The Horizon scandal is a good extreme case of what can go wrong when too many Ministers and MPs accept official advice and believe experts, only to discover later that the official advice and expertise is badly wrong and doing grave harm.

I am all in favour of expertise. If I was ill I would seek advice from a doctor as they know so much more than I about diseases and health problems. I would also be aware of the need to ask what the side effects of treatment might be and  what the record of success has been if treatment was proposed as ultimately I would have to make the decision about what to do.

Valuing experts does not mean that experts are always right. Indeed, in the areas I know best where I have some expertise of my own I am well aware of the divergence of opinions amongst the experts. This makes a Minister’s job both very interesting and very challenging. Advisers advise and Ministers decide. Sometimes a Minister needs to ask for a second opinion or a different expert view. Good Ministers are generalists but they have a sense of when the expertise is well based and when it could let them down. Good Ministers also wish to achieve good results for the public they serve. That too can demand changing experts to get a better answer.

I and a few other MPs, impressed by the work of  James Arbuthnot, asked questions about Horizon from early days of the problems emerging. We all knew good honest local PO managers and could not believe some of them were accused of fraud and false accounting. As we realised the numbers involved I asked how senior managers of the Post Office and senior officials in the sponsor department could think there was suddenly a big outbreak of fraud around the same time as a new accounting system was introduced. It was also strange that no evidence came forward of these alleged fraudsters suddenly having bloated bank accounts or stuffed wallets of their own, going on a  spending spree from the profits of crime.

It was frustrating that so many senior officials and Ministers stuck to the Post Office line.  In future blogs I will look at other very worrying examples of where establishment thinking based on errant expertise is doing damage. As readers will know, I have been challenging establishment thinking over inflation, growth, reductions of CO 2, energy policy and migration amongst others. When people say they want change in the way we are governed, they are often seeking change in the controlling theories and policy prescriptions. When all the main parties accept the same expertise which turns out to be wrong democracy is damaged.

Electric cars are not selling well to individual buyers. Few people want to buy a heat pump. Green campaigners insist these products are essential to save the planet. They plan further taxes subsidies, regulations and bans to force people to buy things they do not want or cannot afford. To succeed the green revolution needs to be a popular revolution with people wanting its products.

There are various strands to scepticism which Green campaigners need to take seriously. Shouting back at people that they are climate deniers is no way to win them over and is usually wrong. Let us first look at the science.

I know of no one who denies carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas or who denies manmade carbon dioxide is increasing. Most accept climate  has changed a lot in the past and is likely to carry on changing. The issues many have with the “settled science” include

1. Green scientists do need to explain to the wider audience what caused the warm periods and ice ages before mankind appeared. How will these  same forces which must still be around affect our temperatures going  forward?

2. In historical times before industrialisation and the adoption of coal,oil and gas as prime energy sources  by people what caused global warming and cooling? Could these forces still be around?

3. How does variation in solar intensity, solar flares and other changes in our main light and energy source affect past earth temperatures.? What are the forecasts for sun activity going forward? Will this make us warmer or colder?

4. Why do wind and current  patterns shift? What is the forecast for these going forward, as they can have an important impact on weather in different countries and continents.

5. What is the role of water vapour and what changes are likely in its pattern in future? Water vapour is another very common greenhouse gas.

Future temperature levels will be the result of the interplay of the past natural forces that produced climate change with the manmade additions to  greenhouse gases. To persuade more people to join green campaigns they will need persuasion that manmade CO 2 will be the deciding variable in future temperatures. This is presumably based on the thesis that past natural forces like solar activity and seismic activity will not be dominant forces or that their net impact will be neutral in ways that it was not in previous eras.

I reproduce today the views of an EV car owner sent to me recently. He agreed I could  share this with you. As it reveals this is someone who bought into the green  idea and wanted the EV to work for him. Experience was very disappointing. I have shortened and anonymised it:

“Some 5 months ago I was in a position to change my Petrol vehicle (Peugeot 3008) for an electric one. Unfortunately the 3008 has only just been released as a Hybrid and the full EV is not due until later next year (2024). As a result of this I was obliged to go to the E2008 which is a smaller vehicle. Despite this the E2008 was considerably more expensive than the petrol 3008.

The cost of a home charger was nearly £1000 extra to have installed. Even the domestic “granny” charger was another £250 to charge at home until a home charger could be installed.

I try to have “green thoughts” about the environment where possible and use Solar Panels and have recently installed a Combi Boiler.

However after using the Electric car for 5 months I have reverted back to a petrol driven model due to the following reasons.

My wife and I had range anxiety. Most manufacturers quote a range of in excess 200 miles. In practice the best I could get was about 150 miles in fair weather. With the recent cold weather I found that range could drop down to as little as 110 miles.

We had to make a number of trips to towns  about 120 miles away  and required a charge on the way home. Of the 5 trips we made we found that none of the high speed type were working, after trying 5 different chargers we finally found a charger which was at a hotel. When we arrived at the hotel the charger was in use and the guy had only just started charging so we knew it would be about an hours wait. Also there is no queueing spaces so we had to double park until the space became free.

On our most recent trip away I wanted to use one of the regular chargers only to find there were already 3 cars waiting to use the one charger.  This would have meant waiting up to 3 hours before I could connect.

I also had a friend visit from Slovakia and we decided to take her out shopping by car. We knew that it would be risky trying to complete the journey without recharging on the way home. We tried 5 different chargers and found that they were not working.

We decided that the only way was to hope for the best and try to get home without the charge and made it home with just 11 miles spare and no reserve having turned off the heater on the way home to save energy.

On these occasions we were in contact with the Network Operators who tried to be helpful but could only suggest using low power chargers at supermarkets which could mean a stay of 7 hours, plus the devices have a maximum stay time of 2 to 3 hours without a penalty of £100-150 for an overstay.

(He gave up on the EV )

Unfortunately I lost about 30% in the trade in of my electric vehicle after just 5 months and had to pay a premium of about 20% in buying a 2 year old petrol model.

Reply: This explains why EVs are a hard sell to non fleet buyers. The motor industry has here lost a customer who bought into the idea but was thwarted by the costs of the product and the difficulties of recharging when away from home.

I was a fairly lonely voice amongst MPs saying I wanted out of the EU single market as well as out of the EU. I did not want a so called free trade deal with the EU single market on the poor terms Mrs May negotiated . I would have been happy with World trade Organisation most favoured nation terms which  we would have got  automatically without a deal .

I came to this conclusion from my experiences running a major international industrial  group of companies before entering Parliament, and from being the UK’s single market Minister in the run up to the laughingly named completion of the single market in 1992.

My business life taught me a UK major company was not welcome as an investor on the continent, where there remained many barriers to acquisition of an existing business and to greenfield activity. The Group I ran continued to find it easier to invest, sell product and make money in the USA, Australia, and Asian countries  than in France or Germany.

As single market Minister I saw how the so called single market project was a massive power grab.The EU proposed the takeover of regulatory and lawmaking powers in sector after sector. It grew single market competence to cover employment  policy, health and safety, environmental policy, transport and much else. It regulated  to gain control. It usually did so in a prescriptive way, laying down how products must be made to the recipes  of the existing dominant continental companies who influenced the drafting. It was anti innovation and dismissive of small business and the needs of the self employed.

The CEBR has just produced its latest forecasts for world GDP out to 2038. These show that the EU’s share of world GDP has slumped from 33.5% in 2008 to 23.6% today. They expect it to fall to just 19% by 2038.  This should be no surprise as EU growth in the last fifteen years has been very weak. The EU has watched as the US has built seven mighty tec global companies that dominate the digital revolution.The UK needs to break free from EU anti enterprise anti innovation rules and go for new ideas and faster growth.It is good news that the UK now does not have to follow the last three years of yet more EU rules stifling business and markets.The UK needs to speed its own revival with pro growth policies now it is free to do so. It should allow companies to innovate, not tying them down with rules on how to design and make things.

There are many other areas where spending can be reduced or better targeted beyond the big ones mentioned yesterday.

As I have often urged the Bank should stop selling bonds at big losses for taxpayers to lay. Hold them to repayment to cut the losses.

There are still monies being sent as overseas aid to successful and or well armed countries with nuclear programmes. Why is still true? Why are we still paying money to the EU several years after leaving? There should be a push back on their calculations and interpretations of the Withdrawal  Agreement.

Who does the UK spend so much on highly speculative technologies for decarbonisation? These can be developed by the private sector or led by other states with more need to decarbonise than us where they are clearly not yet commercial.

Why does the UK have a high tax and subsidy model when it comes to energy? The UK ‘s very high carbon and energy taxes loses us industry here and with it costs us tax revenue. Industries like steel that cannot afford our high energy costs and taxes then need substantial subsidy payments to keep some of the industry .Cut the taxes and end spending on the subsidies.