Chris

Yeah I read that this morning. We’re just not very good at doing anything whose payoff is likely to lie outside the current electoral cycle. There are loud rumblings that Northern Powerhouse Rail is going to get cancelled - again - despite cancelling it being of no present benefit to the task of dealing with the ruined finances, because much of the building and therefore much of the spending is still several years away.

Plus when it comes to nuclear you can add the article of faith in certain parts of the Left that it’s A Bad Thing, which caused Blair’s government to equivocate on it for too long, and caused the Coalition to vacillate and eventually devise a mucky compromise that suits nobody, and which will for the foreseeable future prevent Scotland from generating any meaningful base load of its own, because the SNP knows that keeping the left-leaning part of its internal coalition happy requires them to disavow it.*

It’s a sad state of affairs that we have had so few people in public life with the strength to do what’s right for the country.

* While energy policy is reserved, the SNP has continually threatened to call in any planning applications HMG might make to any Scottish local authority for building a new nuclear power station. The planning inspectorate in Scotland isn’t an independent body, but … the Scottish government. In theory, wonderfully democratic but in practice just another way of one elected body overriding another. Ironically exactly the same sort of thing the SNP loves to moan about vis a vis Westminster, but that’s another rant.