There must be something about the sea air on Anglesey: it miraculously turns even the most hardened opponent of nuclear power into an enthusiast for a new generating station at Wylfa.
The Damascene conversion of Plaid Cymru’s Welsh Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, is already well known. Plaid Cymru is deeply anti-nuclear; its 2009 Euro manifesto confirmed its “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales” and its Assembly spokeswoman, Leanne Wood, declared in a plenary debate in September, 2007, that:
“Plaid Cymru, under all circumstances, will oppose any future proposal to locate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa”.
Mr Jones was accordingly very much out of step with his own party when, in January 2008, he enthusiastically welcomed the Government’s announcement of its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations as “good news”.
Mr Jones admittedly is the Assembly member for Anglesey, and Wylfa is a major employer there, but nevertheless it is rather odd to see a party leader putting his name to a manifesto policy which he manifestly considers to be a load of old cobblers.
Now Carwyn Jones has also experienced the Wylfa effect.
Mr Jones is one of three candidates for the leadership of the Labour group in the Welsh Assembly. He visited Anglesey yesterday as part of his campaign tour and announced that, as the debate on nuclear energy had “shifted considerably”, he now believed that “nuclear power will form part of Wales’s low-carbon response to the serious challenges we face in the years to come”.
Mr Jones’s dramatic turnabout will, I am sure, please the local MP, Albert Owen, who is staunchly pro-nuclear and has put his name to Mr Jones’s nomination papers.
It may, however, be less pleasing to another of his sponsors, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson. Ms Davidson has always strongly adhered to the official Assembly Government line (to which Mr Jones is still nominally committed) of opposition to new nuclear development in Wales. Only two months ago, she demanded a public inquiry into the Government’s proposals for Wylfa B “on the grounds of concern over the safety and security of the management of future nuclear waste”.
Ms Davidson may now be wondering whether she has backed the right man. Perhaps she, too, should take a trip up to Anglesey and breathe the balmy Wylfa air.
