With a looming jobs bloodbath from Ed Miliband’s crusade to make Britain the global leader on climate change a civil war within Labour is about to break out over Net Zero, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
At a crunch meeting later this week, the car-makers will tell the Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds that thousands of jobs in the industry will soon be lost because of the unrealistic targets to sell Electric Vehicles. …
Haigh and Reynolds may well be sympathetic. The trouble is, trying telling the party’s leading Green Commissar Ed Miliband that the target has to be relaxed. High on his own apocalyptic rhetoric, Miliband will no doubt refuse. After all, what do a few car factory jobs count for when the very survival of the planet is at stake? And, anyway, any workers made redundant can simply switch to one of the hundreds of thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’ the transition to a carbon-free economy will create. Haigh will be sent packing.
The looming battle over EV quotas will just be a foretaste of what is to come. The Net Zero obsession is going to throw a lot of people out of work over the next few years. We have already seen that with the closure of the Port Talbot steel works in Wales, and now we are seeing it with the potential shuttering of car factories as well.
With some of the highest prices for electricity in the world, and more than double the United States, we will see a lot more traditional heavy industry close down very soon. That will get even worse when the new round of carbon border taxes come into force, driving up the price of imported raw materials. … The trade unions are already getting anxious about the impact on their members, and rightly so. It is going to be a bloodbath.
The real dividing line in this contest will be a very old one. It will pit Labour’s traditional, working class and trade union base, which is more concerned about jobs and wages, against the middle-class, sandal-wearing, ideological wing of the party, which is more concerned with saving the planet.
Worth reading in full.
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