I know that the 2016 referendum was just an in/out referendum and there wasn't an explicit list of post Brexit demands, but I think most reasonable people can agree that it carried with it certain obligations, not least getting a grip on immigration. In any case, the politics that followed the referendum and the subsequent landslide for the Tories suggested the public wanted a clean break from the dismal metropolitan consensus politics that has plagued Westminster for the last two decades.

Certainly, one of the main reasons I voted to leave was to break with the green groupthink that permeates every Brussels diktat. The Renewables Directive and Large Combustion Plant Directive have been a disaster for European energy policy, making member states more reliant on fossil fuels and precarious energy imports.

It is a safe bet that those who voted for Brexit and subsequently Johnson's Tories did not vote for a programme of heat pumps, electric vehicles and eyewatering household bills to appease the climate gods. That the Tories somehow believe this is what the nation has been crying out for is an indication of the intellectual rot at the top of politics.

It's almost amusing that those who've accused leave voters of being "dangerous ideologues" are the same people who looked at the fallout from Covid and Brexit and concluded that households should pay more for their heating and industry must pay more to keep the machines turning. Somehow, Britain punishing its elderly and poor passes for sensible expert led policy in the Westminster bubble.

This is not your run of the mill incompetence at work though. The decision to ramp up bills is entirely deliberate. The eco zealots want higher bills as a means to change behaviour.

The problem is, there's no evidence of a "climate emergency". Moreover, there is no evidence that deliberately making ourselves poorer and reducing our living standards will impact something as arbitrary and reductionist as the global average temperature. And if carbon really is responsible for warming the planet then the systemic opposition to nuclear power makes no sense at all. Our obsession with useless windmills has led to the UK burning more fossil fuels in order to keep the lights on.

This is the product of two decades worth of ideological zealotry in energy policy and now we're approaching that crunch point where even our media cannot ignore the consequences. The public is waking up to Johnson's Net Zero disaster and so are Tory backbenchers who realise it may cost them their jobs. Unless the Tories have a deathwish they need to kick Net Zero into the long grass. 2022 may be the year when the Tory party turns decisively against Net Zero even if it means new leadership.

If we had a conservative party worthy of its name it would not be touching Net Zero with a barge pole. Ultimately Net Zero is just an authoritarian elite agenda to control and micromanage our behaviour and sneak socialism in by the back door. Net Zero boondoggles are the same old failed Keynesian ideas that leads to bloated and inefficient state directed industry - which is more likely to deliver seventies style stagnation rather than eco-utopia.

Ultimately this battle is nothing at all to do with the climate. As we saw with Brexit and Covid, it's about a section of society who worships authority and prestige, and believes we should all obey the instruction of the expert class. Worse still, they believe that ordinary people should not have a say in it, and as usual, they resort to conspiracy theories, and smear opposition to their agenda as some sort of fascist coup. They need people to believe this in order to legitimise their programme of internet censorship. The ends always justify the means.

Left to their own devices they would almost certainly have overturned the 2016 referendum, and we'd be living under a military enforced curfew every time there's an outbreak of the sniffles. On a long enough timeline they'd ban steak dinners and have us eating insects. These are more or less the same people who think men can get pregnant, and if boys pick up pink Lego bricks they should be frogmarched to the nearest gender reassignment clinic for being "born in the wrong body". Grifting remainer QCs want to feed puberty blockers to kids.

It is often said that the classic divisions of right and left are no longer relevant but I disagree. It's true that the fight of the modern age is between ordinary people attempting to live their lives privately and peacefully, and entitled authoritarians who wish to control their every decision, but the latter tends to hail from the metropolitan left, to which a large part of the Westminster Tory party belongs. Net Zero is a manifestation of that. It's another front in a war we cannot afford to lose.

When it comes down to it, scientists can no more accurately measure or predict what's going on with the climate than they can a pandemic. They have statistical models based on layers of assumptions where if just one assumption is wrong then the whole model is wildly wrong. As the health of an economy cannot be reduced to a single GDP metric, the health of the planet cannot be expressed as a global average temperature. The very idea is a nonsense.

If Scottish and Welsh devolution have served any purpose at all, it is to demonstrate what Britain would be like were it run by the virtue signalling nannying elites. Labour seems dead set on turning Wales into an open prison, while Sturgeon's corrupt little fiefdom is starting to resemble a sub-Saharan basketcase kleptocracy as it panders to the very worst instincts of wokery and welfare paternalism. Sturgeon can get away with it because London is still cashing her cheques, but if the UK ever loses to the the same dark forces running Scotland, there is nobody to bail us out.

The eco-austerity our elites are wedded to will not save the planet. They will only succeed in making us poorer, colder and sicker, while they drive heavy industry abroad where there are virtually no controls on emissions or pollution.

If Britain is to climb out of the Covid hole then we need to be on a war footing for cheap and abundant energy, maximising the use of our domestic resources. We need to decouple the civil service from the Net Zero cult and restore the separation between the church of climate scientology and government. We must then put economic and social freedom back at the top of the agenda. Only UKIP will do that.