The Chancellor's double ended telescope only produces mirages

Tweet

 

When, as a child, I first discovered the wonder of telescopes, it was like a form of magic. Making far away things seem closer, or small things look bigger, was fascinating enough, but then to discover how the opposite happened when I looked through the ‘wrong’ end of one of these marvellous devices was an added bonus. But nothing that I ever discovered about telescopes could have prepared me for the amazing lenses possessed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which were on display yesterday as she announced the outcome of the spending review. She – and, apparently, most of the others around her – are in possession of a device which enables them to look through both ends simultaneously, magnifying those things which she wants to magnify, and minimising those which she would rather forget.

There can surely be no-one, not even the Chancellor herself, who seriously believes that the nuclear power station which she announced (or should that be ‘re-announced’?) will be built in anything like the costs or timescales quoted. One doesn’t need to be some sort of Nostradamus to be able to predict, with a degree of confidence indistinguishable from 100%, that the eventual costs and timescales will be higher, and considerably so, than any figure which escaped her lips yesterday. The degree of confidence that the sums quoted for all the other infrastructure projects announced yesterday will be exceeded might be slightly lower, but still a pretty safe bet. All the timescales and costs announced yesterday have been examined through the wrong end of the telescope.

When it comes to the advantages, however, the right end of the telescope has been deployed with a vengeance. The improvements to people’s standard of living, the number of jobs created: these are things which have been miraculously magnified. There will be no surprise if, like another announcement from recent years, they are quietly revised downwards in due course.

Some of the government’s over-excited comments on the flood of electricity which the new power stations will generate come close to the promise in the 1950s of electricity ‘too cheap to meter’. Even if the phrase has been misunderstood, and its original author was actually talking about fusion rather than fission, the phrase was widely used at the time – including by proponents of nuclear expansion – to describe an impossible energy utopia. In yesterday’s announcements, the costs of decommissioning the stations at the end of their lives, and of handling and storing the radioactive waste seem to have been subjected to their customary level of examination: none. Those issues remain where they have always been – a problem for future generations. Unlike the national debt, however, these are foreseeable liabilities which are not balanced by matching assets; they really are a financial black hole. Throwing good money after bad on nuclear power might look good on a spreadsheet keeping a running total of ‘investment’ spending, but the real cost is in not doing the other things that could be done instead. And probably more quickly.

If I had to pick a stand-out impression of what the government had to say yesterday, it would revolve around that timescale issue: it’s all jam tomorrow, with the lack of butter today being glossed over. The timescales – let alone the consequent benefits – of the capital spend are largely beyond the event horizon for the current government. If there’s one thing that’s almost as certain as the cost and timescale over-runs which are going to occur, it is that future governments (even if, by some miracle, of the same party) will delay or cancel some or all of the projects for which funding was announced yesterday. None of that means that some of the announcements are wrong in themselves: both Wales and the UK need the investment in infrastructure such as rail, for instance. But the belief that promising such investment over a lengthy timescale will somehow persuade people to tolerate the austerity measures baked in to yesterday’s review suggests a complete lack of connection and empathy with people who need relief today.