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A sheepish Kemi Badenoch had to be reminded of who brought in the electric vehicle mandate after she tried to blame Labour for job losses at the Luton Vauxhall factory.
The Conservative leader clashed with Sir Keir Starmer on a number of occasions during Prime Minister’s Questions today (27/11), and even resorted to making resignation jibes based on a recent online petition.
Discussing the news that Vauxhall plans to shut its Luton van factory, putting 1,100 jobs at risk, the leader of the opposition took aim at Starmer for the electric vehicle mandate, which was cited as a primary reason for the closure.
But the PM hit back, saying: “I would remind the leader of the opposition that the EV mandates that are in issue in this particular case were actually introduced by the last government,” he noted, suggesting they came in under her watch.
Badenoch pushed back by saying that actually, her team watered down the EV mandate when she was business secretary.
But regardless, as James Murray points out on social media, the conversation over the UK’s industrial base has become confused.
Responding to a post by Andrew Neil on X, he said: “What these critiques never explain is what happens to UK industry if you do what they say and abandon net zero. The answer is you get a few more years selling 20th century tech (and higher emissions with it) and then your industrial base gets destroyed by clean tech imports.
“There’s no future for the UK, or indeed the EU and US, as a manufacturer of internal combustion engines and boilers when China is about to flood global markets with low cost and big performance EVs and heat pumps and solar panels and batteries.
“This really should be obvious for anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds.”
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