Tendring Topics……..on Line
Our Grandchildren’s Legacy
One
of the most persuasive arguments that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
Exchequer use to justify their continuing assault on the finances of the
poor and disabled and the services on which they depend, is that it would be
grossly unfair of us to leave our grandchildren with a legacy of our debts that we have been too selfish
to clear. It’s a persuasive argument.
None of us wants to be the cause of suffering or hardship to our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. I doubt though if it has satisfied those whose car has been damaged by a
pothole in the road, who have tripped over a broken paving stone or who have
found that they are no longer eligible for a financial benefit needed to keep
their family warm and above starvation-level.
Our top politicians are also – or so I thought – quite keen on
supporting British industry that will provide jobs for British workers and thus
make up for some of the unemployment resulting from their cuts in the public
services.
That
being so, I find it difficult to understand why they are quite so enthusiastic
about a new nuclear power station that is to be built, at the cost of billions
of pounds, by a French enterprise and financed by the Chinese! It will, announced the Prime Minister,
provide thousands of jobs and cost the British taxpayer nothing at all. And that, he added with self-satisfaction, ‘must be a good thing’.
The Chinese aren’t
philanthropists and they are lending that
money for the power plant’s construction just as surely as the financial
institutions lend money to the government to allow it to carry out its functions. They’ll want it back – with interest! It may not cost us anything now as tax-payers
but it certainly will cost our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren as consumers.
Luckily for the government they won’t have votes in the next General Election! The government has promised repayment by
means of electricity charges to domestic, commercial and industrial consumers
at twice the rate at which those
consumers are charged today – and goodness knows, many people, and many firms,
are finding today’s prices crippling.
It’s true that some of that increase will be absorbed by general
inflation by the time that power station is producing electricity – but wages and
incomes (except for those of the very wealthy) aren’t keeping up with inflation
now. Why should we assume they’ll do so
in the future?
Debt
will not, of course, be the only legacy left to our grandchildren and great
grandchildren by this and other nuclear power stations. The production of nuclear power leaves a toxic residue that remains lethal for hundreds of years and for which no-one has yet
discovered a safe means of disposal or storage.
I wrote fairly
light-heartedly in this blog about ‘fracking’ a few weeks ago. The real objection to its practice is not
that it will despoil the countryside and possibly pollute water supplies but
that it will encourage complacency in the face of the strongest evidence yet
that accelerating climate change is taking place and that human activity is
responsible for it. Fracking, as well as
being expensive and destroying the beauty of ‘England’s green and pleasant
land’, produces fossil fuels that will hasten that climate change and delay our
development of sufficient clean and renewable sources of energy sufficient to
meet the UK’s needs.
Nuclear
power doesn’t produce greenhouse gases but it does have bulky by-products that
remain lethal for centuries. Nuclear
power plants are also subject to damage by natural disasters, as we have seen
recently in Japan where
radio-active material from a ruined nuclear energy installation continues to
pollute the Pacific Ocean . Had anyone warned of that Japanese power
plant’s potential vulnerability four years ago they would have been laughed at,
just as those who in Britain warn about vulnerability to natural disaster and
to terrorist action, are laughed at today.
We
need to press on with our harnessing of the power of the wind and the sun. We need also to find effective ways of
exploiting the power of the waves that crash onto our beaches and the foot of our cliffs all
the year round. The potential energy of
wind, sun and waves does, as critics delight in pointing out, vary according to
the weather and the season. That of the tides that ebb and flow twice
daily round our coasts and into and out of our estuaries is completely dependable.
Tidal power doesn’t pollute, needn’t
deface the landscape and doesn’t produce a lethal by-product. It has been harnessed and used in tide-mills
for centuries. We need to use 21st century technology to exploit for
modern use this totally reliable, non-polluting and inexhaustible source of
energy.
I have little
doubt that if we invested half as much capital and effort into researching and
developing those entirely benign and renewable sources of energy as we spend on
manufacturing weapons of death and destruction, our grandchildren would have
all the energy they needed, in safety and at prices they would be able to
afford.
Late News - David Cameron has announced that he will 'roll back' the green taxes introduced to combat climate change as they add too much to fuel bills. Well, it's easier than confronting the energy supply companies and it should win a few votes for his Party. Tough on those grandchildren and great grandchildren about whom he and the Chancellor were once so concerned.
Late News - David Cameron has announced that he will 'roll back' the green taxes introduced to combat climate change as they add too much to fuel bills. Well, it's easier than confronting the energy supply companies and it should win a few votes for his Party. Tough on those grandchildren and great grandchildren about whom he and the Chancellor were once so concerned.
A Prophecy Fulfilled!
How very
rarely does the ability to say ‘I told
you so!’ give the speaker any satisfaction whatsoever!
It must surely
be obvious to any sane person that this dreadful civil war in Syria must be
stopped. Thousands of innocent people have been killed. Thousands more have been rendered
homeless. Much of the country has been
reduced to ruin. The flood of refugees is
overwhelming neighbouring countries. Egypt and Libya ,
Muslim countries that might have been expected to welcome their fugitive co-religionists
are simply moving then on – many to their deaths as they try to cross the Mediterranean
Sea in cockle-shell boats. The religious tolerance that was once a
hallmark of the Syrian regime has been replaced by sectarian strife,
intolerance and persecution of people of minority religious traditions.
Christians, who before the civil war had lived in peace beside their Muslim
neighbours have been particularly targeted by the very rebels whom our
government is supporting.
Backing either one side or the other in an
attempt to force an end to conflict by bringing one of the combatants to
victory is as stupid as it is wicked! The fact is that both sides have shown total contempt for human life.
Both sides are culpable. The only
possible end to the conflict must surely lie in negotiations in which all
concerned are prepared to compromise to restore the country to peace and allow
Syrians – free from any foreign
interference – to heal their wounds, bury their dead and rebuild their
shattered country.
Just such an
international conference has been planned for next month. I prophesied in this blog that I thought it
likely that Russia
would be able to persuade the Syrian Government to attend in a spirit of
compromise. Our government's ability to persuade the
rebels (a hotchpotch of liberal idealists, fanatical Muslim jihadists and known
democracy-hating terrorists, many of them foreigners with no previous association whatsoever with Syria ) to send
representatives ready to compromise and authorised to negotiate, would be
another matter!
So it has
proved. The Syrian Government is
prepared to attend the international conference with no preconditions. By promising that President Assad would play
no part in any future Syrian Government (I'd have thought that that was a decision that the Syrian people might have been allowed to decide in the ballot box?) our Foreign Secretary William Hague has persuaded some of the rebels
to send representatives. Others though,
notably members and supporters of Al Qaida, are interested only in total
victory no matter how many innocents are slaughtered to achieve it. If,
miraculously, a compromise is reached and a new peaceful Syria emerges,
I have little doubt that supporters of Al Qaida will continue their war of
terrorism to try to undermine and destroy it.
Just one good
thing does appear to be emerging from this appalling conflict. The Head of the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
believes that the surrender and destruction of Syria’s stock-pile of chemical
weapons will mean that the organisation’s objective; a world free of these terrible means of
killing fellow human beings, can and will be achieved in his lifetime.
If that is
possible – then why should it not be possible to make progress towards
achieving a world free of those even-more-terrible nuclear weapons? At the
moment we in the UK live in one of seven countries (but officially only six!) that possess these dreadful
weapons of mass destruction. Do we really imagine that the citizens of for
instance, Canada , Germany , Sweden
and Japan
sleep any less easily in their beds than we do because they don’t possess these
so-called ultimate deterrents? I hope,
again for the sake of our grandchildren and great grandchildren, that it doesn’t
take their use in some future conflict to persuade the world’s governments of
the importance and urgency of banishing them for ever from our planet.
Is the UK
betraying Europe – for the CIA?
The UK Government's deafening silence amid
a chorus of indignation about the bugging of the phones of European leaders, while David Cameron reserves his condemnation for those who have revealed this
practice, gives credence to the accusation that Britain's Brussels
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment