Sunak's Net Zero smoke and mirrors act

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Sunak's Net Zero smoke and mirrors act

Pete North • 21 September 2023

Always read the smallprint. Never Trust a Tory.

There was only one pertinent point in Sunak's speech yesterday. He said "we will still meet our international commitments and hit Net Zero by 2050". Us plebs were thrown a couple of scraps from the table in the form of a delay to the petrol vehicle ban, but he's spent today reassuring the blob that the Net Zero destination remains the same.

And indeed it does. Always read the smallprint. Extending deadlines is smoke and mirrors. All the other market distorting measures remain firmly in place and will remain so unless the Climate Change Act is repealed. Which won't happen under Sunak.

The auto industry will still be penalised for not meeting EV quotas, while stealth taxes will gradually tilt the market in favour of heat pumps. Our bills are only going to go upwards. The intention is to strangle the car industry on the quiet and tax us into submission on everything else. As more details emerge, it will become more obvious that Sunak has pulled a fast one. So much for that "honest debate".

Today Mr Sunak has said eco-zealots "just don’t care about the impact on families", but in truth, nor does he. We're going to lose our auto industry to China, and nothing in his latest musings is likely to do anything to bring down household energy bills. Sunak is still intent on throwing our money away on foreign aid eco-imperialism and ridiculous contraptions like carbon capture. He'll no doubt attempt to sweeten the deal for wind barons. The man is a fraud.

The notion that Sunak has opened "clear green water" between the Tories and Labour is a confidence trick. The Tories disagree with Labour only on the means, but not the destination, and even then, there isn't much to choose between them.

Admittedly there is a lot of politics yet to come, and more aspects of Net Zero to hit the buffers in the same way the wind industry has, but this latest Tory con isn't an attempt to delay or roll back Net Zero. It's an attempt to save it. The performative outrage of the green blob is wholly tactical to make this meagre policy tweak seem more significant than it is so they don't lose any more ground.

Even if Sunak was playing straight with us and there was a genuine intention of mitigating the impact on families, this is very far from a radical change of direction, and the Tories are still going to inflict a lot of pain and cause incalculable, irrecoverable damage in the name of Net Zero. This is little more than a political grift, to yet again establish that Labour would be worse. We're again being blackmailed into accepting mediocrity. You'd be a fool to fall for it.

There is only one party that fully opposes Net Zero - and that's Ukip. The Reform Party today put out a video alleging to oppose Net Zero in which Alex Phillips says "What we should be looking at, is finding ways to monetise, whether it be through tariffs or penalties or whatever, products coming from the big polluters, and then we can use that money to fund the green transition." She's talking about a carbon border tax, the same as the EU's - to exclusively to "fund the green transition". So in fact Reform wholeheartedly supports Net Zero and green taxes. Ukip is the only party offering a real choice.

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