No wonder the left hates X so much. Elon Musk is using it to carve himself a role as Britain’s unofficial opposition – a role at which he is proving rather more effective than the official opposition. His latest interjection into UK politics is deadly. Responding to Scottish politicians who would like him to set up a Tesla factory in Scotland he replied simply: ‘very few companies will be willing to invest in the UK with the current administration.’
Ouch! It is so damaging to the Keir Starmer and his ministers because Musk is exactly the person whom they should want to be investing in Britain. He makes all the stuff which this government, and its predecessor, have tried but failed to get Britain making. Electric cars? Britain’s ‘world-leading’ target of banning new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, or now 2035, was supposed to turn Britain into an EV powerhouse, as was the money thrown at Britishvolt, a proposed EV battery factory in Northumberland. But while the latter venture failed and UK car companies have struggled to produce electric cars which motorists want to buy, Tesla forged ahead to become the world’s most successful car company.
You want to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, as Ed Miliband has pledged to do? It is going to be impossible to achieve by that date, but it will be even less possible without vast, grid-scale battery storage, without which we will be wasting much of the output from Miliband’s wind farms as well as going short of energy when there is little wind and solar energy available. Which company is the world leader in grid-scale electricity? Yep, Tesla again, which has built 14 gigawatt-hours’ worth of storage capacity around the world. I’m not personally advocating mass investment in battery storage, as it is still extremely expensive (as are other routes by a decarbonised grid), but if I were Ed Miliband I would be rolling out the red carpet to persuade Musk to bring his battery factories to Britain.
Then there are Britain’s space ambitions. Britain, as it happens, already has a successful satellite-making industry, but we don’t as yet launch them. This and the previous government have tried to put that right, but Richard Branson’s efforts to do so from Newquay airport failed miserably, and several proposed spaceports elsewhere in Britain have yet to spring a satellite into space. What is the world’s leading private company involved in the launch of satellites? That would be SpaceX, Musk’s ‘spare time’ venture. If you want a spaceport in Britain, why not entice him to build it?
Downing Street should be virtually Musk’s second home; he should be in and out there every other week. If the government were able to devise an industrial policy to please him it would open doors to mass investment from other world-leading companies, too. Instead, Musk seems to be living rent-free in Labour’s angst. Starmer didn’t even invite him to his global investment summit. The party treats the world’s most dynamic entrepreneur as some kind of sinister threat, on account that he bought Twitter and sacked all the left-wing ‘fact-checkers’ who used to try to police public opinion by blocking everything they didn’t like.
Labour can’t even accuse Musk of being a foreigner interfering in British politics because, of course, it sent its own agents to campaign on behalf of Kamala Harris. That was a huge own-goal which has effectively elevated Musk into a devastatingly effective leader of his majesty’s opposition.
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