Presumably, some future government will have to reverse the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in Britain. The country quite obviously lacks anything like the necessary charging infrastructure for a wholesale switch to electric for the national vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. Let alone sufficient generation capacity at peak times. But if or when they do, those future vehicles will now have to be manufactured abroad.
The 2030 deadline was first announced by Boris Johnson in 2020, and UK car makers began grandfathering the plant and production lines for new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in the wake of that decision. If the 2030 deadline were now to have been changed, it would have taken years of planning, capital expenditure and preparation to replace what would by then have been very tired facilities in order to go on producing petrol and diesel cars after that date. So it now seems all but certain that Britain’s last ICE cars will now roll off the production lines in 2030.
Keir Starmer is correct that the uncertainty around the 2030 deadline was affecting manufacturers’ ability to make decisions around future capital expenditure. But the uncertainty was a result of legislation on the statute books that was so patently self-destructive that almost everyone believed that they would be forced to change it at some point. But this was the last juncture at which that could have realistically been done in time to allow manufacturers to prepare to build new internal combustion engines vehicles after 2030.
So what will British motorists be driving by the late 2030s? Perhaps Trump’s protectionism will do the job he intends, and we will all drive overpowered muscle cars from Michigan with fuel consumption twice that of the sort of car that the Japanese firms are currently producing in Britain. Alternatively, our future may be as a sort of cold, rainy Cuba, in which we all drive increasingly ancient vehicles due to the government’s ideological intransigence. Either way, the steadily increasing emissions would be the kind of result that we’ve come to expect from environmental policies designed to placate activists.
But surprisingly enough, at least initially, we might instead be driving cars produced in the EU. This is despite the EU’s initial announcement that it would phase out the production of ICE vehicles at the same time as the UK.
As was the case with Boris Johnson’s ‘Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’, the EU plan was largely a form of signalling. Legislation such as this, which is designed to signpost rule changes well in advance, is useful for politicians who want to show that they are engaging with a problem without having to deal with the fallout themselves. Or at least, without dealing with it immediately. This has been a particular foible of British politicians of late, who seem to have forgotten that legislation is supposed to be the basis of law, rather than a means of ‘sending a message’. But the EU is not above it either.
2030 still felt a long way off back then, and the rules could be bent, or pushed back as necessary as the deadline approached. Certainly, they could as far as Boris Johnson was concerned. And as long as he was going no further than the EU, then British manufacturers weren’t being faced with anything more onerous than their nearest competitors.
The trouble was that, by the time the EU agreed in 2023 to delay the phase out of electric vehicles sales until 2035, Boris Johnson was no longer in office, and the Tories themselves had barely a year left before they would be unceremoniously thrown out of power altogether.
What’s most remarkable is that there has been barely a murmur of complaint from domestic car manufacturers
Yet even had cake and fate not intervened to bring down the former prime minister, the Tories always failed to reckon with the extent to which the system could force them to stick to their original promises. Firstly, there is the difference between the European Commission and the UK civil service – which are nominally equivalent institutions in the respective British and EU systems. The UK civil service needs explicit ministerial guidance to alter the implementation of legislation, and this often comes with a political cost. This is especially the case when it is something that goes against its natural inclinations, as the watering down of this kind of policy certainly would.
And then there is the role of the Supreme Court, and judicial review. A challenge could almost certainly have been mounted, which may well have found that any delay to the phase out of fossil fuel cars would have gone against the quasi-constitutional laws that successive governments have now bound themselves to, requiring them to reduce carbon emissions.
For all the traditional complaints by British Eurosceptics that overbearing EU regulation stifled industry, there has always been a pragmatic streak in Brussels, especially when the German and French economies are concerned. Climate campaigners have chalked up their fair share of victories in the European institutions, but in terms of starry-eyed idealism, they have to compete with the EU project itself. And the logic of ever closer union, which like green politics operates on a ratchet principle sustained by its own sense of inevitability, demands that reasonable concessions be made. Where it might now be considered passé for a national politician to weigh the needs of employment and the economy too heavily against those of the climate, one can do so more easily in the name of European unity.
For all the sound and fury we’ve heard over the new American import tariffs, the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate will have a vastly greater effect on Britain’s ability to sell vehicles to the United States in the medium to long term. EV’s make up a relatively small part of the UK’s vehicle exports to the US, yet in a few short years, selling anything but that in Britain will become illegal, so manufacturers would be forced to set up separate lines just for foreign customers in order to continue producing them. And the lack of equivalent government pressure on US manufacturers and consumers is likely to see EV demand rise even more slowly in America than here.
In Britain what’s most remarkable about all of this is that there has been barely a murmur of complaint from domestic car manufacturers. Perhaps this is a reflection of the relative decline in the influence of the consumer compared with that of the regulator and the policy-maker in today’s economic and political landscape. If EV’s are what the car makers are going to be forced to sell, then they may as well do their best to seem enthusiastic about them.
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