This morning, Nick Clegg promised to take £500 million from taxpayers, and use it to subsidise electric cars. Last year, the Spectator’s annual Matt Ridley Prize was won by an essay exposing the idiocy of the scheme – and the menacing social implications of subsidingof the rich.
My wife’s friend Charlotte earns £17,000 a year working as a teaching assistant, lives in a housing association flat and is having sleepless nights about paying her recent £124.78 electricity bill. My friend Toby earns £425,000 a year as a media lawyer, lives in a big house in Putney and every day the no doubt well-meaning but somewhat misguided people of Westminster City Council give him hours and hours of free electricity. This is paid for in part by Charlotte’s council tax.
This absurd situation exists because Toby commutes in to Westminster every day in his government-subsidised electric car, which he parks in his free council-provided parking space and plugs it into his free council-provided charging point.
There are now 83 free charging points in Westminster and the government is planning to spend £400 million building thousands more everywhere else. There is also a handy £5,000 government grant to put towards buying your first electric vehicle irrespective of how much you earn. Again paid for from taxation.
None of this is means-tested because Westminster City Council and the Department of Energy and Climate Change think electric vehicles are such a good thing that the normal principles of progressive state spending, austerity and all of that dreary stuff don’t need to apply. Toby drives an electric car so must be a good chap and his electricity should be paid for by the state. Charlotte travels by bus, so she isn’t and it won’t be.
As well as the economic illiteracy of subsidising rich people’s cars while trying to cut government spending, there are so many environmental objections to electric vehicles that it’s hard to know where to start.
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