So it has come to this. The great electric car revolution, that shining beacon of our net-zero future, is sputtering like a Morris Minor on a cold morning. Reports now confirm that the government is preparing to weaken the mandated sales targets for electric vehicles.
The target, once a sacred cow, is to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Of course it is. Why should we be surprised?
This is the British way: grand ambition, followed by a hesitant retreat, a shuffling of feet, and a mumbled excuse about 'unforeseen circumstances'. We might as well be discussing the decline of the Roman Empire, for the parallels are striking. The West, once a hotbed of industrial innovation, now finds itself unable to enforce its own decrees.
The car manufacturers, those bastions of British engineering, have cried foul. They cannot make enough cars, they say. The charging infrastructure is insufficient, they whine.
And so the government, ever eager to please, bends the knee. This is intellectual decadence at its finest: a refusal to see a project through, a preference for comfortable half-measures over the discipline of achieving a goal. We are not just failing to hit a target.
We are signalling to the world that Britain no longer has the stomach for the hard work of shaping the future. The Victorians would be appalled. They built an empire on railways, steamships, and the stubborn belief that a goal, once set, was to be achieved regardless of cost.
We, on the other hand, are content with empty gestures. We announce a date for the end of the internal combustion engine, and then, when the going gets tough, we quietly push it back. The real tragedy is not the missed target.
It is the loss of national confidence, the creeping realisation that we are no longer a people who can execute grand plans. And the electric car is merely the latest symptom. So let us mourn, not for the electric car, but for the spirit that once built them.
For without that spirit, no amount of targets will save us.
