UK and EU policy on EVs is rapidly turning into a disaster - and it is entirely the result of government interference.

Europe including the UK is potentially facing a glut of as many as 20 million electric cars which customers do not want. If they can be sold at all, and that itself is doubtful, it will only be at a massive discount, lower than the cost of production. This represents a colossal misallocation of capital and at the same time will decimate Europe's car industry, a traditional strength of the continent and a source of freedom, prosperity and tax revenue for its people.

The disaster is the result of deliberate government intervention to dictate what can and cannot be produced.

The UK and EU member state governments have committed themselves to Net Zero targets. To achieve them, they have prohibited the production of cars other than EVs in the 2030s and require us to move to an ever greater EV market share, they are requiring vehicle manufacturers to hit rising % targets of EVs sold year on year the closer we get.

The problem is that consumers do not want the mandatory EVs.

The EV share of the market has actually begun to fall. Instead a growing number of new car buyers are selecting hybrids as the common sense 'halfway house in the face of range anxiety, lack of charging infrastructure, rising electricity costs etc.

Sadly and illogically, the UK and EU governments do not count hybrids as proper EVs so they do not count towards the % quotas and will be no more legally sellable when we are in an all EV world than petrol or diesel vehicles.

Already therefore, large stockpiles are beginning to amass of EVs that no one wants to buy: it is forecast that there will soon be 20million of these unwanted vehicles.

Government policy is dictatorial, authoritarian, and does not take account of what consumers want. Worse, the world's cheapest EVs are coming from the world's leading EV manufacturing nation, China. Therefore the EVs that are most likely to sell are Chinese and the EU governments are therefore looking at tariffs and anti-dumping measures against them which will only make a bad situation worse.

The lessons from all of this are pretty clear and ones which only libertarians and other free-marketeers seem to understand...

you cannot buck the market; en masse over time consumers are intelligent and they will not be taken in by propaganda into buying less good products which do not meet their requirements in the real world; government intervention can do massive damage when it fails to provide what consumers want. In summary both consumers and markets are rational when governments are not.

This of course is what some of us have long understood as lessons from the 90 years of Soviet communism (1917-1989) and their various developing world socialist spin offs but not it would appear for the UK and EU political classes of today... vote for a main stream party - Conservative, Labour, Liberal-Democrat, Green, SNP or Plaid Cymru - and you are voting for irrational economic policies, dogmatic regulations and prohibitions and, as a result, the misallocation of resources and therefore your own poverty... yes, folks as this tale tells you vote for the mainstream and you are voting to be poorer!

Tony Brown - Former Political Advisor