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By-Election Shock..

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By-election shock should be a reminder to focus on what it is actually like to live in Scotland

What lessons for public policy in Scotland can we take from the Hamilton by-election result? It appears that, in a close fight, it is the incumbent party which has been punished most. But which incumbent?

The local authority which covers Hamilton and Larkhall (South Lanarkshire) is Labour-controlled. The UK Government is obviously a Labour administration with an enormous majority. It is only Holyrood that the SNP controls. So what can we take from the fact that, in a result which doesn’t exactly feel like a glowing endorsement of anyone, it is the Holyrood incumbent who is punished?

On one hand, that might be obvious enough – this is a Holyrood election to send someone to the Scottish Parliament and so issues under the remit of that parliament dominated much of the campaign. But there may be another factor which amplifies that effect.

Because this wasn’t a national election, there has been much less focus on national-level issues in the campaign and certainly much of the local conversation will have revolved around locally-felt issues. That means it is an election that encouraged people to focus on the place where people live.

In the case of Hamilton, that is potentially tricky for the SNP. The most visible factors in Hamilton are to do with the town centre and public services. Hamilton is almost a case study in how to destroy your high street with an edge-of-town retail park. Hamilton town centre was once busy and thriving. It is now in a sorry mess.

Like everywhere else, getting a doctor’s appointment is a chore, local authority services are threadbare and local infrastructure isn’t in its healthiest state. While Labour control the local authority, a lot of this happened while the SNP was in charge, so it may not have been a focus on local politics so much as Scotland-level politics as they impact locally.

If this is correct (and there is plenty to suggest it is), there is perhaps a strong lesson that political parties should adopt. Talking to journalists, lobbyists, decision-makers and party activists is not the same as persuading the public that you’re delivering a better quality of life for them. There is a very big difference between national-level statistics and how that feels in a given location.

The issues which are driving people just now are things like housing, crime, local social cohesion or the sense that things are ‘going to the dogs round here’, the ability to access public services, the ability to feel like you have influence over local decisions – and the broad sense that ‘anyone is listening to me and my concerns’.

Bragging about having a ‘record number of affordable homes’ built at a national level doesn’t help if a local housing market is saturated and private rental costs are soaring. A six hour wait in accident and emergency might well be an improvement on a seven hour wait, but it is not a positive experience. You can talk about how you’re focussed on ‘town centres first’ but does it feel like that in your town centre?

Politicians have become ‘managers of performance indicators’. They stand at a national level and explain how ‘the data’ shows that what they are doing is a success. Of course, often the response to data that shows things are not a success is to seek new data. But either way, that data may not tally with public perception.

Politicians need to get out of Holyrood and ask themselves what it actually feels like to live with their own policies. Lobbyists may provide the rhetoric to suggest that the housing situation is great, but do they produce the great, affordable houses people want to live in? A new out-of-town development may look like ‘inward investment’, but is it really disinvestment in towns?

In Scotland politics seems to have become a game played between commentators and politicians, the former assessing the latter from an advantaged position, the latter trying to placate the former using insider access. It all rather passes the public by – they live with whatever happens below.

This problem is getting worse every day. The SNP may like to hope that it will not face a by election near the shores of Loch Lomond any time soon given local opposition to Flamingo Land. Will activists in Galloway choose to punish the party that rejected their campaign for a National Park? What fate an SNP candidate standing in Torry given the likely theft of St Fittick’s Park?

The Scottish Government has hailed all of these decisions as data-driven and in the public interest. The public appears to feel differently. In the space between statistics and disillusionment lies a lived reality for most people. That should be the focus of politics again.

Content retrieved from: https://www.commonweal.scot/.

Scotland Does not Need Nuclear

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Scotland does not need nuclear power and people aren’t being told the truth

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/.