Similarly, I can’t help thinking of how I started being catcalled aged 12, and it mysteriously stopped in my mid 20s.

Yes, that’s how dogwhistles work. It sounds anodyne to you because you aren’t the one targeted.

Because I promise you that both his followers and the non-white, non-Christian Britons he’s targeting know exactly what he means.

What do you think he means by citizenship being ‘more than a piece of paper’?

Oh pull the other one. You know precisely what Goodwin is saying, and it’s that you have to be white and Christian to be British.

The standard Goodwin is proposing and you are defending.

By this standard my Jewish grandfather - whose German citizenship was revoked by the Nazis and who lived in Britain from his teens onwards - was never British and was simply stateless. Sod that.

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Poland and Hungary really aren’t largely dependent on French nuclear, I promise you.

But that’s my point - it’s an exception and it’s an exception precisely because govts were prepared to put large amounts of money and political capital behind it.

Yes, South Korea is an exception in that it made a big political commitment to nuclear in the 2010s and actually backed it, and then Yoon backed it again in 2022 after it had been scaled back. We’ll see what gets delivered but I imagine the policy will remain a political football.

Most countries in Europe rely on a decreasing proportion of fossil fuels and an increasing proportion of wind/solar with support from existing nuclear and hydro assets. Which is broadly what you’d expect.

As for local authorities trying to block wind/solar/new grid infrastructure, the current govt has taken steps to mitigate that which are flawed in my view (more centralised control so decisions becomes much more dependent on who is in govt), but they do seem to be working so far.

If you can point me to a country building a large amount of new nuclear capacity, by all means do so.

It was easier, quicker and cheaper to build gas generation and then renewables, so that’s what we did. And the planning system largely hasn’t prevented us doing that, setting aside political absurdities like the effective onshore wind ban after 2017.

Planning restrictions aren’t the main reason building nuclear power stations is prohibitively expensive. They are simply extremely large, extremely expensive projects that the private sector isn’t prepared to commit to alone and governments aren’t prepared to fund directly.

3) The French nuclear fleet is aging and proving extremely difficult to replace, again primarily for reasons of cost.

1) I am not defending the current planning system. I am defending the idea of having a planning system.
2) The UK (like everywhere else) has struggled to build large quantities of nuclear power primarily for reasons of cost and lack of political commitment to overcoming that.

Okay, but then you have to face the negative real world impact of building a piece of infrastructure that will further exacerbate water stress.

(The UK is also an exporter of energy - the reasons it is not a net exporter of electricity at the moment are to do with differentials in wholesale electricity prices vs the markets we export to, not lack of generating capacity.)

Yes, we can and should, but you do see that the reservoir needs to be there before the data centre can be built?

Like it or not, large parts of the south and east of England are under significant water stress, and that does in fact need to be factored into planning decisions.

This is, if you’ll forgive me, the perfect demonstration of the most fundamental issue with ‘abundance’ politics - it genuinely doesn’t believe in externalities. And that’s a problem, because externalities are real.

Only half of you. The other half have to hate it.

It’s an understandable impulse (on everyone’s part really). I just hope we move through this phase quickly to the phase where we help and learn from each other.

I think you’ve misread my post.

I mean it’s also full of people saying equally ignorant and hot tempered things in reverse. As I said, the entire conversation is fatuous.

We’re all going to have to get over a degree of habitual chauvinism here.

I’m aware, and it’s very impressive. My point is that the UK is no more an undistinguished mass of unresisting people than the US is.

Arguing over which of us is worse or more racist is simply two bald men arguing over a comb.