Dash for Net Zero is recipe for economic catastrophe and defeat by our competitors
U-turn now
HOW long before the next Government wakes up and changes course on Net Zero?
A week? A year? Two?
Make no mistake, it has to happen.
As it stands, Keir Starmer will be in power in nine days. And while for now he may be swallowing Ed Miliband’s mad eco zealotry, even a big Labour majority will not overcome reality.
Private sales of battery cars are falling. Many disillusioned owners are selling up and reverting to petrol, diesel or hybrid. Absurd prices, feeble mileage ranges and lack of public chargers are all proving too much. Only company fleets are propping up the market.
Yet Labour is doubling-down on the Tories’ demand that manufacturers ensure 22 per cent of new cars sold are zero-emission this year, rising to 80 per cent by 2030. They will face punitive fines if they fail.
But buyers don’t want them. And it’s not commercially viable for car firms to keep discounting heavily, paying fines and producing motors they cannot sell.
Vehicle giant Stellantis has vowed to leave the UK unless the new Government backs off. It won’t be the last.
One of voters’ main fears about any Labour Government is that fashionable ideology will blind them to pragmatism and reality . . . leading to disaster.
So it is with the headlong dash for Net Zero with no regard to feasibility or the mind-boggling cost to ordinary people.
It is a recipe for economic catastrophe and defeat by our competitors, not the growth Labour claims to prioritise.
A U-turn is inevitable. Starmer must know it already.
The earlier the better.
Good riddance
JULIAN Assange is an egomaniac and a weasel masquerading as a journalist. At long last Britain is rid of him.
We recoil at his absurd glorification by his friends, campaigners and left-wing hacks who apparently know no better.
Assange stole state military secrets, leaked vast amounts recklessly and may ultimately have cost the lives of Allied troops and informants. The main beneficiaries were the West’s enemies: Russia, the Taliban and IS.
Some of his fans are fellow West-hating loons of the Corbyn variety.
Others appear to mistake what he did for genuine public interest journalism.
We don’t especially begrudge him freedom now, after 12 years. But it sticks in the craw that he never truly faced the music.
Cowardly throughout, Assange hid inside Ecuador’s London embassy for seven of those years — costing our police millions — to dodge extradition to Sweden on rape charges he believed would lead to his removal to the US.
Finally he served some deserved jail time in Belmarsh.
He is an odious creep — good riddance to him.
We can only sympathise with the Aussies having to take him back.