Kier Starmer is leaving Vauxhall workers to suffer (Image: PA)
So, it’s looking like that 1100 people at Luton’s Vauxhall plant are going to lose their jobs all because this incompetent Government is dragging its heels on reducing punishing electric vehicle targets.
Our joke of a business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was warned TEN days after Labour won the election that the factory was on its knees and likely to close if the EV targets weren’t reduced.
Reynolds ignored the warnings and now the city of Luton and its people who depend on Vauxhall factory for their livelihood will pay the price.
This Government’s lunatic policies on zero emission cars are going to wreck the car manufacturing industry in Britain. It’s a jobs killer not least because the bottom has fallen out of the EV car market – a fact to which this Government seems oblivious.
That fact alone is costing car manufacturers £6B a year – and losses Ike that are unsustainable. Fact. Less than one in five EVs were sold to private buyers this year – businesses bought the rest. And why? Because people just don’t want them despite the fact 77% of all new EVs are heavily discounted.
The other problems? They don’t go far enough on a charge, they take too long to charge and the fast chargers are often more expensive than both petrol and diesel.
And who wants to spend their lives suffering from “charge anxiety” never knowing if you’ve actually got enough power to get you where you’re going.
EVs also frequently break down as I know to my cost having ended up locked inside one for more than an hour. And there are thousands like me who’ve had similar experiences.
And why should car manufacturers be forced by law to make 22% of all their cars electric especially when people aren’t buying them. Why should they be fined £15,000 for every vehicle that falls short of these unreachable targets? It’s crippling the industry.
Last year Britain made nearly one million cars, 1.62 million engines and 120,000 commercial vehicles. The industry employed 200,000 people in manufacturing, 800 000 in the wider automative sector, turned over £93B and invested £4B in research and development.
Why the Hell would these blinkered eco maniacs in Government put all that at risk in their futile race to Net Zero? Why aren’t they looking at what’s best for the British people? Why aren’t they thinking about jobs, the economy, this country’s future. And don’t say we won’t have a future if the planet burns. Because the fact is nothing Britain does is going to stop that happening not as long as Russia, China and the US keep knocking up coal fired power stations every other week.
And why does this Government believe EVs are the key to drastically cutting carbon dioxide – they aren’t. Not when you take into account the Co2 produced in mining the minerals for their huge batteries, generating the electricity to charge the car and the fact you have to drive tens of thousands of miles (124,000 to be precise) for emission savings as low as 15%.
Britain emits just 0.8% of global carbon emissions and this car wrecking policy is likely to cut those emissions by a piddling 0.016%. Which translated means next to nothing.
The lesson of EVs – Governments have to learn that you can’t force people to buy a product they don’t want. And as things stand people don’t want electric cars. And if Starmer and Co don’t work fast to reduce these targets there’ll be no cars – electric or otherwise – being produced in this country. And how will all the job losses that will result in sit with Starmer’s “Growth Growth Growth” policy?
We already know the government’s race to Net Zero isn’t yielding the lower energy bills it promised or the green jobs or the cleaner planet it had hoped.
None of which currently matters to the 1,1 000 people in Vauxhall’s Luton plant who are wondering how the Hell they’re going to get through Christmas never mind the rest of their lives.
This country was once famous for its steel industry, its car industry its oil and gas industry. It’s all going down the pan now thanks to a bunch of eco zealots who if they get their way will take us all back to the dark ages with rationing and a wrecked economy.
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