I am delighted that Horizon Nuclear Power, a joint venture of the German energy companies E.ON and RWE, has announced its intention to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa, Anglesey. The station will not only help keep the lights on, but will also provide high quality jobs in the very poorest area of the United Kingdom.
My delight is shared, it would appear, by Ynys Môn’s Welsh Assembly member, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, who is also Plaid Cymru leader (or, at least, one of them). Here’s how the Daily Post reports his reaction:
Ieuan Wyn Jones said the news was very welcome given the job losses suffered on the island during the previous 19 months.
“I will be working with Coleg Menai and Bangor University to ensure that we have the skills in place to ensure local people are best placed to secure jobs at the plant,” he said.
“Coleg Menai has set up a fabrication and engineering unit to train people for the new job opportunities that come up. We must now work with the company as they develop their plans to ensure that we maximise the economic benefit the project will bring to Anglesey, in terms of the jobs that it will create in the building and operational phases.
“Local business must also benefit from contracts on the site and from supply chain opportunities, and this will need to be built into any consents.”
Great to see such unequivocal enthusiasm from one of Plaid’s leadership triumvirate. However, as this blog has previously noted, Mr Jones surely has a bit of an ethical dilemma here. He, after all, signed off Plaid’s European election manifesto, which stoutly declared:
we reaffirm our total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales.
Couldn’t be any clearer really, could it? No wriggle room whatever there. They even put it in bold print.
So what, we must ask, is Mr Jones going to do? Will he be prostrating himself in the path of the bulldozers as they attempt to cut the first sod? Or will he be resigning his leadership of Plaid in the Assembly?
If he does neither, he will effectively be saying that Plaid’s anti-nuclear policy, for which he is personally responsible, doesn’t apply in his own little corner of Wales.
And that wouldn’t be right, would it?
It seems to me to be the current trend in politics to say one thing, and do another, so what’s new? We’re all used to it by now. Is Plaid Cymru different to the others I wonder?
We need a much bigger crisis than we have at the moment before we see conviction politicians of stature I’m afraid. Until then, public apathy will create the next parliament.
Plaid have a POLICY on something?
Now that really is news…