The green assault on taxpayers continues as Treasury takes £52 billion in environmental taxes

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19-03-2025

Environmental taxes raised £52.5 billion in the UK in 2023 according to the latest available data from the Office for National Statistics. To put this in context, we spent almost that same amount on our defence budget over that period.
Westminster and Whitehall have had a near obsessive focus on 'soft power' over the last decade or so, relentlessly pursuing it while seemingly happily allowing the country's 'hard power' to slip away.
Radical environmental policies are relentlessly feted by politicians of all stripes as a definitive weapon in the nation's soft power armoury as a justification for green taxes and charges which continue to push up household bills.
In an act of stunning confidence in our nation's soft power as well as in his own powers of persuasion, Ed Miliband traveled to China on Friday to convince the world's biggest polluter to follow the UK's lead in shifting to green energy.
The construction of new coal-fired power plants in China reportedly reached record levels last year. Beijing's eco-vandalism even extends to countries which have opened themselves up to Chinese investment too.
The same day that Mr Milband and his Chinese counterpart signed the Clean Energy Partnership Memorandum of Understanding, it was reported that 'a river died overnight' in Zambia following an acidic waste spill at a Chinese-owned mine.
These copper mines 'have been accused of ignoring safety, labor and other regulations in Zambia as they strive to control its supply of the critical mineral, leading to some discontent with their presence', according to reports.
And so, when Mr Miliband's ideological allies in the EU urge 'Beijing to halt its coal power growth, saying that it was undermining the country's green credentials', which are evidently non-existent, it is hard not to conclude that we are being ruled by an unserious, out of touch elite, who have developed a habit of being economical with the truth in order to advance a green agenda in which they are heavily invested.
This habit has been developed and perfected over time.
It was back in 2008 when the Climate Change Bill was introduced to Parliament by the Gordon Brown administration, which would go on to enshrine in law a duty on the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
Ahead of the first reading, Lord Lilley, who was then a Conservative MP went to the Vote Office to ask for the Impact Assessment- the cost benefit analysis the government is legally obliged to produce.
'The officials told me I was the only person to ask for a copy and had to cut open the bundle', Lord Lilley recounts. The analysis revealed the cost of the policy to be twice the maximum benefit. If that wasn't enough to set alarm bells ringing in Westminster, even at that stage it was clear that while the cost would be overwhelmingly borne by British taxpayers, the benefits, such as they were, would largely be spread over the world.
'No one apart from us 'infamous five' [the only four other MPs who joined Lord Lilley in voting against the legislation] mentioned the potential cost throughout the passage of the Bill', despite the revelation, such was the strength of cross party consensus on the matter.
Quite incredibly, once the bill had passed and was ready to be sold to the public, the Government claimed to have found an extra trillion in benefits to offset the costs.
A Conservative administration under Theresa May in 2019 would go on to strengthen the target to a 100 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050.
'It's good to see that my opinion is becoming more fashionable after 17 years', Sir Philip Davies, the former MP for Shipley and one of the 'infamous five' crew, tells me as Kemi Badenoch's announcement this week to depart from the Net Zero target finally breaks the consensus in Westminster.
'It is one of the votes I'm most proud of in Parliament', says Sir Philip, having recognised over a decade before most that achieving Net Zero by 2050 would be impossible without bankrupting the country and placing crushing demands on taxpayers.
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