Driving Force

The more electric cars, the more electric anything, the better. No more wars for oil. Instead, the generation of electricity at home by every available means, but chiefly from nuclear power and from the exploitation of this country's considerable reserves of lithium and vast reserves of coal, which is itself necessary to make the steel for everything from electric cars to wind turbines. Secure, highly skilled, well paid, high status, unionised jobs all round.

Richard North wonders where the electricity will come from for electric cars. In Britain, even quite heavy electricity use could be free, with only nominal charges above that level of consumption. If we had publicly owned pits, coal-fired power stations, and nuclear power stations, around which would be built everything else in a publicly owned, all-of-the-above energy policy. Quite literally, in fact: keep saying it until it has sunk in that turbines are made out of steel, which requires coal. As, indeed, are electric cars.

And the publicly owned, all-of-the-above energy policy would be the basis of the publicly owned, all-of-the-above transport policy, again with massively expanded public transport free at the point of use. We could easily afford all of this. But instead, we ignore our thousand years' worth of coal, preferring to import oil and gas from the ends of the earth, even though we have to fight endless wars over those resources, allying ourselves to regimes, notably in Saudi Arabia, that take our money and use it to fund terrorism on our streets. Funny how the wars are never unaffordable.