End costly pursuit of these arbitrary Net Zero deadlines says, Sir Iain Duncan

Protesters opposed to the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Image: Getty) People who work hard while counting their diminishing pennies astonished commentators when they voted ‘no’ to the incompetent Mayor Sadiq Khan and his expensive but bogus tax on older cars, ULEZ. Poll after poll tells us the majority of people are tired of being taken for granted, and hit with extra charges in the pursuit of arbitrary Net Zero deadlines. All this scaremongering has left us making peculiar decisions. In the past decade, as the USA ramped up gas production, the UK went in the opposite direction. We wound down our oil and gas production in the North Sea, and replaced it with gas and oil from other parts of the world – now including the USA. The result is our consumers pay vastly more for their energy than Americans, at least two and a half times as much per kilowatt hour, adding greatly to their bills. Worse, as Russia ‘s invasion of Ukraine showed, we had thrown away our energy security. As former chancellor Philip Hammond rightly pointed out, politicians haven’t ever come clean with the public about the cost they will have to bear. In financial terms, that cost, he claimed, will be higher than £1trillion. The public have made it clear they don’t want to be faced with a financial ‘punishment beating’ to meet an unnecessary and arbitrary deadline – ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. This was a deadline imposed without ever addressing the extra financial cost to taxpayers. When the EU and the USA have moved their 2030 deadline back to 2035 to ease the burden on industry and taxpayers, people are entitled to know why our government refuses to do the same. After all, the UK has the lowest emissions among the top five wealthy nations. So why should average households have to bear the extra burden? As ONS data shows, they have had to pay £15,540 in direct and indirect ‘green’ taxes already. This in the name of a 2030 deadline our competitors have already postponed. The Office for Budget Respon-sibility has estimated the cost of Net Zero to the UK will be at least £321billion by 2050. Other estimates put the cost of expanding the electricity grid in the hundreds of billions. And we now have to add the expensive upcoming ban on new gas boilers. Yet now, added to these problems is a greater risk. China is a systemic threat to us as a nation. Difficult as things are with the challenges of Net Zero, China is about to make them a great deal worse. That’s why China’s Communist government is rubbing its hands in anticipation. Massively subsidised by the government, they have been opening battery factories every few weeks and now almost every battery in a UK electric vehicle is Chinese. In addition, their battery companies are building cheap electric cars to swamp the UK market. Already, the vast majority of electric cars are built in China. The absurdity is that the UK, alone in the developed world, is ideologically rooted to the 2030 deadline. This leaves our car industry, once a world leader in ‘lean-burn’ engines which are designed to produce lower emissions, looking enviously at EU and US companies who have been given a five-year delay. This is not just about competition. China is guilty of genocide and slave labour. It has invaded the South China seas and plans to invade Taiwan. It has penetrated our politics, our universities and, incredibly, some defence projects. Downing Street recently discovered its cars were being tracked by embedded electronic control units, using Chinese-made elements. They can act as switches, to disable elements of batteries and engines. The irony is that China is dominating the electric vehicle industry while being the world’s largest polluter of the environment by a huge margin, and they won’t be sticking to any of the Net Zero targets with which we are obsessed. Given all this, isn’t it time, like our allies in Europe and the USA, to rethink this arbitrary target? We need to do this to ease the burden on our hard-hit taxpayers, to give our car companies time to compete and most of all for the sake of our country’s security.