"Gromit, regardless of what Thatcher did the Brown/Blair dynasty was from 1997 to 2010 (13 years). They, and they alone are responsible for today's predicament. The Tories were not in power and could not do anything about it."
No they are not. Blair was in favour of new Nuclear Power plants, as was Brown. Government reports and reviews from 2003 and 2006 clearly show this.A plan to build new nuclear plants was put forward in 2006 following the government energy review, but Green Peace and the green lobby contested this, took it to court and forced a judicial review, which found in their favour. This effectively put back the development of additional Nuclear Power generation in this country.
Nuclear Power generation is an extremely contentious issue.The general public are conflicted, with little appetite for further nuclear reactors. To attempt to dismiss this simply as the fault of Labour would be a shallow and false assessment. The problem has long been the costs of building them - both the huge capital costs, and the even more eye-watering costs of decommissioning and waste disposal management, all of which the private companies concerned wanted government underwriting for.
So private industry wanted the state to underwrite their profits.Surprise, Surprise. The tories, in opposition, were not united in wanting nuclear development; It was not until 2008 that Duncan, then shadow energy secretary, finally came out to offer some guarantees should a tory government be installed at the next GE.
And then we come to the 2010 coalition; With a LibDem partnership resolutely opposed to nuclear power generation. It was not until 2012 that the LibDems voted for the first time to support nuclear power. And the Tories have been faced with the same problem; Limited private companies with the specialist knowledge, fromRWE in Germany, EDF in France and Westinghouse in the US. The Germans walked out early, ruling themselves out of any partnership,Westinghouse walked away from the last proposals - insufficient government guarantees for profit for their investors - so we were left with EDF, and they had no appetite either unless the government could sweeten the pot.
And now we are going, cap in hand, to the Chinese for the money, in return for which they get lovely goverment backed returns on their investment.
Oh, and it was the Tories that routinely sell of the family silver. It was they who sold off much of our nuclear generation capability back in 1995 under John Major.