Have you got that?
Ownership or control by a foreign state (it doesn't matter which one), as such, is totally unacceptable.
Together with clean coal, nuclear power offers to secure high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class, and independence from Arab oil and Russian gas. Among many other good things, this would contribute significantly to reversing Thatcher's destruction of the economic base of paternal authority, initially in working-class families and communities, but then very rapidly throughout society as a whole.
How could any conservative object to that? Unless, of course, the nuclear power (or the clean coal) were owned by a foreign state.
So we need public ownership, which is British ownership, since nothing else can deliver what is necessary on the scale that is necessary.
So we'll be opening up the uranium mines of Northumbria, will we?
ReplyDeleteWe can get it from the Canadians, our kith and kin under the Crown. That's domestic production in all but name.
ReplyDeleteDon't we import coal from Austalia?
ReplyDeleteBut we don't need to. We have plenty of our own, but a political aversion to miners.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if we must import coal from anywhere, then it might as well be from Australia.
An Inner Commonwealth [i.e., retaining the monarchy] Energy Community? It's a thought...
After all, just look what Euratom and the ECSC became.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
ReplyDeleteNot only did Douglas Jay reject the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was "the blueprint for a federal state", but Ernest Bevin (or it might have been Herbert Morrison - I'll have to check) wrote across the top of the relevant documentation that "the Durham miners would never wear it", so that was the end of that.
They'd wear this, though.