Better in France
DO IT again and get it right. Nuclear fission has now blown such a hole in the plans for privatising electricity that there is no sensible choice but to tear them up and make new ones. No responsible board of directors, seeking to bring their company to market, could thus rewrite their draft prospectus and their business plan from base to apex, fall out with their ennobled chairman, and then tell their merchant bankers to carry on. Still less could they plead that they had to make the issue before they ran the risk of being voted out. Any company coming to market is put through a process of 'due diligence', of independent examination and checking. We can be grateful for that process, as applied to electricity, for uncovering the cost of nuclear power in this country — a tax which we should all of us have borne in enforced ignorance if the industry and its suppliers and contractors had been left unchallenged. We can infer, too, that the cost attaches not to nuclear power as such but to nuclear power as managed and engineered in this country over many years. We can and do import, along the cross-Channel cable, electricity produced in France, competitively priced, and most- ly generated in nuclear power stations. We should be ashamed to see our management and engineering so patently unable to do what our neighbours can do. What we might sensibly do now is to offer the whole business to Electricite de France for what it will fetch, and invite the new owners to put in new management and light some fires under the contractors. That would be an odd sort of privatisation — but no odder
than one which, as my friend lain Carson of Business Daily remarks, is dealing with nuclear power by conjuring, up a brand- new nationalised industry, with the losses built in.
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