nuclear-news

George Osborne’s reputation as a master political tactician may have gone the way of Leave’s £350m a week for the NHS, but the spectre of his misguided energy policy could haunt Britain for decades, and at Hinkley in north Somerset, for millennia.

Theresa May’s government urgently need to seize the opportunity to minimise the damage, an opportunity which only lasts while her government can portray them as the last regime’s errors, and disown them.

This week we learned that the UK has lost 12,000 jobs in the solar industry. This economic disaster was due to Osborne’s ideologically driven subsidy cuts to what was a vibrant and growing sector of the economy. The ideology in question was not opposition to state subsidies, of course.

Osborne has lavished new subsidies on the fossil fuel industry, just as the other leading industrialised nations have started to cut them, and Hinkley Point C is an Olympic-sized subsidy swallower. Osborne simply didn’t like renewables, despite onhore wind farms providing the cheapest electricity in Britain, and solar looking like the technology most likely to undercut them.

Whether this was due to powerful empathy with the small minority of voters who object to renewable energy, a gross misunderstanding of the economics, or an unhealthy affinity with the larger, more established firms pushing older technologies, is difficult to say. But the initial bad decisions became calcified into commandments as the government was forced to defend them repeatedly against an array of bewildered experts.

To avoid paying a low level of subsidy on technologies whose prices were dropping dramatically, Osborne’s Treasury made them rain on the one technology whose costs just keep on going up.

Hinkley C had been described as “the most expensive object on Earth” many months before the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that subsidies would be nearly five times as big as had been previously advertised………