RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Labour’s Net Zero jolly proves there’s an terrible lot of hypocrites in Brazil

As the Prime Minister is swanning round Brazil posing as the saviour of the planet, back home his Chancellor is drawing up plans to slap new taxes on… electric vehicles.

You couldn’t make it up.

While Surkeir preens himself as a ‘world leader’  in cutting carbon emissions, Rachel From Complaints and her childminders at the Treasury are gearing up to make Net Zero motoring more expensive.

Drivers of EVs, which were billed as the solution to eliminating ozone-puncturing exhaust fumes, are set to be charged 3p-a-mile from 2028. The new tax is reported to be announced in the Budget later this month as Reeves seeks ever more desperate ways of extorting money to pay for her own public sector profligacy and fiscal incompetence.

It comes as another high-profile Labour attendee at the COP30 summit in Brazil, London‘s two-bob chancer of a mayor Genghis Khan, prepares to scrap the congestion charge exemption for EVs in the New Year. Call it punishment for doing the right thing. No good deed and all that.

From January, drivers of electric vehicles in London will be hit with the same £18-a-day charge as everyone else – except, of course, Genghis, who is chauffeured round town in a £350,000 gas-guzzling, armour-plated Range Rover. For his ‘security’, you understand.

We also discovered a couple of weeks ago that Khan’s hated ULEZ extension – raking in £3.5 million a week – has had no effect at all in cutting pollution. Turns out his international jet-setting is more damaging to the planet than all the cars in Outer London.

New taxes on motorists are certain to discourage many drivers from swapping their existing internal combustion engine cars for zero-emission models.

Cynical raids on our hard-earned, justified on the grounds that they’re designed to save the polar bears, are simply par for the course. Labour politicians may posture about ‘clean air’ and their concern for the environment, but all they really care about is extracting the maximum amount in taxes.

Remember when Gordon Brown lowered duty on diesel, which was said to produce fewer pollutants than petrol? We were all encouraged to buy diesel cars to combat global warming, even if it meant less duty for the Exchequer.

Then came a sudden reverse-ferret from ‘the science’ which declared that actually diesel vehicles did more damage than petrol.

So Gordon jacked up the price of diesel again, with the happy consequence of swelling the Treasury’s coffers. And to hell with all those he’d bribed to junk their petrol cars in favour of diesel. It’s money that matters.

Rachel has now realised that tax-breaks for electric cars reduce the amount of money raised by the Government. So she’s come up with a different way of screwing motorists, along with everyone else.

Labour’s hypocrisy on ‘climate change’ would be hilarious were it not so scandalous.

Wouldn’t a Zoom conference do the trick? After all, it was good enough for everyone else during the Covid lockdown?

But obviously not for freeloading, jet-setting Knights of the Realm Surkeir and Genghis. Or the swivel-eyed eco-zealot Mister Ed, who has also gone along for the ride.

Preaching hair-shirt environmentalism to the rest of us, Labour’s grandees think nothing of gallivanting halfway round the world to take part in a meaningless jolly ostensibly aimed at cutting global greenhouse emissions.

‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ is the order of the day.

In addition to new taxes on EVs, Reeves is also preparing to jack up yet again Air Passenger Duty from next April.

We already pay the highest APD in the world, allegedly to discourage us from flying. But that hasn’t stopped Rachel announcing a third runway for Heathrow.

Of course, none of this will impact on Surkeir and Genghis Khan’s globetrotting. The mug British taxpayer will pick up their bills. Miliband also turned left on the plane to Brazil, taking a reported 100 officials from the Department of Energy with him.

And that’s probably only about half the size of the British delegation. The Government is refusing to give us the full figure, or the total cost. All we do know is the UK presence is the largest of any country at the conference.

No wonder their stinking double-standards stick in our craws. They’ve even roped in Prince William to play volleyball on the beach and warn of the coming apocalypse.

For some unfathomable reason, the Labour Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin has also joined this Jolly Boys’ and Girls’ Outing. What’s she doing there?

‘Mayors are the tugboats of change, pushing the tankers of Government towards a greener world,’ she explained helpfully. I’m sure they speak of little else in the saloon bars of Halifax, Dewsbury and Leeds. Where do they find people like Tugboat Tracy? Give me strength.

Down in the city formerly known as The Smoke, Khan’s London tourist board has decided not to welcome visitors with a sizeable carbon footprint. They won’t be advertising in long-haul markets such as Idaho, in the US, in order to make London a ‘sustainable global destination’.

Not that having a footprint the size of a Yeti has prevented Genghis from jetting around the world. Analysis of his international travel since he came to office shows he has churned out enough carbon to punch a ‘black hole’ in the ozone layer, so to speak.

He’d already accumulated enough air miles to fly to the moon and back before boarding the big silver bird to Brazil.

As for Surkeir, his extravagant grandstanding is frankly sickening at the time of a cost of living crisis, and the prospects of extensive tax rises in the Budget in clear breach of Labour’s manifesto commitments.

It’s his 40th foreign trip since taking office 16 months ago. When he gets back from Brazil he’s off to Johannesburg.

And it’s not as if he’s got anything to do at home, apart from a prisons crisis and rampant illegal immigration, as a basis for negotiation.

So how dare vainglorious, deluded Never Here Keir claim to be a ‘world leader’ in tackling climate change when Britain produces a piffling 1 per cent of global emissions? The leaders of the big polluters, the US, China and India, have quite sensibly given the latest COP fiasco a wide berth.

This is the 30th such gathering. Thirty years ago, we were warned we had just 100 days to save the planet, if memory serves, back when Two Jags was flying first class to China to lecture the rest of us on not taking package holidays.

Yet after three decades, little if nothing has been achieved. We’re still being told that the danger of the world being consumed by fires and tsunamis is greater than ever.

Virtually every other sensible country in the world has scaled back its over-ambitious Net Zero targets. Brazil, this year’s COP hosts, is actually ramping up drilling for oil and gas.

In Britain it’s full steam (or wind) ahead, further and faster in pursuit of a suicidal, unattainable goal: shutting down the North Sea, banning fracking and carpeting the country with inefficient solar panels and wind turbines made in China with electricity generated using coal – as well as lumbering us with the highest energy bills in the developed world, four times higher than America.

Only this week, the US ambassador warned that American-owned pharmaceutical giants based in Britain were relocating because of the exorbitant, uneconomic cost of gas and electricity. That’ll lead to thousands more climate-related redundancies and the loss of billions in taxes.

Meanwhile, Surkeir prances round Brazil in Carmen Miranda’s hat, singing Copacabana with Mister Ed and Genghis, while back home we all go to Hell in an expensive electric handcart… at 3p-a-mile.