We’re told that an anti-windfarm campaigner phoned up a local Swansea radio station this morning to announce he was voting Conservative because they were the only party who did not support wind power in their election literature.
The station got at least one response remarking on the gullibility of the caller for somehow thinking that renewable energy companies were not among the businesses that have been putting millions into Tory election coffers in the expectation of a commercial return, i.e. deregulation and less stringent planning controls. You only have to note the glaring omission of the Infrastructure Planning Commission from Cameron’s promised bonfire of past Labour legislation to figure out which way the wind is blowing, so to speak.
It is anyone’s guess how much the big six energy companies have coughed up between them or if their contributions are among figures released by the Electoral Commission which reveal that in the last two weeks alone, the Tories have reported donations of nearly £3.7 million whilst Labour received £2.3 million and the Lib Dem got £140K.
These are just the so-called ‘corporate’ donations, of course. According to the regulations, political parties are required to report donations and borrowing during the official election campaign on a weekly basis. Parties must report donations and borrowing exceeding £7,500 received by the central party. They do no need to report those received by accounting units, i.e. constituencies or associated organisations.
But with so much media emphasis on style and shirt-sleeve presentation – and whether microphones are still switched on – perhaps such single-issue naivety from the radio caller is understandable.
One thing that has been remarkable about this election so far is that as much as change has been the recurrent theme, so few have recognised that rather than improving the public’s ability to make an informed choice, the razzmatazz of the televised debates has managed to obscure a constant truth that the defining factor of each political party is not so much the calibre of the person who leads it or even the policies they espouse but the extent of the vested self-interests that underpins each platform.
2 Comments:
The caller was a bog mouth regular caller who supports nuclear energy because he is a electrical power guru of some sort. I bet however that he has never had to actually move nuclear waste or clean up after aplant has been decommissioned. I really can't get my head around his kind of logic that sees windfarms as environmentally damaging but thinks nuke power is fine.
And I'm sure that our big mouth caller is well aware of the fact that any nuclear built in Wales will be on Ynys Mon and not in the south where he lives. For this reason we in South Wales won't see a drop of this electricity because the national grid splits wales into two regions - north and south wales.
All this electricity is destined for the big conurbations of the NW of England.
In S. Wales it's not nuclear, it's gas we've been earmarked for, but hey let's not go there as the gas companies have been giving sweeties to one of our engineers' big butties - who also happens to be a certain Swansea councillor...
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