A Place to Stand

A judge has told the government it has to go back & touch all the bases again on its "review" of nuclear power.

High Court judge Jeremy Sullivan handed a stinging rebuke to Blair's government, saying the public consultation it carried out before deciding Britain needed new nuclear power stations was "inadequate" and "wrong".

The ruling was a setback for Blair, who has made it a priority of his final months in office to win backing for a new generation of nuclear power stations -- a policy opposed by some Labour Party members.

Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling said the government would give interested parties a new chance to comment -- a process that usually takes three months.

Judge Jeremy Sullivan has absolutely no business making engineering decisions. It is a matter of record that 24,000 pensioners die unnecessarily every year from fuel poverty. If the entire programme is held up on average by 3 months that will be 6,000 people. If it leads to more unnecessary blackouts Mr Sullivan's death toll will be much higher. Judges are not experts on nuclear engineering & should not abrogate to themselves the right to decide on this or many other things.

Will his Lordship be apologising to any of the people he has, albeit not immediately, murdered? Or do we think that when blackouts come he & his ilk will be making judicial decisions that extra efforts must be made to ensure the lights continue to shine on the majesty of justice.

Unfortunately the unearned stranglehold that lawyers have on government is damaging us. In this we are following rather than learning from America's example. In Heinlein's Number of the Beast his best of all possible worlds had in its history a "year they hanged the lawyers". That may be extreme but Judge Sullivan has certainly justified the hanging of 5,000 of the worst.