Our leaders are living in an eco-bubble if they think ordinary people can afford their breakneck race to Net Zero
HAS the Labour Party learned nothing from the debacle of its 2019 General Election campaign?
On that occasion the party tickled its middle-class Islington supporters in every favourite place, while ignoring the concern of working-class voters in the Midlands and North.
The result is that it went down to its heaviest defeat in a century.
Sir Keir Starmer likes to think he has decontaminated Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy — and true enough, Starmer is unlikely to start calling a terror group his “friends”.
Yet still he and his party are fixated on the obsessions of green-minded voters in metropolitan areas while promising nothing but misery for manual workers in traditional industries, as well as for the finances of low-income households.
Even the unions are now berating Starmer for his promise to end all new oil and gas extraction licences in the North Sea.
Gary Smith, General Secretary of the GMB union, describes the policy as “naïve” and said it shows a “lack of intellectual rigour and thinking”.
Sharon Graham, of the union Unite, has also lambasted the policy.
I don’t always see eye to eye with union leaders, but on this I couldn’t put it better myself.
Even with a shift to green energy, Britain is going to remain reliant on oil and gas for many years to come.
It would be cheaper and better for the environment if they were produced in the North Sea, rather than imported from the US, the Middle East or elsewhere.
Given the energy consumed in bringing gas to Britain in the form of liquefied natural gas, Starmer has just committed his party to a policy which will actually increase the UK’s carbon emissions for the foreseeable future — as well as increasing fuel prices for UK households.
How silly can you get?
Labour’s climate policy remains heavily under the influence of Ed Miliband — himself of course a failed Labour leader — who seems more interested in cosying up to extreme pressure groups such as Just Stop Oil than in devising a coherent programme to improve the environment.
All this ought to provide the Conservatives with valuable ammunition for the next election campaign — except, that is, that they are seriously hampered in this department by their own foolish net zero policy.
While the Government has said it will issue licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, it keeps coming up with ever madder ways of imposing huge costs on households.
The latest is a plan for punitive fines on manufacturers which sell us gas boilers.
Under the plans, central heating installers will be set targets to sell a certain proportion of heat pumps.
For every “missing” heat pump they will be fined £5,000 — a cost they will have no choice but to pass on to customers.
In other words, when our old boiler reaches the end of its life, either we will have to shell out for a new heat pump, at upwards of £10,000 a time, or, if we opt for a cheaper gas replacement, we will be hit with an indirect fine.
The “energy security and net zero” secretary Grant Shapps may love to boast about installing a heat pump in his home.
But the £5,000 grant which we taxpayers are providing to subsidise his new heating system won’t be there for the rest of us — the Government has only made enough money available for the first 30,000 homes to take advantage of it.
We all want a cleaner planet, but for most households, switching to a heat pump will be a huge burden on their finances.
What’s more, there are many misery stories of people who fitted the devices only to find that they don’t always keep their house warm.
It is a similar story with electric cars.
Shapps boasted several years ago of buying a Tesla (while also keeping a 27mpg Chrysler Crossfire in his garage).
Electric cars are fine if you can afford to buy one, you have somewhere off-road to charge it and you have a second petrol or diesel car for longer journeys.
But for ordinary motorists with no off-street parking they are a nightmare.
The North West of England was revealed last week to have only one public charging point for every 85 electric vehicles.
And even if you can find one, it will cost you to use them, with some charging 85p per kilowatt-hour.
As well as costing half as much again to buy as a petrol car, electric cars currently cost much more to run if charged from public charging points — 21p per mile for an electric VW ID.3 against 14p for a petrol Golf.
How ironic, given that we left the EU partly to rid ourselves of excessive rules and regulations, that the Government has become more dogmatic about net zero than the EU — the latter of which has relaxed a proposed ban on internal combustion engines from 2035.
With Labour and the Conservatives falling over each other to reach net zero regardless of the cost to ordinary people, we no longer have much of a choice — with none of the established/big political parties prepared to look again at the issue.
Our leaders are living in an eco-bubble, oblivious to the way ordinary people live.
As the late Lord Lawson once said, the worst policies result from a consensus between the main political parties.
That has never been more true than it is now.