Vestas: Good News?

Only up to a point.

I am not a big fan of wind turbines. Far from being environmentally friendly, they cut up birds, and they kill both farm and wild animals by depriving them of sleep.

There is not, because there cannot be, any environmental case for re-restricting travel to the rich. Nor for arresting economic development in the poor world. Nor for eradicating, or failing to restore, high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class in general and for working-class men in particular, the economic basis of paternal authority in working-class families and communities.

You may argue that the Vestas workers have such jobs. Yes, but there are vastly more of them to be had in nuclear power and in clean coal technology, themselves safeguards against dependence on foreign oil or foreign gas (we can obtain uranium from Canada, which is as good as domestic production).

Those industries, in turn, can only be properly developed in this country under the aegis of public ownership. Which is, of course, the British ownership from which Vestas so conspicuously does not benefit. And which could again, as once it did, bind together the Union by creating communities of interest across the several parts of the United Kingdom, often in the form of companies with the word “British” in their names.

When it comes to weakening either national self-government or the Union, some things have done as much damage as the destruction of the nationalised industries. But nothing has done more.