It was Europe for the Conservatives for much of the last twenty years, reform of public services and the Iraq war for the Blair government, and Europe again during the Thatcher years. Every governing party starts fighting amongst themselves eventually. And this government won’t be any different. 

With looming job losses from Ed Miliband’s ideological crusade to make Britain the global leader on climate change it is already clear that a civil war within Labour is about to break out over net zero – and the battle will be a vicious one. The Telegraph has the story.

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. 

The companies already have to make sure that 22 per cent of the vehicles they sell are battery-powered, and that is set to increase to 28 per cent in January. If they don’t, there will be fines of up to £15,000 per vehicle. Stellantis, which owns Peugeot, Citroen and Fiat, will warn that the plan may mean factories have to close, and others may follow that lead. 

Haigh and Reynolds may well be sympathetic. The trouble is, trying to tell 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 cars 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. 

Read the full story here.