Ed Miliband is taking a wrecking ball to the UK economy (Image: PA)
Keir Starmer’s Government has been in power for less than half a year and produced its first budget only weeks ago and yet the evidence of the economic illiteracy and total lack of business acumen of the current administration is manifesting itself in so many ways.
The latest and most iconic to date is the announcement by the Vauxhall car company that they are to shut their Luton production plant, entirely down to Ed Milliband’s Net Zero madness, aggravated by the avalanche of anti-growth policies which have been heaped upon the enterprise economy
So now a company that has been in existence for 120 years is laying off over a thousand employees in response to the illogical insistence on a national crash drive towards EVs. The UK is already extremely green and can only further reduce global CO2 emissions by 1%, in other words by nothing worth speaking of.
There it is. The Net Zero fanatics in the statist, near-Marxist, accidental Government to which we are subjected, are prepared to have people live in fuel poverty and freeze to death over the winter as collateral damage.
Taxpayers will have subsidise EVs that people do not want with all their attendant problems of child labour in the extraction of rare minerals and the problems of the eventual disposal of masses of toxic batteries, not to mention the unaffordability of EVs and lack of infrastructure to make them in any way practical and fit for purpose.
At the same time, Mr Milliband is hell-bent on spreading taxpayer subsidised wind farms across the country while buying foreign produced gas and oil at the highest prices, so that the UK pays more for its electricity than any other developed nation.
All this while our abundant natural resources are undeveloped, our nuclear programme a non-starter and flood defences remain under invested. But it seems to be acceptable to force energy suppliers to blackmail people into installing inadequate and impractical heat pumps.
What is it all for, this destruction of the UK economy? Surely it cannot be merely so that our benighted political class can virtue signal and feel like heroes at dinner parties, can it?
Or could it be the insatiable desire for gongs awarded by our King, himself a major beneficiary of huge funds provided by the development of wind farms on crown land. Oh! The everlasting power of patronage.
Or is it that so many now make lots of money from the green agenda at the expense of the rest of the nation? Certainly those now heading for redundancy at Vauxhall deserve an answer.
This developing tradgedy has been ballooned by a nation now taxed at higher levels than during the post-war reconstruction of 1947 and over-regulated beyond belief. Entrepreneurs are giving up under the headwinds of a Government that either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand.
The PM and Chancellor’s mantra, before and after the election is that growth and wealth creation are the Government’s biggest priorities. These are sensible priorities to have, because all else depend upon them.
What is starkly worrying is that Ms Reeves thinks that taxing and borrowing £70billion is a growth promoter. That paying the unproductive public sector more for nothing and expanding the state is a growth promoter. It beggars belief and points to major problems ahead.
The situation at Vauxhall is only the beginning. We now face a slow motion national car crash of job losses, inflation and poor productivity. The dead hand of the state will lead to creaking public services and a Britain falling ever more into relative poverty, already we are 30th in the world league table of GDP per capita measured by Purchasing Power Parity. Furthermore, there is a risk of catastrophic stagflation not seen since the 1970s.
Put your seatbelts on as it is going to be a bumpy ride, with or without EVs.
John Longworth is an entrepreneur and businessman. He is Chairman of the Independent Business Network of family businesses and a former MEP
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