Reform rides the wave of poverty and inequality to political power in England
Reform UK has won the by-election in Runcorn near Liverpool and is dominating the English local government election results. The Westminster seat that they won used to be a Labour safe seat. But is this really a surprise? History tells us that poverty and inequality are fuel for right-wing populism.
The unlawful plunder of Scotland’s resources will continue through these Freeports, as the British state ignores again the Treaty of Union.
Freeports are more than just a port, they are designated areas often covering a large area of land and sea.
Kate Forbes MSP collaborated with Michael Gove MP to bring two Freeports to Scotland, which for some reason are called Green Freeports. How green they will actually be is in question as it is not clear how they will be regulated and by whom.
One will be situated in Inverness and the Cromarty Firth but the external boundary extends to Brora. The diameter of the circle, which looks like the main working area, is almost 28 miles or 45km. The contract for this freeport is for 25 years.
The other is the Forth Freeport, which covers around half of Fife and approximately 70% of Edinburgh, Falkirk and Grangemouth. The boundary width is 44.8km or and almost 28 miles. More details about the Forth Freeport will be available when we announce dates for public meetings in that area.
Freeports can be a good thing if the legislation is in place to serve the community they are in and the operators invest in the community through creating jobs and improving infrastructure. And if they operate within the law of the state or country they are in.
What is being imposed is not that.
The freeports in Cromarty and Inverness, and the Forth Freeport do not have to adhere to employment laws; including minimum wage, NI and pension contributions, and Health and Safety laws. They are free to avoid environmental laws. Who regulates the freeports is not clear. There will be little or no benefit to the local community as there is no obligation to return regional investment to local communities.
Tax and customs and excise laws have been relaxed, who knows what will be coming in and going out?
Will these freeports become Tax Havens?
The Scottish Government has insisted these will be green freeports, but how can that be regulated when they are operational? Will they be subject to Scots Law or the UKGov Internal Market Act 2020?
This model of freeports, favoured by the UK Government, is not the preferred model across Europe. They serve big business, not the local community or the people.
Freeports? Free for who?
Salvo objects to these freeports as Scotland is not in a territorial union with England therefore annexing these areas and implementing different laws and regulations is a breach of the Treaty of the Union. The resources within these Freeports – oil, gas, wind farms and projected hydrogen capture should be used to benefit Scots, not syphoned off to benefit big business with little or no reward to Scotland or for Scots.
The land in Scotland belongs to the Crown. The people of Scotland are the Crown. The land and its resources belong to the people, not big business or conglomerates.
Content retrieved from: https://salvo.scot/freeports/.
The nuclear industry has one of the most aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns of all energy sources. It pushes relentlessly on politicians and the public to support the merits of nuclear power based on partial or inaccurate information. Very often this goes unchallenged in the Scottish media.
Given that nuclear power presents itself as a pragmatic response to decarbonising energy and given the scale of the PR campaign, it is perhaps not enormously surprising that SNP voters appear to split with their party over this issue. But would they continue to support nuclear power if they new the numbers?
Here are some stark realities. The cost of generating of electricity from renewable sources is £38 to £44 per MWh. The estimated cost of the same electricity from nuclear (at the new Hinkley Point C reactor) in 2025 is £150 per MWh. It can only be presumed that the participants in this survey were not told that generating electricity would become between three times as expensive with nuclear.
But even that hides the true costs. Nuclear power is very dangerous and, at the end of its lifecycle, is very complex to decommission and make safe. Every spent rod of nuclear fuel takes a full ten years simply to cool down. They must be immersed in a deep pool of cold, constantly-circulating water and monitored closely for ten years just to bring them down to a cool enough temperature that they can be processed.
That’s just the ongoing fuel. The complexity of decommissioning and entire nuclear power plant is significantly greater. In fact the current estimate of the cost for decommissioning nuclear power is about £132 billion. That is not paid for by consumers in their electricity bill – it is paid for by consumers through their tax.
This is the second stark reality that nuclear power works hard to conceal; not only is it three times as expensive as renewables to run, there is then a cost of at least £4,600 for every household to decommission the nuclear power plants and make them safe for the future.
Of course, safety is another issue here. Nuclear power stations are very vulnerable. They are extremely sensitive sites which require substantial long-term attention. There are currently concerns around the world that unreliable power supplies could mean existing plants may struggle to keep spent fuel rods from combusting if they cannot constantly and continually keep large amounts of cold water circulating round spent fuel.
Nuclear power stations do not like loss of electricity, especially for any extended period of time. This makes them very climate-vulnerable. And of course who knows what sorts of extreme weather we may face before the lifetime of a nuclear station is complete. Fukushima is not a cautionary tale for no reason.
And it is uncomfortable to dwell on the risks of nuclear sites if they become targets for terrorism or in war. No-one is expressing continent-wide anxiety over the threat-to-life status of Ukraine’s wind turbines; they absolutely are over the shelling of Ukrainian nuclear power stations.
The remaining case for nuclear is to provide ‘electricity baseline’ – the ability to bring electricity provision on and off line as renewable generation rates rise or fall (if the wind does blow), or during periods of peak demand. This just isn’t really honest – nuclear power does not like rapid changes in supply and are designed to run flat out, all the time, not least because costs rise rapidly if they are running at less then full power. You can’t just ‘turn them on and off’. So yes, they can provide baseline electricity but not ‘on demand’ electricity that can balance renewables.
Hydrogen storage can though. Scotland currently dumps enormous amounts of perfectly useable electricity in the ground if it is generated when there is no demand. This can be turned into hydrogen and then, on demand, converted back into electricity. At the moment the cost of electricity from hydrogen is about half as much again that of generating by nuclear. But there are big caveats to that.
First, the current hydrogen electricity price is about £230 per MWh, but this is a rapidly-developing area of technology and the current industry target is £100 per MWh. That makes it cheaper than nuclear. Second, there is no hidden capital cost – the incredible costs of building and decommissioning nuclear which are hidden from consumers by subsidy from tax just isn’t there for hydrogen. It is a simple technology.
Third, these costs all assume that you are generating hydrogen from electricity at full wholesale grid prices. But if you are using electricity that would otherwise be dumped because it is being generated at the ‘wrong time’, the hydrogen becomes a waste product. It is in practice much cheaper than nuclear and can supply long-term baseline. (Battery storage for short term is even cheaper.)
That is the reality that respondents in this poll were not given. Try the poll again with ‘do you want to pay three times as much for your electricity with an additional costs to your household of £4,600 to have unsafe nuclear power when renewables with hydrogen storage are cleaner, cheaper and safer’.
Consistent, reliable renewable energy isn’t hard to solve in Scotland. There are nations where nuclear may have to be part of a clean energy solution, but Scotland is not one of them. You need to withhold a lot of information from people to make them believe the wrong thing about nuclear.
Content retrieved from: https://www.commonweal.scot/.
