Onedin: Thnx 4 yr comments - I'll start with yr remark at the end :
"As for green jobs, this is another fantasy. No enterprise or business thrives from being labour intensive. "
Does the phrase "UK plc" ring any bells ? You remember, surely ? If we accept the working analogy (pun intended) of the UK as a gigantic "business" will you maintain that UK plc will thrive as labour employment tends towards 0 ? Because in case you've been out of the loop for the last 3 years at least - most people in Government and elsewhere have been racking their brains to think of how to create employment / jobs / labour intensity. (Despite the distasteful craze sweeping the major shops for "scan it yourself" etc )
Why even today, Danny Alexander's felt compelled to make a dint on structural unemployment with his proposal to force job-seekers to sweep streets and paint railings ... digging holes & filling them up again has been used before, in France I believe; why don't we try that here too ?
My point is we should be judiciously reaching out for every real and significant - let alone transformative and game-changing - opportunity to generate bona-fide labour intensive industries of genuine utility & economic significance. The French have, precisely, allowed themselves the luxury of an easy life with a 35 hr working week and retirement at 60 on the back of a nuclear Ponzi scheme in which they nuked themselves up to the hilt, and where their economy can only stop falling over if they continue to export their nuclear nightmares to every country in the World they can think of.
Unluckily for us, we're only 20 miles away.
The mass-protests in France against the increase of retirement age to 62 (!) - we should be so lucky - is just the tip of the ice-berg with which the French ship-of-state is about to collide. And BTW, Cameron's crafty deal to sell the UK Armed Forces down "riviere" is designed to try and (a) help Sarkozy eke out his nuclear-based economy by increasing the likelihood of cooperation in military nuke matters as well as "civilian" ones - the intention being that there should be a seamless segue from one area to the other - and a general acclimatisation of opinion in favour of the whole "Entente Nucleaire" ..
.. too bad about the sovereign UK Armed Forces - sacrificed to the EU vision of a Pan-European nucleocracy (and, to boot, an Integrated EU Armed Forces to act for our nascent Superstate).
I'm intrigued by the process in which Daily Mail readers have become - almost as one - so utterly & completely besotted with the idea of France & all it's doings (seeing as they're mostly nuclear power and armaments sales) ... perhaps I've just answered my own question. But I suspect that even paradoxical "Mail" readers, subsidising an easy French way of life by subsidising purchases of their nightmarishly expensive nuclear stuff is going to be hard to swallow. Keeping the French in croissants by paying them scores of £Billions of our taxes is bound to stick in OUR gullet ? Or, judging from the comments in reply to the original article - perhaps not: the hand over of our £Billions of our tax-cash will be as easy as supping a nice cup of "chocolat chaud"
Furthermore - since when, I wonder, did just about every single decent, self-respecting Conservative "Mail" reader become so violently opposed to Globalisation ? Trade with abroad - China, & good-grief, Germany? But, isn't that just next door to France? So why is buying £100's of millions of renewable energy technology from Germany worse than buying scores of "£Billions of radioactive technology from France? (Or is the only consistency in the "Mail" reader make-up that we hate the Germans more than we hate the French ? No, hang on, that's not right, obviously - the "Daily Mail" was so in favour of Herr Hitler before the War ...
Isn't the Globalised Free-Market Economy, that precious totem that Mrs T. received from Milton Friedman, dear to every "Mail" reader worth their blue rosette ? What's going on?
And the renewable technology - should it be the Solar PV type discussed in the article, or Solar thermal, in which the Germans are also expert - or Wind, tidal, wave, hydro, ground-source, energy efficiency etc. - will generate hundreds of thousands more lasting employment and jobs in the sector (manufacture of UK components, planning, infrastructure back-up, construction, servicing and maintenance, refurbishment, end-of-use re-cycling etc) than the comparatively few "jobs for the nuclear boys" ever can do. If you work in Sellafield today, that won't seem so unarguable - but it's a fact.
So what IS going on here ? - here's what : the British have been soft-soaped by the French nuclear Establishment into seriously considering handing vast amounts of our taxes (over and above what we already pay into the EU) to let them continue to lead the lives of grace and ease and Gallic good taste that we so admire - and in return we get a bunch of continuously radioactive - and potentially catastrophically deadly - bunkers in which to boil water. If nuclear power had never been invented in the first place, no-one in their right minds would dream of it as a viable way of generating steam. instead we would be hugging ourselves with joy and congratulating ourselves on the fortuitous existence of the tremendous resources of sun, wind, wave and tide and our great success in ingeniously devising means of exploiting these plentiful - actually infinite - resources.
Instead, the UK will be, in their plan, a useful bridge-head for the French nuke power companies, AREVA and EDF etc. with which they can evangelise world-wide for the supposed "nuclear renaissance" - since, if the UK kowtows, then the whole nuke proposition acquires, sadly - and quite unreasonably - a certain credibility globally, and we can be held up as an encouraging example to other prospect countries further afield . . .
I suspect that many "Mail" readers, and others, have been swayed - some perhaps even 'subliminally' - by the campaign of lies originating with the nuclear lobby about various forms of renewable energy, such as "birds being chopped up by wind-turbines" etc. giving nightmares to bird-lovers everywhere; "flicker" giving headaches to migraine sufferers and fits to people suffering from Epilepsy; "noise" disturbing the peace of an otherwise tranquil day by the M6 or M62; the fallacious argument of "intermittancy" and so on and so on. Well wouldn't you try every trick in the book, and then some, if the Euro-gravy train that is nuclear power looked like being de-railed by renewable energy ? You might even be tempted - to prepare the ground well in advance - say a couple of decades - and set an Anthropogenic Global Warming hare running ! ( That's the only joke in this reply, btw. )
In any case, if the French think that nuclear electricity is such a brilliant idea for the UK - I suggest we call their bluff. Let 'em build the eight or so nuke-power stations that they're keen to dot around the UK - but build them in France. As nuclear power is 150% safe, they can even build them in a ring around Paris, using local rivers like the Seine, for cooling - and feed the power to the city and to the rest of France radiating (pun intended) outwards. Meanwhile, if we find we need extra electricity we can purchase it as when required from the pre-existing French nuclear-power stations which line the coast - these will be re-dedicated to fulfilling contracts for electricity supply to the UK fifteen to 35 miles away across the water. That way the French nuclear establishment won't have to suffer the endless frustrating planning delays we will cause them, and they can look after the matter of the various forms of radioactive waste etc. to their own satisfaction. And we won't be burdened with waste, or building and decommissioning costs - just costs of purchasing the end product: electricity. See how they like that proposal. I'm not joking.
Michel Henry
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