Captured

If carbon capture is the political price of a return to tapping this country's vast reserves of coal, then so be it. As much as anything else, it demonstrates that the technology of the coal industry now bears no resemblance to that of the 1980s, never mind that of the early twentieth century. The recent tragedy is South Wales was precisely a result of the end of public ownership and of trade union power, under the provisions inherent in and consequent upon which it could never have happened. Dennis Skinner made that point very well to Chris Huhne this week.

Ah, yes, Chris Huhne. By cancelling this country's first coal-fired power station with carbon capture technology, Huhne has demonstrated that he and the rest of the Coalition are not interested in safeguarding national sovereignty, the Union (not only, though certainly, because that power station would have been in Fife), and the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. They remain fully committed to the war against secure and skilled employment, against the paternal authority thus possessed of the necessary economic basis, against global economic development, against travel by us common people, and against our access to the meat that we are designed to eat.

Attentive readers will have noticed the significant crossover. When the possibility presents itself of simultaneously combating carbon dioxide emissions and delivering One Nation politics with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, then they do not want to know.