Friday 16 September 2016

Enrage the Chinese or shaft the British public?


As one of the most inept Prime Ministers in living memory David Cameron has left an awful lot of toxic legacies behind for his successors to deal with (rising inequality, six years of economically ruinous austerity, re-inflation of the household debt bubble, savage local government cuts, his failed Brexit gamble ...) 


One of Cameron's absolute worst legacies is the shambolic rip-off nuclear power price-fixing deal that he and George Osborne cooked up with the French and Chinese.

There are all sorts of factors that make Cameron and Osborne's deal an absolute catastrophe for Britain. One of the main objections is the fact that the deal to get France and China to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station for us comes with the huge bribe of a guaranteed £92.50 per MWh of electricity for 35 years. This figure will rise with inflation for throughout the contract. When the global costs of renewable energy sources are in sustained decline, it's economically suicidal to lock yourself into a rip-off 35 year contract to pay way over the odds for electricity, but that's precisely what Cameron an Osborne did.

The rip-off deal is so bad that George Osborne's own father-in-law David Howell described it as "one of the worst deals ever" for British energy consumers and businesses.


The hopeless chancers Cameron and Osborne left Theresa May in an impossible lose-lose situation.

She either had to enrage the Chinese by backing out of the deal (a risky move when the Brexit vote has put the UK in such a weak position on the geopolitical stage) or she had to completely shaft the British public by continuing with this appalling rip-off deal.

On September 15th 2016 Theresa May announced the inevitable: She's choosing to shaft the British public rather than stand up to the Chinese.

Another big problem with the Tory nuclear price-fixing deal is that a Chinese company with a one third stake in the Hinkley Point C project has been charged by the US government with nuclear espionage.

By deciding to continue with a deal to work with a company that stands charged with stealing US nuclear secrets, May is clearly spitting in the eyes of the Americans. The nuclear espionage charges could have been an ideal opportunity to try to renegotiate the deal with less loss of face, but Theresa May spurned it.

The idea of a British Prime Minister spitting in the face of the Americans in order to suck up to the communist Chinese government would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago, but somehow the Tories are being allowed to completely get away with it by the mainstream media.

Just imagine the howls of outrage in the mainstream press if Jeremy Corbyn had even dared propose a policy of gravely insulting the Americans in order to suck up to communist China (obviously he wouldn't, he'd say that Britain should build its own energy infrastructure), yet the Tories aren't just proposing such an absurd policy, it's what they're actually doing ... and there's barely a whisper of dissent about it in the mainstream press.


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