Labour’s green war on the working class

After 120 years of operations, Vauxhall’s van factory in Luton, Bedfordshire is shutting its doors for good, putting 1,100 jobs at risk. Stellantis, Vauxhall’s parent company, has left no room for doubt as to why. In an unusually frank statement, it said its decision was made ‘within the context of the UK’s ZEV [zero emissions vehicle] mandate’. In other words, the UK’s rush towards Net Zero, and to electric vehicles in particular, is bringing the car industry to its knees.

Vauxhall is not alone. The cries of alarm from other car-industry giants have been deafening lately. Ford says it plans to cut 800 jobs over the next three years – shedding a sixth of its British workforce – citing ‘unworkable’ green rules. Nissan, which runs the UK’s largest car plant in Sunderland, warns that current EV policies threaten ‘the viability of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds in investment’. But will the Labour government heed their warnings?

No one should be surprised that the ZEV is crippling the car industry. Introduced by the Conservative government in January 2024, it forces UK-based manufacturers to sell a minimum quota of electric cars and vans. This year, a minimum of 22 per cent of cars and 10 per cent of vans sold must be electric. These quotas rise each year until EVs make up 80 per cent of all sales in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035. For every non-electric vehicle that is sold outside this quota, British manufacturers must pay a fine of £15,000 per car and £9,000 per van (rising to £18,000 next year).

With customers balking at the price and the impracticalities of EVs, most firms are struggling to meet the target. This year, only three carmakers – BMW, Mercedes and Chinese-owned Geely – will meet the mandate.

Responding to Vauxhall’s announced job cuts, Labour business secretary Jonathan Reynolds promised to rethink and ease the current ZEV targets in the short term. But he has refused to budge on the longer-term goal of a full transition to EVs. Worse, he has reaffirmed Labour’s promise to bring forward a ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2035 to 2030. Carmakers and jobs be damned.

Besides, it’s not just Britain’s car industry that will be subjected to these Stalinist zero-emissions quotas. The Labour government confirmed this week that boilermakers will also be subjected to fines if they fail to sell enough heat pumps. Just as with EVs vs conventional cars, while heat pumps may be eco-friendly, they are both more expensive and inferior in just about every way to the ‘polluting’ products they’re supposed to replace. The inevitable result will be a hike in the price of boilers and manufacturers going out of business.

And that barely scratches the surface. Thanks to successive governments’ abandonment of fossil fuels, neglect of nuclear energy and embrace of renewables, British companies now pay the highest electricity prices in the developed world. The true cost of this is borne out in deindustrialisation and job losses.

In recent months, we’ve had the grim news of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales losing 3,800 jobs, as it transitions from a coal-powered blast furnace to a less carbon-intensive electric-arc furnace. Grangemouth, Scotland’s last oil refinery, responsible for a whopping four per cent of the country’s GDP, is planning to shut down in the summer, thanks to Labour’s war on North Sea oil and gas.

Everywhere you look, industries are collapsing under the weight of Net Zero – either thanks to specific rules like the ZEV, which make certain sectors unviable, or thanks to skyrocketing energy costs. Yet Labour refuses to reckon with the damage this is all causing. When faced with the choice between saving working-class jobs and meeting fantastical green targets, it is all too clear which side the current government is on. Net Zero deserves to be its downfall.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.