Rishi Sunak is talking bollocks about nuclear power

Rishi Sunak claims that Britain's nuclear capability is a cornerstone of our national security, but if this is really true how come our nuclear power is run by the governments of France and China?

Rishi Sunak has claimed that "nuclear power generation is a cornerstone of our national security" while announcing hundreds of £millions of public cash to benefit companies in the nuclear industry.

One of the recipients that is actually quoted in the government press release about this additional funding is EdF; the 100% publicly owned state energy company of France, which owns and operates all of the UKs active nuclear power plants.

It’s a truly absurd situation.

If you’d have proposed handing control of Britain’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors to the government of France at any time before privatisation mania took over in the 1980s, you’d have been derided as a lunatic and a traitor.

But somehow this farcical arrangement is treated as absolutely normal these days, while those of us who argue for renationalisation of the UK energy sector are derided as if we’re the fringe political loonies!

But it gets even worse.

As a result of giving away our nuclear generation capabilities to France, we no longer have the expertise to build new nuclear power stations for ourselves, meaning the Tory government ended up bribing the governments of France and China into building them for us.

Whether you think new nuclear is a good idea or not, it’s absolutely ridiculous that Britain is dependent on bribing foreign governments into doing the job for us.

It takes incredible brass neck for Rishi Sunak to blether on about how strategically important nuclear energy is, while knowing that the bonkers Tory energy privatisation agenda has left us totally reliant on the national energy companies of overseas governments to operate our ageing fleet of nuclear reactors and build the replacements.

The Tory government is desperately trying to dress this additional funding up as some kind of wonderful success story, but the quotes from EdF in the Tory government’s own press release give the game away.

The press release quotes an EdF spokesman boasting that they (the government of France) have "been at the heart of the UK’s nuclear energy sector for over 15 years" before going on to say that it’s only in recent years that they’ve realised that there is "an urgent need to attract, train and inspire the next generation of people who can design, build, operate and decommission existing and new nuclear facilities".

What the French government are saying here is that they’ve failed to maintain a sufficiently large and well-trained workforce to keep the UK nuclear energy sector going, and that they’re glad the UK government is chucking money at the problem now to cover for their lack of workforce planning!

On the very same day as these new nuclear subsidies were revealed, the Tory government announced new sanctions on China over alleged espionage, which is totally ludicrous while the government continues to rely on China to build our new nuclear plants!

If Rishi Suank was remotely serious about nuclear energy being so vital to the UK’s national security, then he wouldn’t be announcing more public cash to benefit the government of France (plus a bunch of private companies like Babcock, Rolls Royce, BAE), he’d be announcing that energy generation is being taken back under British public ownership.

But to do that would require an implicit admission that the Tory privatisation agenda has failed, so it’s never going to happen.

Neither is it going to happen under Keir Starmer, who ripped up his deceitful leadership election pledges to renationalise energy and water, because he’s intent on defying public opinion to keep allowing profiteering corporations and overseas governments to continue using our utilities to siphon wealth out of the British economy.

Whoever wins the next election we’re going to have to put up with more of this deceptive drivel about how strategically important nuclear energy is as they shovel public cash at the problem, while complicit media hacks refuse to ask politicians the stunningly obvious questions about why it remains under the control of foreign governments if the claims of such national strategic importance are actually true.

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