Firing Up

Drax’s two coal-fired power stations in North Yorkshire, and EDF’s one in Nottinghamshire, are being warmed up for the second time this winter, due to cold weather (yes, in the winter, who knew?) and the failure of the wind to blow (yes, in the extreme cold, who knew?).

Splendid stuff, of course, but what is now Drax used to be in public ownership. EDF still is, but in France. When the British State owned the generation and supply of electricity, then it also owned and exploited this country’s vast reserves of coal, not by request in an emergency, but by right every day.

Let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and those coal reserves. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Say it again, harness the power of the State to bathe this country in heat and light from oil, gas, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, solar, and that without which there could also be no steel for rigs, pipelines, power stations or turbines, namely coal. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the defeat of the miners in 1985. Do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.