Tonight in coastal Suffolk a public meeting will take place on a subject more vital than anything that hangs on next month’s General Election.

Politicians both local and national will speak, but they won’t be seeking votes. The meeting was arranged before the election was called and its repercussions will extend a lot longer than the next five years.

It’s a matter literally of life and death. Potentially the lives and deaths of thousands, maybe millions, not yet born. Lives that may be centuries – possibly many centuries – in the future.

The question at issue is nuclear power. Specifically, whether or not a new reactor should be erected at Sizewell.

No one at the meeting in Woodbridge – where the chief guest speaker will be Baroness Jenny Jones, who represents the Green Party in the House of Lords – has the power to give Sizewell C either the red or green light. But they can make the public more aware of an issue that affects all our lives, and will do so more than many realise.

The building process could cause huge disruption locally. The aftermath could be grave over a far wider area.

Some quite serious people argue that nuclear power is necessary to help us meet our commitment to curbing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. It should give pause for thought that the one party that makes environmental issues its top priority thinks otherwise.

It is true that the age of fossil fuel is drawing to a close. And none too soon, either. The evidence has been around for a long time – and is now overwhelming – that burning coal, oil and gas in great quantities has a devastating effect on the world’s climate.

Humanity’s addiction to oil has caused wars and economic calamities too, but that’s almost a side issue.
So we need, desperately, to move on. But to what?

There are numerous possibilities, some of them quite exciting. What is required is a mix of energy sources. All feeding into the system, no single one so dominant that its failure would bring the whole system down. Or so powerful that whoever controls it controls everything.

Wind power is perhaps the most obvious, the most visible, right here right now. Frankly, I don’t understand those who object to it. No, it can’t provide all our needs, but then we don’t want it to – and it can make a valuable contribution.

As can solar power – even here. The Nevada Desert could power North America. Given the political will – and currently unfeasible co-operation between nations – the Sahara could probably power Europe.

Our rooftops could heat our homes. Our black road surfaces could generate a lot of the power it takes to travel on them. Then there’s wave and tidal power, and geothermal energy. There are even possibilities in rainwater. It’s all there, just waiting to be tapped.

Some of it may sound futuristic, but any of it could be on-stream a lot sooner than Sizewell C. Almost certainly at a fraction of the cost.

Endlessly renewable sources could already be powering everything we need if the billions poured into the great nuclear experiment had been spent instead on the right research and development.

Switching now from nukes to renewables would surely provide more jobs. And it would do all that without creating piles of deadly waste no one knows how to get rid of.

Without the risk of an East Anglian Fukushima or Chernobyl.

• The free public meeting “Sizewell C and Suffolk’s Environment”, looking at the local effects of the development plan, will be at 7.30 this evening in Woodbridge Community Hall.
• For more information on the issues, see sagesuffolk.com

If you believe what the polls, the national papers and the fawning BBC say, we should call off the General Election now and just award victory to the Tories by a technical knockout.

OK, you can discount most of what you hear from two of those sources as propaganda. As for the polls, they may be impartial, but they have a terrible record lately of getting things badly wrong. Which would be cheering news for Labour – except that where the pollsters normally go astray is in under-estimating support for the right wing.

When people are confronted only with the personalities they seem to lean hard to the right. Show them actual policies, and they tend to prefer Labour over Tory.

It’s the policies that will truly affect our lives. But it’s the shallow celebrity game of names and faces that will determine which policies we gain or suffer from.

Which is why the Tories’ Australian strategist Lynton Crosby has insisted on making their campaign all about Theresa May. Though it’s odd to put so much trust in such a lightweight.

Even Tory columnist Dominic Lawson referred at the weekend to the promotion of May as “a cult of no personality”. The blatant attempt to make her over as a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher is so fatuous it deserves to backfire spectacularly.

Love her or hate her – and many of those working-class voters the Tories now think they’ve won over were firmly in the latter camp – Thatcher had personality. You might have despised her principles, but you couldn’t deny she had them.

If TV debates had been a thing in her day, you wouldn’t have caught Thatcher ducking out. She’d have relished the chance to take on her opponents face to face, not shy away for fear of being shown up.

She wouldn’t have made her prime public appearance on anything as soft as the One Show sofa. And if she had, she would have insisted on talking about politics, not her shoes, or whether it was Denis who put the bins out.

In one thing she’s said – over and over again – May could be right. This may indeed be the most important election of her life. Unlike any other General Election of the past 20 years, it’s a choice between two very different directions.

And this is why the shallowness of the public discourse and the apparently foregone conclusion of the result are so galling. Because Labour’s policies are the best any major British party has put on the table for at least half a century.

Returning the railways, the Royal Mail and the water supply to public ownership ought to be vote-winners. Their energy and environment policy is outstanding, championing community-owned renewables over the profits of the big six.

Their proposed National Education Service may not sound very sexy, but it’s an interesting plan to rescue something extremely important that has been seriously messed up these past seven years. The same goes, big time, for the NHS.

All these vital public services are the very things government ought to be about. And this is where the fundamental difference lies. Labour, the Greens and most of the LibDems believe in service to the public; the Tories believe in profit.

Their only response to Labour’s policy proposals is to repeat their claim that “the sums don’t add up”. Pretty rich coming from the party which has more than doubled the National Debt, now growing at a rate of over £5,000 a second and heading towards £1.9 trillion.

Never mind, it’s all about the famous faces, isn’t it? And you won’t find the made-over May or any of her well-shod crew at the food bank.

Like liberal-minded people everywhere, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when the election result came in on Sunday evening. But it was relief tinged with trepidation for a country I have deep affection for.

If I were French I would certainly have voted with the winning side. But I’d have done so with very little enthusiasm – and I have some sympathy for the record numbers who either entered spoiled ballot papers or stayed out if altogether.

As in 2002 when France chose “the thief rather than the Fascist” – Jacques Chirac over Jean-Marie Le Pen – this was surely a vote against Marine Le Pen rather than in favour of Emmanuel Macron.

And to look at it for a moment through British eyes, I’m not sure the racist, exclusionist Le Pen is that much worse – or that much different at all – than the leaders we are expected to endorse next month. Or that Macron – though clearly different – is very much better.

He is said to have abundant charm, a quality not much in evidence in UK politics south of the Scottish border. But charm can be a dangerous weapon. Especially when wielded by someone who remains for now something of an unknown quantity, even to those who voted for him.

And Macron is not just – as Le Pen probably accurately dubbed him – the “continuity option”.

There are some very good signs – notably his impassioned support for climate change science and innovation. I want to believe that he is a shining beacon for our future, a charismatic alternative to the Trumpery vilely infecting the world.

But he also appears to embody everything about the European Union that makes me cringe. All the aspects that might have swayed me, against my emotional attachment to Europe, to vote Leave.

Let me make a brief detour to Somerset to explain what I mean.

The “garden city” of Somerdale was opened in 1935 by Cadbury with social and sports facilities, wages and conditions, all well in advance of workers’ expectations elsewhere. Until 2011 it was the production line for such well-known delights as Dairy Milk, Double Decker, Creme Eggs, Crunchie and Fry’s Chocolate Cream.

Then, following the takeover of Cadbury by the US conglomerate Kraft Foods, Somerdale was closed down. The workforce was made redundant, and all the machinery shipped to a new greenfield site in the village of Skarbimierz in western Poland. Which is where your Crunchie and the rest are now made.

At least until another, cheaper workforce is found, perhaps further east – and another EU Special Economic Zone, with cash incentives for companies to move there.

Now, I have nothing against Polish immigrants who come to work here – or those from anywhere else. Though it’s a fact that emigration to Western Europe has led to troublesome skills shortages in some areas like the Baltic.

But I’m not sure how much good is done by exporting not only jobs but whole production lines Especially when the routes, locations and incentives are all devised for the benefit of multinational corporations.

Which brings me back to Macron, a former finance ministry apparatchik with a pedigree in global investment banking. A man who was to be seen recently in his home town, Amiens, trying to explain to striking tumble-dryer manufacturers why their jobs and their factory – like those of the Somerdale chocolatiers – are about to be exported to Poland.

The famous charm calmed them, apparently. For a while. But you can understand why many of those workers might have voted for Le Pen.

Macron is a new and shiny face. But the honeymoon may be brief, especially when he starts swinging the axe over public sector jobs, as he will.

With parliamentary elections to come next month, and no real party of his own, he faces an interesting future. Despite his past membership of the Socialist Party, and his welcome enthusiasm for genuine science, his economic instincts seem closer to those of Margaret Thatcher – or maybe Tony Blair.

His victory over the forces of darkness looked pretty conclusive at the weekend. But there are no guarantees that victory will stick long-term. And then what?
 
 

• A couple of scraps of comfort in a generally dismal round of UK local elections – the death of UKIP and the steady rise of the Green Party.
  
  UKIP can now surely be officially deemed an ex-party. Sadly, this because the Tories, in what amounts to a hostile takeover, have made off with all their policies, along with their votes.
  
  So will the BBC now stop pandering to the washed-up Kippers and start to take the Green Party more seriously? The Greens, after all, have been advancing with no help at all from the national broadcaster – which could never be said for the Farage fan club.

What qualities do you look for in a leader? If your unthinking response to that question is “strength and stability”, you’ve fallen victim to the most blatant piece of vacuous propaganda in an era of vacuous propaganda.

Someone told Theresa May and all her Tory colleagues to repeat the phrase “strong and stable leadership” at every conceivable opportunity – and every inconceivable one too. Whoever it was takes a pretty dim view of the intelligence of the British electorate. It seems that dim view may, sadly, be an accurate one.

Until June 23 last year, May was a Remainer. Now she’s a gung-ho Brexiteer. How strong is that? 

And how stable can any government that includes Boris Johnson really be?

What Johnson has always known – and what the coiner of that “strong and stable” soundbite knows – is the principle of the Big Lie. Say it often enough and people will believe you. And they’ll keep repeating the formula as if it was their own.

The act of calling the election we’re now facing was not strong or stable. It was entirely unnecessary. An act of weakness on several counts – as the Opposition would have made clear to all if its own leadership had been strong and stable. And if it had had a fair crack of the media whip.

The originator of and prime exponent of Big Lie theory was Adolf Hitler. He was a strong leader, stable (except perhaps mentally) for years, until he wasn’t.

Joe Stalin was a strong and stable leader for 29 years. Mao Zedong had 31 strong years – not to mention a sharper mind for the killer slogan than anyone in Tory Central Office. Robert Mugabe’s been stable since 1980 and still looks pretty strong at 93. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I’m not suggesting Theresa May resembles any of these strong men very much. It’s just rather peculiar that she apparently wants us all to think she does.

The qualities I want in a leader? Intelligence, compassion, far-sightedness, an open mind – all in shockingly short supply in today’s corridors of power.

 
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I’ve been accused by a friend on social media of being a member of the “middle class chatterati”. I suppose it’s a fair cop. Sort of.

The crime for which this verdict was handed down? Speaking up for the BBC.

My friend is a former BBC reporter, so he should know what he’s talking about. He asked: “Does the BBC have any vision or purpose left other than to appease its mortal enemies, to whom its very existence is anathema, in a doomed attempt to protect its licence fee?”

It’s a loaded and complicated question. One answer is that the BBC news and current affairs department does indeed seem to have a purpose. And that is to elect and keep re-electing a Tory government.

It’s hard to see why else it consistently ignores Labour policies in favour of mocking the Labour leader. Or why it constantly promotes the vacuous propaganda outlined above. 

It’s hard to see why it continually gives a platform to non-entities from UKIP while denying one to the Green Party – which does actually have an MP – unless it wants to shift the centre of political gravity to the right.

In all this the BBC is a national disgrace and a serious danger to democracy.

So why was I speaking up for it?

Because apart from a few sports programmes on other channels, BBC4 is about the only TV station I consistently find worth watching.

This may be how I reveal my middle-class credentials. But it’s a lot more than that. BBC4’s excellent line-up of programmes and presenters is about the only one of the myriad channels now available that actually sets out to educate viewers.
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And if education is to be axed – or ceded only to the middle class – then we’re all lost.