This appeared in The Daily Mail; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14134949/MATT-RIDLEY-Labours-car-industry-wrecking-policy-Chinese-laughing.html
Unlucky Luton. The miserable news that Stellantis, the owner of Vauxhall, is considering laying off 1,100 workers from its van manufacturing plant is a hammer blow to the town. What makes it all the more painful is the knowledge that the damage is entirely avoidable and the direct result of a futile government policy that will have no measurable effect on the climate anyway.
The decision to force all vehicle manufacturers in Britain to move progressively away from engines that burn oil, and to fine them if they don’t move fast enough, is beginning to look like the Starmer government’s Waterloo, far more serious than the Quatre-Bras skirmishes over spectacles, suits, farms and the CV of Rachel from Complaints.
For once Sir Keir and his ministers are justified in reaching for their usual excuse of blaming the mess on their Tory predecessors. In January this year the Sunak government proudly boasted of having passed into law “the most ambitious regulatory framework for the switch to electric vehicles of any country in the world”.
True, it was a partial retreat from Boris Johnson’s even more ambitious (mad) zero-emission vehicle plan but even so the law reads like a 1930s Soviet Five-Year Plan for tractor production from the Minsk branch of Gosplan. It mandates the precise percentage of new cars that manufacturers produce each year that are to be electric: 22% this year, 28% next, then 33%, 38%, 52%, 66% and 80% in 2030, rising to 100% in 2035. The targets for vans are a bit less onerous.
Notice that, in true Soviet fashion, this plan nowhere considers the consumer’s opinion. Sure enough, the plan has skidded into the market like a car crashing into a ditch.
Inexplicably to the government, real people are not doing what the commissars tell them. This year sales are likely to be nearly 100,000 vehicles short of the target of 450,000 new electric vehicles sold. It turns out that many people prefer the convenience and running cost of a good old petrol or diesel engine over the range anxiety, lack of charging points and disappointing second-hand value of an EV.
I am one of them, having recently bought a small diesel Jaguar. It’s a truly excellent car or was until I skidded on the ice and fender-bent it last week. Perhaps I was distracted by irritation at the advert in which Jaguar’s creative elfs danced about boasting that they hate their own products, despise their customers and cannot wait to give up making decent cars and move to all electric.
Failure to meet Gosplan’s targets means the industry paying huge fines, of £15,000 per car, or buying a credit from another manufacturer unaffected by the system, usually a Chinese one. This acts like a tax on home-grown cars.
The EV mandate is therefore going to cost the industry an astonishing £6 billion this year alone. Two-thirds of that will be the cost of massively discounting electric vehicles in a desperate attempt to persuade us to buy them. The rest is the punitive fine for not succeeding in the task. The laughter in China is audible even here.
Nothing could be easier than for Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, to say “this was a foolish Tory policy which we will reverse.” Instead, boxed in by Labour’s manifesto commitment to go even harder and restore the 2030 target for outlawing new petrol and diesel engines altogether, he is insisting decarbonisation is more important than jobs, consumer preference or cost.
Not that he puts it that way. “I have said repeatedly that for me decarbonisation cannot mean deindustrialisation,” Mr Reynolds said this week. He might say so, but car workers in Luton can testify that is exactly what it means.
The policy of telling consumers what to buy and rationing the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles is leading to cutbacks in production at factories with job losses throughout the
supply chain, including on forecourts. Livelihoods are being sacrificed on the altar of pretending to reduce emissions.
Pretending? Yes, the bitterest pill for the workers in Luton to swallow is that electric vehicles are not especially low-carbon anyway. They may emit nothing as you drive them, but once you take into account the carbon dioxide emitted in mining the minerals for their huge batteries, in generating electricity to charge the car, and so forth, it turns out that you have to drive them a long way before you save any emissions.
Calculations by Volvo, comparing the carbon footprint of an electric car with a petrol equivalent, found that after 124,000 miles (who drives a car that far anyway?), the emissions saving could be as low as 15%. So this policy is saving less than 15% of the 52% of transport emissions that come from cars, transport being 26% of Britain’s total emissions, which are 0.8% of global emissions. That equals 0.016% of global emissions, a number far too small to have a measurable effect on the world’s climate.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom
If an electric car is made and driven in a country that still uses coal for its electrical grid, such as China or Germany, then it might never earn back the emissions produced in its manufacture. Such cars might as well be called coal cars.
In the real world, as opposed to the cult that is the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (the cost of running which to us taxpayers is an extraordinary £400 million a year), our competitors are profiting from our idiocy. China increased its emissions last year more than the net increase in emissions in the world as a whole; Europe is slowing down its transition to so called green energy; America is about to tear up its electric vehicle mandate altogether. We are looking more and more isolated.
https://x.com/7Kiwi/status/1861712018387898530
Until this policy came in, Britain had a highly successful auto industry, selling Jags, Range Rovers and Nissans all over the world. Automotive was our biggest single category of manufactured exports. Last year Britain made over 900,000 cars, 120,00 commercial vehicles and 1.62 million engines, of 70 different models. The industry employed almost 200,000 people in manufacturing, 800,000 in the wider automative sector, turned over £93 billion and invested £4 billion a year in research and development.
To put all this at risk is crazy. Perhaps the only argument that might get through to Mr Reynolds and Sir Starmer is the political one. Do you really want to go into the 2029 general election forcing people to make 66% of new vehicle purchases electric, having failed to build enough charging points and increased electricity prices to the highest in the developed world, while relying on a wind-destabilised grid and insisting at the same time on forcing people heat their homes with lukewarm and costly electric heat pumps? I cannot think of a more effective electoral suicide note.
In that year, 2029, a 340-metre-wide asteroid named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction, is going to pass close enough to Earth to cause tremors. If it deviates slightly and hits Luton it will be touch and go which does more damage: Apophis or the Starmer government’s energy policies.