfortably secure, with someone who knows where the University Women’s Club is, doesn’t have to look up the Chocolate Factory on Waze and might just say, “I had that Maureen Lipman in my cab last week.”
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