Who are Britain Remade?
There’s a concerted attempt to attack Scotland’s long-standing commitment to no new nuclear power, alongside a full-scale assault on the idea of Net Zero, and the very basics of climate policy (however inadequate mainstream policy is).
This is being led by Nigel Farage who has called Net Zero ‘the New Brexit’, whatever that means. All this has been echoed by Tony Blair’s intervention this week where he argued that any attempt to limit fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is “doomed to fail”. Alongside this we can see Scottish Labour’s recent commitment to the cause of new nuclear power in Scotland.
Today The Scotsman ran with a front-page splash all about how ‘SNP voters back nuclear power’ by Deputy Political Editor David Bol and Alexander Brown.
The article was replete with quotes from Labour MSP for East Lothian, Martin Whitfield, Scottish Conservative MP, John Lamont, who said the Scottish Government embracing nuclear power would be “basic common sense”. Then there’s a quote from Sam Richards, founder and campaign director for Britain Remade, who, it turns out commissioned the poll and was also enthusiastically pro-nuclear.
What The Scotsman didn’t explain though, was who ‘Britain Remade’ are? They’re presented as if they’re maybe pollsters or some independent think-tank.
But Britain Remade is a Tory think-tank and lobby group campaigning on behalf of nuclear power. Jason Brown is Head of Communications for Britain Remade, a former No. 10 media Special Adviser and Ben Houchen’s comms Adviser.
Ben Houchen, Conservative Mayor of the Tees Valley
Jeremy Driver is the Head of Campaigns at Britain Remade, a former Lloyds Banker and Parliamentary Assistant to Ann Soubry. Sam Dumitriu is Head of Policy at Britain Remade who formerly worked at the Adam Smith Institute. These are Tory SPADS working on their own campaign to support new nuclear in Scotland: Lift The Ban On New Scottish Nuclear Power.
Britain Remade claimed they are not affiliated: “We’re an independent grassroots organisation. We are not affiliated with, or part of, any political party” their website says. They may not be officially affiliated to any party, but it’s very clear where their politics (and their staff) come from.
So here we have the Scotsman giving over its front-page to a Tory lobby group to promote their campaign. On the same day they published a similar piece in the Telegraph “SNP’s ‘senseless’ nuclear ban ‘damaging Scotland’” so it’s really working for them.
This is not just a question of client journalism, it’s a question of how far right-wing forces, often working with dark money, will attempt to derail even the most modest (and completely inadequate) environmental policies. Quite why Saudi-funded Tony Blair should jump on the anti Net Zero bandwagon is anybody’s guess, but it’s quite clear there is a coordinated pro-nuclear lobbying group in action in Scotland that pans across the Conservatives and Labour parties, and is supported by astroturf groups and pliant media friends. Watch this space for more on the new nuclear lobby.
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Your analysis is both on point and on target. You have it right on the money — and I mean that literally.
Yours is excellent journalism at work. You have laid bare the sinews of power structures at work in the real world and it’s often concealed naked brutality. I am reminded of Hobbs “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Poetic/philosophic exaggeration perhaps but a worthy reminder.
Dito!
James O’Brien in “How they broke britain’ highlights the incestuous relationship between the tory party, think tanks, pollsters, bbc, press, interns and some businesses.
In Scotland replace Tory party with unionism.
Deep shame on Labour for promoting nuclear with the tories!
Controversial bbc this week was saying Hunterston was nuclear free – eeehhh???
This of course follows the premature and destructive closure of Grangemouth!
You can see the pieces of the puzzle unionism wishes the people of Scotland to piece together.
Scotland dependent on England for energy, whereas, we all know the opposite to be true!
The. Scottish Government needs to be bolder and louder in highlighting to the people of Scotland the dangerous nuclear strategy westminster seeks to impose on Scotland!
Remember Dounreay!
It is still an active nuclear accident!
Unionism can’t be trusted an inch, let alone a half life of 25,000 years!
Sigh.
Nuclear power is a red herring because we have no known ability to deal with the waste nor decommissioning reactors once they get too old. All it’s fuel and assembly requires fossil fuels (anyone seen a solar or nuclear powered uranium mining machine recently?), so once you “phase out FF by replacing it with nuclear” you can’t build anymore nuclear or renewables. Also, nuclear requires a consistent input of electricity for safety purposes – in the Spanish blackout yesterday the Spanish nuke plants automatically shut down. To quote a BBC article:
“….but four nuclear power reactors at Almaraz, Ascó and and Vandellós were automatically shut down by the outage, and three others were already offline anyway.”
So even if you went 100% nuclear and renewables, you’d still need gas/hydro backup for the nuke plants.
We have to remind ourselves that nuclear plants and renewables produce electricity, not concrete nor iron ore nor bauxite nor rare earth metals.
Plus, to replace fossil fuels the world would have to be building 3 reactors a day worldwide, whilst shuttering 2 fossil fuel plants a day.
Is it happening? No, therefore it isn’t going to happen. If English or Scottish nuclear is going to take as long as Hinckley Point C to come on line, then sellers of rocket stoves and boxes of matches should do well in the interim.
Net zero is a red herring because newables require fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, transport and install, and more signficantly, not one iota of renewable infrastructure as displaced any FF infrastructure, it has merely added to the total energy mix. Despite the claims of Mark Jacobson and others, it ain’t gonna happen. Especially not within the current market-orientated dominant paradigm.
Yes, you can have renewables, but humans are going to have to realise that it won’t be a one-for-one replacement for fossil fuels or nuclear. Until we grasp that nettle and the other one of leaving it all ‘to the market’ this issue will never be resolved. Until, as is happening already (with me certainly), people start self-rationing because they simply cannot afford the price.
Less energy use, and very localised and owned energy systems are the only way forward that will even attempt to work.
Whatever energy system is pushed by these “think tanks” – more like Unthink tanks, is clearly a sign that someone smells a profit somewhere, usually through some kind of government subsidy and/or price commitment. I don’t think any of them actually give a sh*t about where energy comes from, as long as it keeps coming and they can be involved in the profits.
Looks like we need to get the old SCRAM – Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace going again.
Bliar is a shill got the fossil fuel, nuclear weapons / atoms NOT for peace and tech bro hegemony.
Remade Scotland one to watch for!
Should be easy on this occasion. Scotland is self sufficient with renewables and has abundant other energy reserves to meet all our energy needs without nuclear power. England is in a different situation and they may need nuclear to fulfill their energy needs.
Simply say we oppose nuclear power stations being built in Scotland to provide energy for England because they don’t want to build nuclear power plants down south. Scotland takes all the risks to provide energy for English customers. It might sound a bit nationalistic but I do think this would have a lot of popular support throughout Scotland.
The tale of corporate media and astroturfed groups pushing for a big policy shift in painfully familiar to trans people.
Again, I’d recommend Nuclear is Not the Solution: the folly of atomic power in the age of climate change, by MV Ramana (2024). In the author’s opinion, nuclear power is pushed by capitalists to solve a problem caused by capitalists, appeals to elites and fantasies about growth, often exploiting the myth of the entrepreneur and gullible journalists, and is inextricably linked to militarism (and global armageddon). It’s an expensive folly mired in corruption, extortion and undelivered promises. Reactor integrity will be threatened by increasing climate volatility. Nuclear cannot be rolled out at anywhere near the scale required, even if all other problems were solved.
Renewables will require a paradigm shift, with new infrastructure planning, and their negative consequences minimised.
p235 “This is an open and shut case. Expanding nuclear energy will not help address climate change but will worsen a range of environmental problems and security risks.”
The nuclear industry also appeals to people who prefer secrecy over transparency, centralisation of power over democracy (let alone biocracy), and get a kind of sick thrill about poisoning the world for hundreds of human generations (best case scenario).
….but Nuclear energy will be so cheap and abundant that we won’t even need to meter it ! 70 years and still waiting for this Utopia !
Have we been lied to ?
Muchly.
Thanks for drawing attention to this. There is a very determined effort going on to force us to accept new nuclear power.
I have recently fallen out with Octopus. I discovered that, without telling customers, their energy mix is now 15% nuclear. I was and still am shocked because they have previously made a great thing about their green credentials. I have been an anti-nuclear campaigner for 50 years and -as I told them – I would never knowingly buy nuclear electricity. I need all my consumption to be covered by renewable, and preferably local and co-operative, generation.
I already had a dispute with them because they refuse to pay anything for my solar PV exports unless I install a smart meter which I will not do. So they get my electricity for free while charging what they themselves agree is an outrageous price for electricity I buy from them, the highest rates in the UK no less, while the rural highlands is trashed and industrialised to send electricity to London. I have cancelled my contract with Octopus and changed supplier.
The reason for the promotion of nuclear now is that the techno-fascists have discovered that the vast amounts of energy required to drive their digital dystopia simply cannot be generated by renewables without trashing vast areas of the UK. And despite their rejection of any due diligence, consultation or planning constraints, building it all out will take too long. They want to power their facial recognition, their AI, their digital ID and digital ‘currency’ right now. They are also increasingly concerned that more and more people are installing their own solar panels, or developing local community energy projects that make them less dependent on centralised power.
Of course traditional nuclear is now almost impossible to finance and construct commercially, which is why they are so keen on Rolls Royce’s ‘small modular reactors’, the sort of thing developed for nuclear submarines and no doubt similar to Russia’s new nuclear powered missiles that can be deployed and re-deployed in space.
The other reason is of course that all the new nuclear weapons we are all spending bullions on developing need fuel. And nuclear power plants are where that comes from.
Although climate change and the ecological emergency are real enough, ‘Net Zero’ was always an accounting con-trick used to justify building out the electricity infrastructure. So they are replacing ‘net zero’ with a new, equally meaningless goal. ‘energy security’.
The good news is that the whole nightmare is unravelling. The drive for nuclear power is really a desperate effort to keep the ‘Great Reset’ on the road. But it is literally running out of fuel, and without the supposed (but always ludicrous) justification that it is the only possible solution to the climate emergency, they are left with nothing except forcing it on us all by sheer violence.
Nuclear power is an economic, political and ecological disaster in every way. We have to keep saying ‘no thanks’.
All that plutonium for future generations!
…then there is the ‘forgotten’ power station in Dumfries and Galloway at Chapelcross. Decommissioned in 2004, it was built with the sole purpose of producing weapons-grade uranium – electricity generation was regarded as a by-product. We are informed that the site will be radiation-free by 2095. That’s not a scientific estimate based on radioactive half-life or anything else, just a timescale that’s suitably remote from any responsibility being attached to anyone alive today. Dounreay will be returned to use as a brownfield site in 100 years? 200 years? – estimates vary. Hunterston and Torness sites being returned safely for use to the Scottish people have as yet no reliable timescale.
Scotland does not need or want any new ‘small’ reactors – a design based on the power plants of the submarines such as those currently rusting away in Rosyth because the MOD hasn’t a clue what to do with them.
Scotland needs nuclear power like it needs Westminster’s corrupt governance.
Ha ha. Nothing new. This is a familiar story to Australians, But take heart. We have just kicked out of Parliament our Tory party – that ran on a pro-nuclear platform, publicised by a succession of fake “independent” think tanks. Good on you for exposing this one!
And by the way, of course Tony Blair is on the anti Net Zero bandwagon. As in Australia, the forces of the fossil fuel lobby push for nuclear energy – they know it’s a dead duck, but in the meantime, the main game is stopping renewable energy and energy efficiency. Tony Blair is right in their pocket, with his pro-nuclear front group – Tony Blair Institute For Global Change – https://nuclear-news.net/2025/05/03/tony-blair-still-a-nuclear-nutter/
Why would a country that in recent times has produced enough renewable electricity to meet it’s own needs, want a power source that produces waste that is toxic for many hundreds to thousands of years?
https://dearscotland.substack.com/p/uk-lobbyists-east-lothian-council
On May 1st, a public meeting was held in Dunbar. It was attended by 28 people, most of whom were retired workers from the nearby Torness nuclear power plant. An attendee provided me with notes from which I have drawn.
The meeting was organised by Britain Remade, a lobby group headed by Sam Richards, a former Tory SPAD.
Richards is also a former Director of the Conservative Environment Network, where he praised Michael Gove for “doing good work for our planet.”
A Britain Remade campaign, “New Scottish Nuclear Power,” aims to reverse the SNP’s ban on new nuclear power stations. Its petition has over 1400 signatures.
In addition to the petition and public meetings, its efforts include planting stories like this one in The Spectator on May 7th.
Also present at the Dunbar meeting were Councillor Norman Hampshire, leader of the East Lothian Council (ELC) and Chair of the Planning Committee, and Martin Whitfield, English Labour MSP for the South of Scotland.
Sam Richards described Britain Remade as a “cross-party campaigning group” that believes in economic growth and building infrastructure.
He boasted about the UK’s nuclear power track record. In 1956, the world’s first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in Sellafield, Cumbria (it was decommissioned in 2003). The plant’s main purpose was to produce plutonium for the UK nuclear weapons programme – electricity for the domestic market was a sideline. Throughout its 47 year life, it exposed workers and the public to higher levels of radiation than comparable reactors and wasn’t economically viable for long periods.
Sellafield was also the site of Europe’s worst nuclear accident, the Windscale fire in 1957, that led to the atmospheric dispersion of radioactive materials throughout England and Wales and parts of northern Europe. Sellafield has been a nuclear waste dump since 1959 and has been called Europe’s most toxic nuclear site, described as a “bottomless pit of hell, money and despair.” It’s a reason Scotland is the “cancer capital of world.”
That’s a hell of a track record, Sam.
Sam blamed high electricity bills on the UK’s failure to build more nuclear plants, claiming nuclear power was the reason France had lower bills. Wrong. Nuclear power has never been economic. It requires hefty government subsidies and there’s no solution for radioactive waste disposal. French energy bills are lower because France didn’t privatise its energy and thus retained the ability to cap costs. The French government owns 100% of Électricité de France (EDF), which runs the East Lothian Torness power station and the UK’s 4 other operating nuclear plants.
However, EDF doesn’t seem overly concerned with the safety of its UK plants. The Torness reactor has 46 cracks in its core which the ONR (Office for Nuclear Regulation) said could lead to a reactor meltdown and the release of radiation into the environment. Nevertheless, EDF has extended the life of the plant to 2030.
Britain Remade’s goal is to get the ban on nuclear lifted and to use the Torness site for new nuclear plants. Does that fill you with confidence?
Then English Labour MSP Martin Whitfield trotted out 2 pro-nuclear talking points, both of which are easily refuted:
Nuclear power doesn’t increase CO2. Not so. There are carbon emissions from mining, transporting and processing uranium, from constructing power plants and from transporting radioactive waste to places like Sellafield. By contrast, renewable energy doesn’t increase CO2, there’s no mining required or toxic waste to dispose of, and Scotland is bursting with renewables.
Nuclear power creates skilled jobs for life. The renewables industry also creates skilled jobs for life without shortening it – in engineering, project management, data analysis and renewable energy technologies – and doesn’t endanger the health of workers or the local community.
Councillor Hampshire, who worked at Torness from the beginning, spoke next. He said that although he “had to support renewables”, nuclear is needed for baseload power, which is the minimum power level on the grid.
Wrong again. Baseload power can be provided by any mix of generators, including variable wind and solar, if constant backup sources like tidal are provided. Furthermore, nuclear can’t be easily switched off, so when it’s present on the grid, much cheaper renewables are limited, which raises costs to the consumer.
Nonetheless, Councillor Hampshire said he was lobbying hard for more nuclear power. He wants two Rolls Royce SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) at the Torness site, claiming they’re cheaper and quicker to build and said that many SNP MSPs support him.
I wrote about SMRs back in February, showing they are 1) more expensive than and just as dangerous as large nuclear reactors, 2) will generate more radioactive waste and 3) will turn communities into de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal sites.
There’s also the minor detail that only two SMRs are operating in the world today – in Russia and China. Both are performing at less than 30% capacity and have been plagued by cost and time overruns. According to the World Nuclear Energy Status Report, these problems “make it even less likely that SMRs will become commercialised.”
Despite these facts, Councillor Hampshire vows to include SMRs in the next ELC Local Development Plan. He said “a lot of work is going on behind the scenes” to ensure Torness remains an active nuclear site. Otherwise, “the UK would have to import energy” and “Scotland can’t just keep its energy to itself.” Does he seriously claim to represent Scotland?
During the Q&A, Martin Whitfield was asked what it would take to change Scotland’s position. He replied “a change of government,” and questioned whether Scotland has the authority to ban nuclear power since energy policy is reserved to the UK. It does, because the Scotland Act 1998 devolves planning to Scotland.
Nevertheless, Whitfield said this could and would be tested through the courts, although he later clarified there were no definite plans to mount a legal challenge to Scotland’s authority to ban new nuclear power.
We know exactly why English Labour is pushing for more nuclear. They’re funded by the industry and I suspect that’s where Britain Remade gets some of its funding, too. The nuclear industry expects payback.
The UK Nuclear Industry Association boasted last September:
The places where nuclear is strong are also the places who put the Labour Party into government. Hartlepool on Teesside, Heysham on Morecambe Bay, Torness in East Lothian, and Sizewell on the Suffolk Coast host all our operational nuclear power stations, and all were Labour gains at the last election.
Britain Remade CEO Sam Richards ended the meeting by saying this was just the start of the campaign to lift the nuclear ban and that he’d be going to other parts of Scotland and then to Holyrood to argue the case.
Nuclear power is another issue crying out for Direct Democracy, where the Scottish People, not special interests who are in bed with the politicians, have the power to decide via a referendum whether they want it or not. There are many other issues, local and national, over which the Scottish People have no control – pylons in the Highlands, corporate tax haven ‘freeports’, the closures of Ardrossan Harbour and Grangemouth, the Loch Lomond Flamingo Land development, to name just a few.
If we’re to stop special interests always crushing the interests of the People, we must demand our international human rights. That’s why Respect Scottish Sovereignty (RSS) is urging as many as possible to sign PE2135, to enact the Direct Democracy/Self-Determination Covenant (ICCPR) into Scots law.
If you’re an East Lothian resident, you can write to Councillor Norman Hampshire ([email protected]) and Martin Whitfield ([email protected]), and if not, write to your MSP and MP and ask them to support PE2135.
The sovereign Scottish People – not compromised politicians or nuclear lobbyists – should decide Scotland’s energy future and whether it can just keep its energy for itself.