Well, well, well, it’s taken Vince Cable just 18 days in government to do a complete U-turn on the most fundamental issue for the British economy which will dominate British politics for the next decade.   He repeatedly and vehemently argued in Parliament over the last two years and through the election campaign right up to election day that immediate spending cuts could knock the fragile economic recovery on the head and risk a double-dip recession.    Less than 3 weeks later he’s just announced he’s changed his mind and is now pursuing the opposite policy, falling in line with the Tories.   It’s amazing what government can do to you – one of the fastest turnarounds on a fundamental point of principle in moder politics.

But he’s not the only one.   Chris Huhne, the new Energy secretary, who as Liberal Energy spokesman before the election rejected any new nuclear build as his party have always done, told us in his first interview after his appointment that he still opposed nuclear power, but that in deference to the coalition agreement it would still proceed provided there was no public subsidy.   And he clearly hinted that without public subsidy he didn’t believe it could go ahead at all.   Now, 3 weeks later, it’s all changed.

Now we learn – what indeed most of us had always suspected – that taxpayer subsidies will be offered for the disposal of toxic radioacative waste from new reactors.   Previously the Labour Government proposed to charge the nuclear industry a high, fixed disposal levy according to the amount of nuclear waste produced.   It also told the industry that the waste would be taken over by the State only when the waste had been disposed of, at least 110 years from the start of operations of any reactor.

Now concessions are being offered to the industry following extensive lobbying by the French nuclear giant EDF.   A much lower fixed unit price for waste disposal is now proposed by the Government.   In addition, the transfer of the waste to government responsibility following the completion of decommissioning has now been almost halved to just 60 years.

Of course the coalition government continues to insist that there will be no public subsidy.   But this is a classic case where the devil is in the detail.   There are so many hidden ways in which costs can be secretly transferred to government, tucked away under misleading or seemingly irrelevant spending categories, and not publicly reported.    Watch this space: many of us will be using FOI requests as well as Parliamentary questions to keep tabs on every sinuous and manipulative device to provide covert subsidies in this slippery area.

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