Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): I am intuitively, perhaps ideologically, against nuclear power. I sat in on the deliberations of the Nuclear Consultation Working Group that has just issued a damning report on the government's plans to sanction a new generation of nuclear power stations (see nuclearconsult.com) with two purposes: to study in depth the issues involved and to gain an expert's eye view on the consultation exercise that the courts had demanded from government. I am now clear that my fears that the decision to go nuclear is reckless, dangerous and wasteful are justified; and equally that the consultation exercise was deeply flawed and failed to engage with the real risks and challenges that going nuclear entails.
Yet the predictable response from the pro-nuclear lobby that I have seen and heard on television, the World at One and Guardian letters page seems very plausible. Even though the working group's reply in Wednesday's Guardian is in my view crushing, it is obvious that for the majority of people the issues will seem too complex and even abstract to grapple with, and they will simply see two sets of embattled experts at odds with each other with no notion as to how the balance of argument lies.
Former minister Brian Wilson spoke on World at One about the bias against nuclear power that had prevailed in earlier debate, and professed himself satisfied that government and informed opinion had at last got it right. But I am not clear where the governing debate took place, though it clearly was neither open nor deliberative. No more than the consultation exercise was. Now it is time for one of the ‘big' and ‘tough' decisions that Gordon Brown has elected to take on all our behalfs, in direct contradiction of his earlier promise of more consultative government.
At the brandy stage of an evening out with David Falcon, an international consultant on governance, we began discussing the desirability of a modern version of the Royal Commission to resolve ‘big' issues of energy supply, airport expansion, etc. - that is, a kind of citizen's jury, made up not of ‘the great and the good', but of a decent balance of specialists and lay people who could take evidence from all parties, quiz other specialists and experts, deliberate in public, come to a set of conclusions and recommendations and consult widely. Something of this kind would be infinitely more valuable than either the government's new commission for major planning decisions or a PM's clunking fist.
