Saturday 15 December 2012

Show Some Energy

Don't get carried away over shale gas. We have no idea how much of it we have, and in any case we already have the means to practically limitless energy. It is called nuclear power, which the last Government very strongly supported because that is the position of the trade unions, whereas the present one supports windfarms because they favour, and are favoured by, large landowners.

As surely as the last General Election was a shift back into a recession which had been over by that point, as surely as it was a shift towards the wholesale redefinition of legal marriage by means of the removal of a Government which had repeatedly and specifically ruled out any such measure, and as surely as it was a shift from a Government demonstrably opposed to the euro and to an elected second chamber to a Government open to the former and actively committed to the latter, so it was also a shift away from a Government passionately committed to nuclear power, replaced with one that was and is at best ambivalent towards it.

Nuclear power, and this country's vast reserves of coal: we know that they are there, and we know that they work. But they employ people, and the wrong sort of people at that, rather than merely funnelling public funds into the pockets of those who are already enormously rich. The utilisation of any source of energy depends on government action. It is a matter of deciding on what, and on whom, that taxpayers' money is to be spent, and why.

Ed Miliband, over to you.

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