Let us not feign outrage. The Government’s decision to water down electric vehicle sales mandates is not a betrayal of the climate. It is a belated admission that the green transition cannot be built on the bones of British industry.
For months, we have watched ministers play a game of virtue-signalling chicken, demanding that 22% of new car sales be electric by 2024, while the very factories that built the Mini and the Vauxhall Corsa teeter on the brink. The numbers do not lie. EV uptake has slowed, charging infrastructure remains a postcode lottery, and the average British family cannot stomach a £40,000 hatchback.
What we are seeing is not a retreat from net zero but a recognition that the Victorians who built our railways understood something modern zealots do not: infrastructure must precede demand, not the other way round. By loosening the targets, the Government has chosen pragmatism over purity. It has decided that a functioning car industry employing 180,000 people is worth more than a ministerial press release about ‘world-leading ambition’.
History will judge this not as a concession to fossil fuel interests but as the first mature climate policy in years. Let the purists wail. The rest of us can drive a hybrid and still sleep at night.
