Dippy Wicks

The Minister for Nuclear Profitability, Malcolm Wicks, has insisted that New New Labour is showing "leadership" in the area of renewable energy. As usual with attributes that display positive connotations - responsibility, viability, toughness, sensibleness, positivity, non-inflationariness and the rest - "leadership" in this case means cutting back funds and then doing one's best to cover the damage with a nice, thick, gloopy coating of rhetoric. Grants for households to install solar, wind or water power are being underspent; the programme for low carbon buildings has been "reformed", hence cut, and the maximum grant for solar PV has also been reformed to a level that makes the systems uneconomical. In fact, the only European countries showing a greater level of leadership than the mainland are Malta and Luxembourg.