Meeting of the Parliament 24 June 2026 [Draft]
Alan Brown is again finding some spurious reason to deny the reality of the reliability of nuclear power. Yes, there may be bottlenecks in the transmission system, but it is for us, as policy makers, to deal with those issues.
Most Governments would look at the achievements of Torness, for example, and ask how they could build on that success—but not the SNP Government. Its answer has been to say no—no to new nuclear, no to investment, no to jobs and no to opportunities. That is not a serious industrial strategy. The SNP would rather stick to outdated ideological positions, trying to tie in nuclear power with nuclear weapons and spreading fear and disinformation that has no basis in science or reality, rather than showing ambition for Scotland.
England has expanded its nuclear ambitions and has attracted billions of pounds of investment. Ironically, that happened under the nuclear energy minister Andrew Bowie, who is a Scottish member of Parliament. Scotland has watched those opportunities pass by. Skilled workers have left, and expertise is migrating elsewhere. Projects that could transform local economies—as Liam Kerr pointed out, some of the areas involved have the most deprived local economies in Scotland—simply never materialise because of a simple denial of reality. Those are not abstract statistics. The apprenticeships were not created, the engineers were not employed and the scientists were not retained. Families were denied the security that comes from well-paid, highly skilled jobs.
Now we stand on the threshold of another thing that Alan Brown is happy to dismiss: small nuclear reactors. I ask him to consider France, which is an interesting case study for serious energy policy. We should consider how France has been able to weather the shock of global energy prices. Why? Because it has determined to become truly—[Interruption.]