The Telegraph reports that “The government has quietly backtracked on proposals to require every shop, office or factory in England to install at least one electric car charger if they have a large car park, prompting criticism by environmental campaigners”.

The original plan required every new and existing non-residential building with parking for 20 cars or more to install a charger. However, the Department for Transport (DfT) has now revealed it will only require chargers be installed in new or refurbished commercial premises amid fears over the cost for businesses, according to a response to a consultation.

Meanwhile The Sunday Times notes that EVs are careering towards a giant pothole. There isn’t nearly enough metal around to put in all the batteries we need. The race is on to develop deposits of lithium, nickel, cobalt and the jumble of other metals that make up a car battery. Deposits of some minerals are widespread but not easily accessible. And they may be in jurisdictions where companies do not want to operate.

Take cobalt, 70 per cent of which is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the government likes to whack foreign mining companies for tax at a moment’s notice, and where dangerous “artisanal” mining by ordinary folk equipped with little more than a pickaxe is common.

Received wisdom tells us that as goods become mass produced, their price falls — but it is plausible that the cost of EV batteries will rise. This would sabotage the UK’s goal of slashing emissions, stalling EV uptake just as it is gaining momentum. And the government’s decision this month to slash subsidies for the buyers of EVs won’t help.

From whichever direction you interrogate the issue, the EV revolution simply isn’t going to happen. There are too many barriers to a successful implementation – not forgetting that we don’t have the spare electricity generation capacity even if we could persuade the public to make the switch. The government has already abandoned plans to electrify the railways.

In fact, were you to look carefully, the government looks to be quietly climbing down from Net Zero. It may be the root command handed down to local authorities who will do an enormous amount of damage in the meantime but the government is unwilling to divert the money required for Net Zero infrastructure. We can’t afford it and even Johnson’s tone deaf administration might have worked out by now that Net Zero is a vote loser.

All the same, though, we are to endure endless green taxes and impediments to mobility under the guise of saving the planet which can only serve to strangle our recovery. Though the electric car revolution simply isn’t going to happen you could be forgiven for thinking there is a more sinister agenda at work to make private car ownership a thing of the past.

There are certainly grounds to disincentivise car ownership and promote shared ownership, but if it is the policy of this government to bully us out of our cars then it should say so and put it to the vote. Instead there are a number of stealth policies in action that we don’t get a say in. Even some quarters of the Conservative Party welcome rising energy and fuel bills, taking the view that private capital will replace government investment as everyday activity becomes prohibitively expensive. Hardly the flavour of free market radicalism Tory voters thought they were getting.

The result of all this is an unwholesome muddle of eye wateringly expensive nonsensical policies which do not meaningful contribute toward a reduction in emissions, kill more jobs than they create and pile yet more misery on households reeling from the pandemic. It means less economic freedom, less mobility, colder homes and unprecedented levels of stealth taxes that would make even Gordon Brown blush.

This, though, is just the detectable fallout from Net Zero. Though we have left the EU with a view to restoring our sovereignty, there is still a galaxy of global conventions spawning telephone books of damaging regulation, most of which bypass our parliament in much the same way EU law did. Our trade deals are still authored by a small clique of eco-indoctrinated wonks who, like Brussels bureaucrats, believe FTAs should be instruments to achieve non-trade policy objectives (NTPOs), such as emissions reductions and carbon taxes. You can trade the trade wonk out of Brussels but you can’t take the Brussels out of the trade wonk.

Further to this the NGOcracy has set its eyes on WTO reform to turn it into a proto-EU, working toward a global system of liberal work visas, carbon border charges and protectionist environmental measures. The people who run the machinery of Brussels and Whitehall are the same breed of people we send to Geneva – marinated in climate propaganda and sworn enemies of national sovereignty and borders. It is a mistake to believe Brexit marks a radical departure from the Brussels mentality or that we will see any meaningful divergence from the globalist mindset or the dogma of the WEF’s “Great Reset”. It’s no conspiracy theory.

They make no effort to hide their ambitions – not least because they know that our sham democracy can’t disrupt the programme. The consequence of this is a global apparatus notionally for “free trade” but one that largely protects global corporations from competition paying only lip service to free trade, while maintaining the kind of disjointed and unfair trade practices that drive the very migration we see on the shores of Kent.

We’ll keep saying it. Over the last three decades there has been a quiet takeover in the establishment, and we are (in effect) an occupied country. Our national infrastructure is now the plaything of green ideologues and globalists. We may have left the EU but the prevailing technocratic dictatorial mentality is still deeply rooted, and without a counter-revolution Brexit won’t make much difference to the way things are done.

The Tory leaning press has puffed up Liz Truss as the new Mrs Thatcher, citing her accomplishments as trade minister but all she’s done is roll over the same deals we had before, and they contain more or less the same non-trade policy tract as before, and the establishment still sees the roll of trade policy as a means to export “our values” (ie. theirs) rather than advance the interests of UK exporters. The boilerplate fluff in trade policy speeches is the same whether it comes from the Tories or the Labour shadow minister.

Withdrawal from the EU was only a starter for ten. We need systemic cleanse of the establishment to root out the globalist bureaucrats and eco-cultists and we need a government alert to the danger of allowing the WTO to become yet another tool to undermine national democracy. To date, though, even Tory brexiteers are enamoured with the WTO, largely because it isn't a supranational authority. But all the same, the more the “rules based order” is baked into our trade agreements, the more power we hand to global NGOs and activist lawyers. We have already seen a reluctance in the Tory party to take them on, and an institutional naivety as to how much power they’ve accumulated.

The Tories won’t deliver on immigration, nor will they take on the green blob. We can expect only a quiet climbdown on flagship Net Zero polices but the more low key encroachments carry on as normal. They are the silent juggernaut which neither our politicians or media pay any attention to. Little by little, our democracy dies and the global tyranny of climate authoritarianism takes root. We must “follow the science” they say. Their computer models demand our obedience. What could possibly go wrong?