Grant Shapps is looking to set legally binding targets to speed up the shift away from petrol and diesel, and towards the mass adoption of electric vehicles. In its new report, the Department for Transport proposed legally binding annual targets that car manufacturers will be forced to meet before 2035. In less than eight years, the Government will ban the sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK.

Just five years later, a similar ban will be introduced to restrict sales of hybrid vehicles. The proposed scheme would start in 2024, when manufacturers would have to sell all-electric cars, which account for 22 percent of their total sales. The Government document added: “There is a level of uncertainty based on the form of wider policy measures and future demand, but this modelling assumes that by 2030 a minimum of 80 percent of all new UK car sales are zero emission. It assumes a 22 percent mandate in 2024 and 52 percent in 2028.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said that new rules “must encourage consumers to purchase, not just compel manufacturers to produce”. SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said: “The danger is that consumers will lack the incentive to purchase these new vehicles in the quantities needed, keeping their older, more polluting vehicles for even longer thereby undermining the carbon savings this regulation seeks to deliver.”

He is almost certainly right. It has seemingly escaped the government’s attention that household budgets at somewhat strained at the moment. Then as blogger, Paul Homewood, observes:

“It also raises the question of how these quotas will be enforced. After all, car manufacturers cannot force people to buy EVs. And we already know that huge discounts don’t make any difference, because the government has already tried them. I have read rumours that manufacturers will be fined if they don’t hit the targets, which simply means that these will be added to the price of conventional cars, to the detriment of drivers. If that is the case, people will simply tend to buy imported cars instead, who presumably won’t be affected by the quota. This whole business is an example of how we are all gradually losing our freedom of choice”.

The more obvious point is that if EVs really were the life changing, money saving innovation the Tories think they are, they wouldn’t need to force the issue. Once the iPhone was established it took less than three years for smartphones to dominate the market. Successive governments have been trying to foist EVs on us for years and still there isn’t the level of uptake they wish to see. Moreover, Britain does not have the spare energy capacity to charge a mass uptake of electric vehicles. This is pure fantasy.

Meanwhile, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business minister, has endorsed plans to charge households higher energy bills if they charge their phone or boil the kettle on a Friday evening, in a scramble to prepare Britain’s creaking power network for the end of fossil fuels. He said that it “totally makes sense” for consumers to face higher costs at the busiest times of the week in the strongest sign yet that a radical shake-up is being considered by ministers.

Under the new billing system, households would be charged less when not many people are using energy, such as in the middle of the night. They would pay more at times – like Friday evenings – when lots of people are cooking, watching television or making a cup of tea. The plans, says The Telegraph, have already won support from energy companies but are likely to prove controversial with customers.

This is looking more and more like a climate lockdown where we have to rearrange our lives to suit the needs of the national grid. This is “Stay home to save the NHS” all over again. Only this time, they have a means to financially penalise those who don’t or can’t comply.

We’ve been saying for some time now that Boris Johnson has abandoned any pretence of being a conservative government, and this latest round of measures rivals Labour for being aloof, out of touch and seeing the public as subjects to be bent to their will. This will hit the working class the hardest – they who are too busy working to rearrange their lives. This is major regression for living standards. A nation that can no longer supply energy on demand can no longer consider itself a first world country.

The establishment is now waging two wars. One is a proxy war against Russia, fighting to the last Ukrainian, no matter the economic cost to Europe and the world, and the other is a quiet war against the British people under the guise of saving the planet. There is no question of them seeking consent. Despite the obvious technical and financial obstacles, reality does not intrude even for a moment.

There is no meaningful difference between Labour and the Tories. The only discernible difference of late is that the Tories would not make female changing rooms available to flashers and other sex offenders. The bar is set as low as it will go. They have declared war on us, and it’s time for the British public to fight back.