Forgive yet another reference to my recent car-swapping episode, but let me state emphatically that I was not tempted to follow 10,800 other British buyers last month in choosing a Jaecoo 7, the Chinese SUV hybrid that looks like Range Rover’s ugly sister. Led by cheap EVs, Chinese imports took 23 per cent of the UK new car market in September, while surveys say almost half of car buyers would now consider going for a Chinese, double the level of three years ago. That’s an extreme threat to the survival of our own auto industry, yet we still impose only a 10 per cent tariff on these invaders, apparently in the interest of building wider trade with them.

Just 5 per cent of British-made cars are sold to China (chiefly Jaguar Land Rover and luxury marques such as Rolls-Royce) while 56 per cent, plus huge numbers of Ford and BMW engines, are exported to Europe. You might think that makes it blindingly obvious the UK should negotiate to join the EU’s ‘Made in Europe’ scheme, formally called the Industrial Accelerator Act, which would require us to apply tariffs of up to 45 per cent on Chinese vehicles but would cement our position in complex EU supply chains. Such an alliance would be warmly favoured by European auto makers and might also, for example, allow manufacturing of the Mini Cooper EV to return from Jiangsu province to Cowley, where the plant designated for that project stands empty.

The town where Europe committed suicide

The gross narcissism of........

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