Diesel U-turn does not inspire confidence
When governments make terrible decisions, their successors in office should not be embarrassed about reversing them. So yesterday’s announcement that new petrol and diesel car sales will be banned by 2040 in order to improve the quality of our air is not inherently outrageous. The original sin lies at the door of the Labour government, which heavy-handedly encouraged consumers to buy diesel vehicles more than 15 years ago. Financial incentives were deployed to boost sales of what turned out to be a relatively dirty, unhealthy mode of transport. Who should pick up the bill now that it turns out that encouragement was misguided?
The answer, apparently, is drivers themselves. For the Treasury will not back a scrappage scheme. This is a palpable injustice. Diesel drivers are already bearing the cost of the government misdirection as, for example, some councils force them to pay a higher rate for parking. Such punitive measures will only increase. What price a second-hand diesel car now?
The official U-turn over diesels is particularly galling because, like so many apparently “green” measures, it was imposed with a sense of smug self-righteousness by those who felt they knew better than the rest of us. The same goes for the building of speed bumps, which spread like a vicious rash across the body of the nation’s road network, to the immense and unanimous irritation of drivers. Now it turns out that the dieselpromoting, speed hump-building brigade were wrong, and a great deal more money will have to be spent to put the bureaucratic machine into reverse.
Given that government is so capable of utterly changing its position in such a short space of time, initiatives with decades-long deadlines do not inspire confidence. It is likely that the rapid advance of technology will have radically changed the automotive industry by 2040. Cars are already the subject of some of the most heated, competitive innovation on the planet. Ministers should remember that it is the fruits of such innovation that will revolutionise our lives, not clunking-fist intervention from on high which, while wellmeaning, is almost certainly wrong. The lesson from this whole sorry episode is that sometimes, if government really wants to help, the best thing it can do is encourage the inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs – and then just get out of the way.