In a ‘bone-headed’ move, the UK to roll back gas car phase-out and other net zero policies

Conservative politicians. The same all over the planet, greedy evil selfish shitheads. Served by their base who are mostly greedy evil selfish shitheads too.

They use wedge issues to maintain power in our 'first past the post' system. They're desperately trying to latch onto and exacerbate any wedge issues between now and Jan 2025 in a desperate bid to stay in office. I warned my friends of this a couple of years ago.

Old vs young (pensions triple lock, inheritance tax); straight vs lgbt; lgb and angry straights vs trans; middle class vs 'scrounger' lower class; residents vs immigrants; these are the wedges they are trying to exploit.

It has really gone to shit with these rolling Tory governments where every Tom, Dick and Harry in the party gets a turn at making everyone's lives demonstrably worse.

good question

most people want to jump and scream "brexit!" and yes, brexit isn't helpful, but it's a symptom of bigger problems.

the most recent problem is that, the UK embarked on the "government austerity program" since 2010. this means that, the government slashed spending on most government provided services, ostensibly to pay off the UK national debt. in practice, this meant sharply reducing spending on social security, cancelling school building projects and restorations, sharply reducing police and prison spending, reducing funding to local governments, and increasing national sales tax (VAT).

end result? take a look at this graph, showing the number of hunger charity/food bank users increase over time. note that it was basically nobody at the start of the austerity program, and now it's several cities worth of people.

it's almost as if, when you cut government services that people rely on... that... people start suffering?

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if you pull on the thread of history, there are reasons why austerity was done, and there were reasons that those reasons were done, and so on. i'm happy to talk about it at length but i'm also trying to catch and prevent myself from "longposting".

the short answer is that, successive UK governments over 50 years have sold everything in the proverbial house to pawnbrokers and vultures, to prop up an unsustainable drug addiction (winning general elections). the result is now there is nothing left to sell, they maxed out all the credit cards, and now the debt collectors are coming.

there's a nice line from this article that sums up my opinion on the issue:

...in today’s UK economy, whose underlying stagnation has been masked only by the release of excess liquidity on an oceanic scale, some deficit spending may be good – necessary, even.

"release of excess liquidity" is an understatement here. we sold everything to the highest bidder, and now we're fucked.

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here's some hot topic examples of some things that are fucked, for further reading:

the police are now in "murders only" mode, only 4% of crime is actually being prosecuted because they just don't have the resources to investigate anything anymore. even if you do the investigation yourself, and give the evidence over, they just shrug.

most sewage is now dumped directly into rivers and oceans, because we sold off the water utilities and now they have no real oversight. remember, the police are in murders-only mode? who's going to prosecute them? nobody, lol

a lot of schools and other buildings are at threat of literal collapse, because we cheaped out on the material to build them. each successive government wanted to win an election, so none of them thought to mention it to us.

the queue for healthcare is so long, that 120,000 people in the queue for surgeries and treatment are... just dying, because they don't get seen in time. (granted, some of these are oldies who were going to die anyway, but the figure has doubled in 5 years.)

lastly, here's some further watching on how tax works over here, it's pretty messed up

And yet you people will vote that party in come next election, I guarantee it.

The Tories themselves? They saw the petrolheads getting all worked up over the London ulez extension and decided to go for their votes. That's all I can think of.

Probably folks who can’t afford new cars.

Jeremy Clarkson

It's from all those years of brainwashing from top gear...

If nobody could afford to buy a car because of this, what do you think would happen? A) The economy would grind to a halt as nobody could get to work anymore without a gas car or B) The auto manufacturers would miraculously figure out a way to sell cars at a profit for cheaper just in time?

I know what you're saying but the plan is to ban new sales of internal combustion cars from 2030, so you'll be able to buy second hand ice cars until a good 20 years after that. Seems ok to me?

Some older BEVs are just entering the range of affordable. But more importantly, the more new BEVs are bought, the more there will be coming onto the second hand market in 5, 10. 20 years' time.

The market would enter that space, if you have to buy something they want it to be theirs. There is literally no point in making something you cannot afford, I get what you're saying there are some stupid policies surrounding EV take up but if everyone had to have one in 5 years there would be a range available for every level.

Since when did the government give a shit about lower classes?

Nobody's banning the sale of secondhand ICE cars, they would have still been sold as new up to the end of 29, so there would be a good supply of used cars for more than a decade post that.

Second hand EV prices have been returning to more normal prices in the UK, and I would expect that downward trend to continue as we see greater availability on the secondhand market. Cars that were 10k last year can be had for almost half that this year.

Finance in the UK of new (and nearly new) cars is heavily dependent on lease style agreements with the total cost massively offset by future value (thus EVs had been fantastic value new on finance) and the liability held by the car finance company. At the moment they had been trying to hold used prices to offset that liability, it hasn't been working very well with dealers left with cars they can't sell without losing big time.

But they have actual cheap EVs in Europe, unlike the US. Like the Dacia spring and other Chinese imports.