Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar on Grangemouth redundancies
It wasn’t perhaps the best day for Anas Sarwar to go with a plea for jobs in Scotland, but for some reason he chose today to announce his conversion to new nuclear power in Scotland, arguing at FMQs today that new reactors would bring in thousands of jobs, which will otherwise go to England and Wales. We’ll go into why new nuclear power is a disastrously stupid idea (again) if you really need us to, but for now, let’s have a look at how Sarwar’s previous job promises have gone … (and congratulations to Colin Mackay at STV News)
and in case you missed it, here’s Anas Sarwar making his explicit promise on the campaign trail …
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That interview was extremely embarrassing, but boy does Sarwar have a brass neck. Good strong questioning from Colin but he could have disarmed Sarwar’s pathetic defence ‘but it’s a private company Colin!’ by asking him whether or not it was a private company when Sarwar made his extravagant election promises.
This interview clip should be distributed widely.
Coincidentally (or not) I’ve just today started reading Nuclear is Not the Solution: the folly of atomic power in the age of climate change
by MV Ramana (2024), which the author summarises (p2) with:
“Although climate change scares me, I am even more scared of a future with more nuclear plants. Increasing how much energy is produced with nuclear reactors would greatly exacerbate the risk of severe accidents like the one at Chernobyl, expand how much of our environment is contaminated with radioactive wastes that remain hazardous for millennia, and last but not least, make catastrophic nuclear war more likely.”
I’m impressed by the clarity, structure and political depth of the book so far (into Chapter 1).
I guess Anas Sarwar was making the implicit points (by cowardly avoidance and glazed robotic repetition) that 1) you shouldn’t believe anything politicians say in their campaigning, at least not Labour ones; and 2) Nuke Labour now recoils at entertaining the slightest thought of nationalising private companies, even those in industries supposedly considered vital (or at least adjacent) to national security.
I mean, the fever pitch of insanity of Starmer’s Labour government surpasses even the preceding Conservatives. This is a mind-boggling government press release (6 February 2025):
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-rips-up-rules-to-fire-up-nuclear-power
If planning laws from 2011 are ‘archaic’, what about our royalist-theocratic quasi-Constitution, which vouchsafes the nuclear codes to our hereditary monarch anointed by the state religion? The language is insane. Why do we need nuclear plants for “supercomputers to power the UK’s ambitions”?? Does not compute…
In the text, Starmer uses ‘we haven’t had one for decades’ as a reason, despite the same logic being applicable to not having a nuclear meltdown. Then Starmer whines about paying market rates for fossil fuels from other countries. Then Starmer divides the nation into builders and blockers. Finally Starmer takes the ‘radical’ decision to take his orders from corporate lobbyists.
I’ve just finished chapter 2 of Nuclear is Not the Solution: the folly of atomic power in the age of climate change (2024) where author and nuclear physicist MV Ramana writes about the neoliberal lobby groups pushing to deregulate nuclear power plants, despite industry self-regulation failures and disastrous accidents like Fukushima being partly attributed to regulatory failings (including sweetheart relationships and revolving doors between industry and government). Clearly the UK public is expected to bear the costs of underwriting private sector adventures into nuclear speculation, and encourage the riskiest projects and indulge the most overblown hype. But hey, cleaning up from nuclear disasters will boost GDP, and at least one trade union is on board, along with wheens of consultants and death-merchant-funded junktanks.
Presumably the proposed ‘Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce’ will have shown to be corporate captured before it arrived on the drawing board. Modularisation has been another broken promise by the nuclear industry already. And apparently we need growth in our nuclear ‘defence’ (perhaps in exponential relation to all those other countries which will be acquiring nukes?). And AI to, what, run our nuclear wars for us?
The next nuclear accident anywhere in the world will likely set back these extremely expensive, ever-delayed, over-hyped and utterly dangerous plans anyway. The vast ancillary costs even without accidents are not going to be deregulated away. Will security be reduced? The qualifications of staff (hey, get some interns and gig workers in!)? Speculators will make their profits even if the damn things are cancelled, like 120+ reactors in the USA pre-2007 before government bullying, bluff and bribery pushed the programme forward at public (and environmental) expense, apparently. Clean power, it isn’t, from the uranium mine to the warhead to the cracked reactor casings to the leaky geological depository to the depleted uranium dust to the poisoned land, sea and air.
Our own government poses an existential threat.
…. aye, you would be flattering him with the title of “Snake Oil Salesman” ….. he can lie, deceive, deflect & obfuscate at ease and without any sense of shame or reflection ….. even vermin would be embarrassed to be associated with him.
If there is any cognisence within the Scottish political body and working people in General ….. show this wessel the door and in the Scottish vernacular “don’t let it skelp yer arse on the way oot”.
Kudos to Colin MacKay for not letting him squirm out of the question.
Colin Mackay is consistently one of the best broadcast journalists in Scotland.
Sarwar still thinks that not answering the question is a clever way to deal with an interview. I remember when this started during the Blair period, people want answers, this approach can only fail to attract votes. What a sad sorry pit the Labour party has become.
The Grangemouth plant closure is in some way a metaphor for politics in Scotland today.
This issue has been brewing for sometime but Westminster under Tories did nothing to help and Holyrood under SNP weren’t powerful or assertive enough to do anything prevent the closure.
Labour in Scotland made extravagant promises in GE to save plant which been unable (or never intended to fulfill) which has left them looking weak and untrustworthy.
Shades of Oliver North