19th October 2009

The Guardian gets in a muddle.

Jackie Ashley, in today's Guardian, and the leader writer in yesterday's Observer, have both been advocating bunging the CWU to keep them off the picket line.  And yet, at the same time, the Guardian seems to think it is somehow wrong to "bung" the bad old nuclear industry to keep the lights on.

The Guardian's confusion aside, this is a serious business.  The CWU are on the brink of destroying our Royal Mail, and a bung will only prolong our inconvenience and the company's agony.  On the other hand, giving minimum price commitments to the nuclear industry merely levels the playing field, as nuclear has pay to for its own waste, which is surely right, whilst coal doesn't have to pay for its carbon emissions, which is surely wrong.

The Guardian would do well to examine the role of its preferred party in all of this.  The Royal Mail is in trouble now in large part because the government failed to support the company's earlier attempts to spread ownership among the postal workers and thereby incentivize reform.  On nuclear, years of dithering on energy policy (they were vacillating as recently as 2003) have only served to increase the costs of new build nuclear, and increase the risk that we will have chronic power shortages while we wait for new capacity to come online.

If the Guardian really cared about the postal service, and about climate change, then it would stop setting itself up as the patron of lost socialist causes, turn against the CWU and give full-throated support to nuclear.