Did Oliver Cromwell ban diesel? (. . . asks David Phillips)

JUST a dozen or so years ago, politicians finally understood what Land Rover enthusiasts had known all along — that diesel was best.

We loved the efficient diesel engine’s low-down torque for towing and off-road driving and the fact that you got more miles per gallon.

The politicians probably didn’t do a lot of towing or off-roading, but they did appreciate its efficiency and how more of the fuel got converted into energy, which meant it produced less carbon dioxide (C02) — and this is where the politicians really got excited.

Back then, the British government had a problem meeting C02 emissions targets imposed by the EU, so swapping to diesel would reduce our carbon output. Chancellor Gordon Brown slashed tax on diesel cars and the surge in demand saw most manufacturers invest heavily in new diesel technology to produce ever-leaner and cleaner engines to keep within emissions limits.

Enter the bad guys . . .

The exception was the world’s biggest carmaker, Volkswagen, who decided to cheat, installing software that fooled testers into believing their engines were a staggering 40 times cleaner than they actually were. They got found out — in the US — in 2015, and the subsequent ‘Dieselgate’ scandal saw VW pay nearly £3 billion in fines, as well as over $16 billion to rectify the affected vehicles.

That same year, it was also revealed that Volkswagen had approved laboratory tests in which caged monkeys and human volunteers breathed in car fumes for hours at a time. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, reacted furiously, saying: “These tests on monkeys or even on humans are not ethically justifiable in any shape or form.”

A German company indulging in horrific experiments involving poisonous gases seemed particularly insensitive.

What followed was a diesel backlash. Unfairly, it was not confined to VW. Diesel sales of all makes began to fall, hastened in the UK last year by then environment minister Michael Gove’s hatchet job on diesel cars. As we all know, his thoughtless utterings have cost Land Rover billions of pounds in lost sales.

It would be easy to dismiss Gove as a typical blundering politician. But dig a little deeper and you can see how his policies on energy were farcically inept as well as brazenly two-faced, as I will reveal . . .

Electric propulsion is now seen as the way forward. For example, JLR has built a new factory to produce the electric motors for those cars of the future in North Warwickshire, a few M42 junctions away from its Range Rover factory at Solihull. It is also building a huge factory to produce many more of them at Bridgwater, in Somerset, thanks to a very generous grant of £500 million from former PM Rishi Sunak, on behalf of the British taxpayers.

But batteries need charging. And that means taking energy from the National Grid. At present the biggest single supplier to the National Grid is Drax power station near Selby, in North Yorkshire, which used to burn coal but now burns mainly biomass —wood pellets imported from the US and sourced from wetland forests. These, of course, are important ecosystems to a wide variety of animal and plant species and classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America”.

Drax delights?

Meanwhile, environmental campaigners Biofuelwatch claim emissions of particulates from Drax were 897 tonnes a year, which they say is the “equivalent to adding three million diesel cars to the roads each year”. Drax is also Britain’s biggest C02 emitter. Yet despite all the above, Drax is Britain’s most heavily subsidised industrial site — receiving nearly £2 million in government subsidies every day. Nice little earner for someone.

Those subsidies for a wood-burning power station were signed off by Mr Gove’s department — the very same department which, just a few years ago, declared war on log fires and household wood-burning stoves, which it said it would outlaw because of their alleged effect on air quality! They claimed that the average wood-burning stove caused more pollution that a “dirty diesel truck”. Yet Drax, an industrial-scale wood-burner that produces the equivalent of three million diesels a year, is subsidised heavily by the same government department. Incredible.

Pub talk

Winter will soon be here in the Nene Valley, which for me means enjoying a drive through a frosted landscape in my diesel Land Rover, followed by a pint or a dram in front of a roaring log fire in my local, the King’s Head at Wadenhoe, so named because the ill-fated KingCharles I is alleged to have called in en route to Naseby and the threat of Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentary forces.

Simple pleasures, I know, but the mere mention of anything pleasurable usually motivates our inept politicians to either tax it or ban it. Cromwell’s intolerant zealots certainly would have banned diesel, if it had been invented in the 17th century. Once they’d seized power, they banned alcohol, too. They even banned entertainment, because of the risk of alcohol being involved. It just goes to show that the modern absurdity known as ‘Woke’ is nothing new.

But of course alcohol has always been in the politicians’ sights. They tax it to the hilt for us ordinary folk, then rush into the bars at the House of Commons to enjoy a few cut-price tipples (subsidised by us, of course). Just as well there’s no tax on hypocrisy.

Diesel, so recently the politicians’ darling, is now demonised and faces a future ban, while even the crackling log fire, which has been a feature of my local pub since before the English Civil War (the 1645 one, not the 2019 Brexit skirmish), is now at risk.

You couldn’t make it up.

HICKATHRIFT PRESS