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London will follow suit soon enough
Ye that's what got me worried too. As soon as they put something like this in place in one area, it makes it that much easier for other regions to follow suit 
This is when i get annoyed that i wasn't good at physics etc. at school. I would love to convert an 80's car to an electric one just for this and when trying to be enforced, i'd ask them what the issue was, as their banning was based on No2 emissions (or whatever it was) but my car wasn't putting out any emissions at all.
Someone somewhere brough up the point that a small car at idle puts out x amount of emissions, but you have to drive it a lot harder (i.e rev it higher) so it ends up putting out higher emissions over x miles than a 'higher' emission vehicle could. I remember seeing a top gear repeat the other day where they put up 3 cars against eachother and the one with the smallest engine used more fuel as Jeremy pointed out that he had to bounce it off the limiter almost just to do the speed limit.
If they're cutting down on emissions, then just aim it at emissions, don't tar a car by age. You can easily get into the debate about the environmental impact of building a new car (all the energy, chemicals etc. that go into producing it) vs. continuing to use your existing car. I'm all for saving the environment, i believe that we can live off of solar, tidal and wind energy etc. Just seems strange to ban a car by age if the reason is to do with emissions.