Carbon captives

While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting tones, unveiled the Bristol Brabazon — the elephantine passenger plane with wings longer than Waterloo Bridge which was supposed to bolster the British aeronautical industry. A single phrase stands out as the camera fixes on mechanics carefully removing the chocks for its maiden flight: ‘You don’t take any chances with £12 million of taxpayers’ money.’

It is a laughable untruth. No matter how grim its austerity programme, no government can resist throwing money at technological pies in the sky. It was almost uncanny after the newsreels to watch George Osborne take a billion in child benefit from the pockets of families — and then splash it instead on a demonstration project into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.