My Conservative Home article on Net zero damage

The pace of closure of UK manufacturing is alarming.

I asked a question of the government who told me in 2025 alone there were 12,510 closures of industrial companies. They were unable to tell me how many closures there were affecting more than 200 employees.

The ONS Inter departmental business register shows a 4.5 per cent decline in manufacturing companies between 2023 and 2025, and a 12 per cent decline in transport and storage companies. These are not the same figures, and can conceal some mergers as well as closures. They do however illustrate the same worrying decline. The UK is making less in many areas.

There have been some very large closures, with two refineries, a fibreglass plant, ceramics factories  and some large chemical plants shutting down. These general figures reveal the wider trend. The UK is no longer competitive for many types of manufacturing for companies of all sizes.

Why doesn’t the government do more than express short term concern and promise help for people who need to retrain and try to find a new job? Why isn’t it angry or worried about the de industrialisation of the UK? Why is a party that is called Labour and has a great past tradition of standing up for workers in industrial settings so unwilling to engage and to find a solution to the mass retreat from making materials and finished products in the UK?

The main reason is Ministers are in the grip of the demon ideology of net zero extremism. They believe in the self-harming policy responses that  Minister Miliband embodies. They  say UK factories have to be shut to stop them creating CO2 as they burn gas or use fossil fuel feedstocks. Instead we must import these goods, leaving our home produced CO2 figures down. It means boosting world CO2 figures, usually by more than the UK saving. How can they defend this madness?

This crazy philosophy leads to the UK having the dearest energy prices in the advanced world, with government quietly rejoicing that will accelerate our ending of fossil fuel use at home. Government goes out of its way to make fossil fuels dearer, with a carbon tax, emissions trading, super taxes on oil and gas profits, VAT, fuel duty and range of charges to milk and punish the user of gas and oil and their derivatives.

The policy makes no contribution to cutting world CO2, but it does do untold harm to the UK economy and workforce. The government loses the tax revenue on production workers, and has to pay benefits and compensation to those losing their jobs as the closures take place. It loses profits tax on the closing businesses, and loses a range of tax revenues as higher unemployment leaves communities with less spending power to use on shopping and services.

The government’s economic policy is marred badly by the relentless upwards march in unemployment. It adds to the economic damage, forcing the Chancellor to impose yet more taxes to pay for the lost revenue and the higher benefit costs from closures. This creates a vicious spiral. New and higher taxes lead to more energetic and hardworking people, and more people with money to invest, going abroad to escape the tax raids.  They lead to more businesses strapped for cash, paying less profits tax or in turn closing down.

The government adds to the agony by imposing bans on fossil fuel related activity. Companies cannot drill to find more oil and gas, hitting the domestic oil supply industry. Soon companies will not be able to make and sell diesel and petrol cars here, leading to the closure of all factories and production lines doing that. Ministers may be cheering the end of car plants, plastic factories, refineries and petro chemical works, but the rest of us  rue the day and sympathise with all those losing their jobs.

All of this is avoidable. If the government lifted the bans on oil, gas and petrol car making there would be more jobs and investment here and fewer imports. World CO2 would go down a little, not up. If the government scrapped carbon taxes and emissions trading a lot of closures would be averted. If the government cut the excessive rates of domestic tax on producing oil and gas, we would have more of them and more investment, reducing imports. Why pay the tax to foreign governments for the imports when you could get that revenue here at home if you charged sensible rates of tax?

Whenever I recommend more use of home gas and less of imports critics falsely allege I am in the pay of the big oil companies.

Let me reassure you. I am not and have never been in receipt of payments from oil companies. If I had I would have declared it. They say this as they have no good argument to counter my case. They simply ignore the harm they are doing to existing firms and jobs, and refuse to engage with their mad carbon accounting system which forces us to close and import instead. Then they fly off to their next conference to condemn the oil industry that supplied their jet fuel.

The best the net zero extremists argue is we are creating lots of green jobs. I agree they are in China, who make most of the solar panels, larger batteries and wind turbines, and in parts of the world with the materials to mine and smelt into the special materials needed for battery production. Clearly in the Uk we are destroying a lot more jobs than we create, as we see in surging unemployment.

The government’s passion to import from China and the EU visible in so many of their policies underlies much of their unpopularity. They ruthlessly intervene to stop or harm  the UK manufacturers. The public grasps that you cannot go on increasing your imports, as you run out of money to pay for them. If you do not make enough here and employ enough people here you have a poorer and more miserable community. We need sensible tax policies that increase revenues through growth, and import substitution policies to help home production.