I spent much of the Article 50 era at odds with the majority of Brexiteers. I was no fan of the so-called WTO option and to some extent I consider the WTO to be part of the problem. Though it does not have the same supranational authority as the EU, it does have considerable coercive influence, underpinning a global “rules based order”. At one time I would have argued that a basic framework of rules is a necessity for free and fair trade, but increasingly the WTO is becoming part of a global nexus of captured institutions which now exist primarily to advance climate policy agendas.

As such, Brexit of itself was never going to resolve very much, and the scope for divergence was limited. I therefore took the view that divergence was a question of picking our battles carefully. I saw Brexit as a longer term process rather than an event and one which should not be rushed. To that end I campaigned for the EEA Efta option as a longer term “departure lounge”.

That option, though, was politically untenable. Successive attempts to sabotage and derail Brexit soured any compromise options and had we gone down the EEA route it would have been hijacked by remainers and turned into a BRINO, probably with the addition of a customs union.

I can accept that I lost that argument. Opponents of the EEA option rightly point out that we wouldn’t have reclaimed the powers to diverge that we have now. I was aware of this at the time and always remarked that it was suboptimal, but necessary to safeguard our EU trade.

But now that we have quit the Single Market, it is incumbent on this government to make full use of our reclaimed sovereingty. We have sacrificed considerable trade with the EU, which in my view will not be recouped through agreements like CPTPP. If the costs of our Single Market departure are to be offset, then it is through a radical programme of deregulation and renewal.

The problem here is that the Tories have absolutely no plan, no ideas what to deregulate or where the major problems lie. Prior to Covid and the global energy crunch there was already a case for dumping the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), which is a massively bureaucratic and ineffectual system. The ETS remains susceptible to fraud and gaming, has subsidised polluters at taxpayer’s expense, and hasn’t substantially reduced emissions. Both greenies and sceptics alike can agree on that.

Brexit was an opportunity to replace or remove ETS, yet we’ve adopted more or less exactly the same system only it’s a bit more expensive for business. Hardly a Brexit win.

The system as it stands now, is complex, convoluted and time consuming, and really only serves to make energy more expensive without a corresponding reduction in emissions. Worse still, the costs are incurred by those industries working to decarbonise our grid. It makes very little sense. It’s wholly self-defeating.

Then as much as nobody wants to see a repeal of laws that protect habitats and the environment, the EU rules we inherited which place environmental burdens on business accomplish very little and in the main serve only to create compliance jobs and parasitic statutory reporting requirements which soak up vast sums of money and add costly delays to infrastructure projects.

In the absence of any kind of Brexit plan, Johnson has pegged us to his Net Zero agenda, which is a gold plating of the EU’s own agenda to eliminate emissions by eighty percent by 2050. Climate virtue signalling on steroids – but still bound to the morass of EU red tape.

UKIP does not support Net Zero. This is not “climate denial”. Our view is that there is no climate emergency, but that’s neither here nor there. There is still room for debate on whether such an aggressive and expensive policy is in the national interest and whether the strategy for achieving it is likely to succeed.

There are obvious logical flaws to the current strategy. When the grid is already struggling to meet electricity demand in the UK, where is the sense on pushing us toward electric home heating? Where is the sense in pushing for electric cars? We still have no coherent answers as to what will provide the baseload generation for the next twenty years, while all the incentives are handed to intermittent renewable developers. Johnson hopes to create jobs by way of a green revolution, but how many jobs will be lost over the next decade as energy prices for industry become unsustainable?

We take the view that renewable energy is a gigantic white elephant. It has its evangelical advocates, but they all tend to be wonks and green blobbers or energy execs who rake in handsome volumes of subsidy. But wind energy is a wholly unworkable means of generating power for a modern grid (unless you’re prepared to throw billions upon billions on mitigating the problems it creates). The grid is being redesigned around the inadequacies of wind power rather than choosing reliable baseload technology.

Supposing we supported the view that we are amidst a climate emergency, we might venture that Brexit has allowed us to go greener faster, but that means dumping all the make-work non-jobbery of renewable energy, to go all in on small modular reactors and CHP on a war footing. In the interim we we should use whatever fossil fuels are available to us (including coal), to ensure cheap and abundant energy, if only to speed up the delivery of new technologies and reduce the costs of developing them. Doing so will put the UK ahead of the game, giving us first mover advantage in terms of intellectual property and standards setting.

As such, there is a very clear case for going all in on nuclear irrespective of the climate, but there is no case for whacking an unsuspecting public with Net Zero. There is no mandate for it nor is there informed consent. Moreover, the push for renewables increases the risks of grid instability leading to rolling blackouts. That cannot be the basis of any prosperous low carbon future.

It is Boris Johnson who insisted on a hard Brexit and a lightweight FTA specifically so we would have regulatory sovereignty and the freedom to diverge. That came at considerable cost to the economy, particularly British food producers, who are now being incentivised to pave over our countryside with useless solar panels, all because this government doesn’t have the imagination or the political will to do anything differently to the EU.

The 2050 Net Zero target is a wholly arbitrary piece of virtue signalling, committing vast resource to a highly questionable agenda, but it also kicks Brexit into the long grass. As much as Brexit was a demand to curb immigration, it was also to put an end to top down meddlesome technocratic agendas over which we have no say. Johnsons’ Net Zero has rendered his “hard Brexit” inert, while betraying the founding principles of it.

Yesterday I promised the party chairman, Ben Walker, I would change the subject for today’s piece, but Net Zero is the flagship policy of what is supposed to be a Brexit government, and it embodies the ultimate betrayal of it. Combined with its abject failure to get a grip on immigration – thereby adding further pressure to our acute housing and energy problems, this government has reverted to the pre-referendum stupor, carried along by fad and fantasy, oblivious to the urgent needs of voters and adrift from any notion of conservatism. Net Zero isn’t merely a topic heading. It’s the root command of this government – and basis on which it must be held to account. By that measure, it is selling Britain down the river.