Bernard Ingham: The Northern Powerhouse won't run on greenwash and hot air

SIR Edward Heath once said I was 'a menace to the constitution'. 'Well, he should know,' I retorted. 'He abolished Yorkshire in 1974.'
Eggborough Power Station.Eggborough Power Station.
Eggborough Power Station.

I know of no evidence that Heath’s tinkering with Yorkshire’s boundaries and local government structure 40 years ago has made the county any more of the powerhouse it aspires to be. This is not surprising. Yorkshiremen are awkward, not least with each other.

As Don Mosey, the old cricket commentator, put it: “The truth is that we are rude, boorish, stubborn, aggressive, argumentative, intolerant and just plain downright bloody minded.”

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Unfortunately, we seem to have gone unnaturally soft in the 21st century. This softness – this weakness in the head – is conspiring to make sure that we shall be anything but a powerhouse in the future.

Let me explain. The majority of our local politicians have been brainwashed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and such into believing that the planet will become too hot to live in and that nuclear power is an unacceptable antidote.

Both propositions are ludicrous. Scientists satisfy me that, notwithstanding the smoky outpouring for 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, there is no evidence that anything untoward is happening to the planet’s temperature. Others see nuclear power as both the answer to these current fears and a source of power for millennia.

And where do you find Yorkshire’s awkward squad in this argument? You don’t. This is not going soft. It is dissolving in greenwash.

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What is the consequence? Yorkshire is steadily being eliminated as a source of English power supply after losing its coal mines with the determination to end electricity generation by fossil fuels – except, of course, Drax’s risible use of subsidised biomass (wood, and imported at that). With it, is going heavy industry.

Yorkshire’s steel industry, for example, is in peril partly because of the cost of schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These politically correct wheezes serve only to put prices up, cut spending power and slow national economic growth.

It isn’t like Yorkshiremen to do themselves out of a penny or two, but that is exactly what is happening because of our uncharacteristic willingness to go along with a load of unscientific hogwash.

In these circumstances, I call on two expert witnesses: the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Professor Wade Allison, an Oxford physicist who, incidentally, has not worked in the nuclear industry.

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First, the engineers. Their simple message is that the Government’s policy to close all coal-fired power stations by 2025, combined with the retirement of Britain’s ageing nuclear fleet, will leave Britain facing a 40-55 per cent electricity supply gap. The country has neither the resources nor skills to plug it with gas-fired plant and new nuclear stations. In other words, these daft Greens and gullible politicians have led us up a gum tree.

Meanwhile, they continue to portray nuclear power as a fate worse than death. Prof Allison shows them up for what they are: ignorant scaremongers. In a book Nuclear is for Life, he accuses them of radiophobia.

Radiation is part of our natural existence and man has adapted to it. Current safety limits owe more to Hiroshima and Nagasaki than scientific observation and exaggerate risk a thousand-fold.

That exaggeration burdens an industry capable of producing electricity with next to no carbon emissions for thousands of years partly by recycling its waste from which only one per cent of its fuel has been used. And that waste, he claims, is a small problem because there is so little of it and its clean accident record.

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To put it bluntly, we Yorkshiremen are robbing ourselves by falling for myths. This is most unlike our tribe. But it gets worse.

We are killing people, too. Prof Allison points out that official figures show there were no deaths or cases of radiation sickness at the tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant in Fukushima, but Japanese politicians subjected 100,000 people to evacuation, causing trauma and disruption costing 1,000 lives. He calls for a cultural revolution to explain the benefits of ionising radiation to everybody through medicine, carbon-free power, desalination and food preservation.

Meanwhile, we are left with Yorkshire in decline and in danger of a self-imposed and nationally crippling gap in power supplies to no end but to serve the fantasies of so-called environmentalists who do not know the meaning of the term, witness wind turbines and dustbins.

Instead of abolishing Yorkshire industry, join me in becoming a latter-day menace not just to the constitution but to the very cosmos. Let’s get awkward with “environmentalists”.

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