Once this political objective was achieved the British government stopped worrying about energy. It has only re-appeared on the political agenda recently.
This is the sort of boring, infrastructure issue that the British political class, fixated by punching above their weight in foreign policy and eye-catching initiatives (for which read badly thought out and probably counterproductive, illiberal measures on topics like crime and immigration), only reluctantly engages with.
Building a new power station, whether coal-fired or nuclear is difficult. Most localities will resist such a scheme, which is why the idea seems to be to build on existing nuclear power sites.
In another area, water supply, we see similar problems arising. The privatised industry has not made the enormous infrastructure investment the government hoped they would make. Consequently a few dry winters leaves the reservoirs and ground water supply at a low level and there are hosepipe bans in southern England now, with a threat of drought orders (preventing certain uses of water in affected areas) and even the risk of the cutting of mains water supply in some places, if things go badly this year.
It is good that the free market is so much more efficient than the state. Think how bad things would be if the Labour Party still believed in socialism.
"efficient" is an incomplete meme. the necessary question is "efficient at what?"
the so-called free market is very efficient at... consolidating wealth and ownership in the hands of a fairly small elite, driving down commodity prices, wages, and living conditions to a lowest common denominator, rapidly converting natural resources into trash and living stuff into dead stuff, etc. a genuine free market might offer other efficiencies. we don't know, since as Hardin [whom btw I do no endorse by this brief quotation, he merely happened to say one thing I agree with] said, it's never been tried.
games theory suggests that when a system repeatedly, even with varying initial conditions, achieves the same results, those results cannot be interpreted as accidental or random. they must be regarded, at a certain level of consistency, as design parameters of the system. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
