My letter to the Times and Star and the Whitehaven News:
In an effort to lay the groundwork for his party’s cancellation of new nuclear in West Cumbria, our new MP is really tying himself in knots - publishing a cache of letters showing clearly that no access to Moorside had been blocked and that nothing has changed on this front between my government and his.
The letters were obtained through Freedom of Information rules by me, yet sent to him by ‘apolitical’ senior officers of our council at the same time. Make of that what you will.
They revealed nothing new, and I’d written publicly about delivering at Moorside, including about the content of the letters, a number of times prior to the election.
In a written answer from the Labour Nuclear Minister he was told that all proper access requests to Moorside land had been granted, and a follow up letter from the Minister doubles down on that - making clear that all requests need to follow procedure.
He is simply trying to cover up his government’s plan to sell out West Cumbria again, just as they did last time when Gordon Brown sold BNFL and our nuclear IP, and Blair saw “no economic case for new nuclear power stations” - that statement being lifted directly from their manifesto at the time.
Ed Miliband has been clear that they are about to scale back our Nuclear plans, and nuclear does not feature in their industrial strategy or more remarkably in their unachievable plans for ‘clean power’ by 2030.
I’m very confident that the SMR process under a Conservative government would not only have been much quicker than the current process - which has been slowed down as preparations are made to scale it back - but that it would also have resulted in new reactors in West Cumbria.
I’m not a fan of circumventing process to prefer one party - it opens it up to accusations of abuse like those currently surrounding Labour Cabinet Ministers, and it ties it all up in judicial review taking longer overall.
But it would be good to know if our MP is urging Ed to forego due process to guarantee SMRs on Moorside as he promised us during the election. As the man in control of both the NDA and GB Nuclear he could guarantee that today, with just the stroke of a pen.
Kind regards
Mark Jenkinson
Former Member of Parliament for Workington and Vice-Chair APPG Nuclear.
