We've never been so consulted

Gordon Brown's public consultation on nuclear power is being fixed by the market research company carrying out the polling.

Dr Paul Dorfman, a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Involvement at the University of Warwick, told the Guardian that the questions being asked in the consultation were deliberately skewed to get a thumbs up for nuclear power by massively overplaying its role in tackling climate change - because the government knew this was the only way they could ever get people to accept new nuclear power.

According to Dr Dorfman, "partial information was rammed down the public's throat. It was totally impractical for people to make a rational decision based on the information they were fed. The way it was put together was designed so that a particular view would emerge."

The fact that a new fleet of reactors in the UK could only cut our carbon emissions by a measly 4 per cent was buried at the back of a huge pile of information that consultation attendees had to plough through in one day. Positive messages about nuclear were made as statements of fact (pdf) - "Nuclear power stations could make an important contribution to reducing the UK's CO2 emissions" - while negative issues for nuclear power required answers by degree, with the loaded term "satisfied" included in the question: "How satisfied are you with the government's proposal to manage new nuclear waste in the same way as existing waste?"

Of course, you have to ignore the small issue of the government not yet knowing what they are going to do with any of the nuclear waste.

Despite entering into this consultation (which, don't forget, a high court judge ordered the government to do after their first attempt was exposed as a total sham) with the intention of engaging as fully as possible, it soon became clear that the whole thing was little more than a pro-nuclear rubber-stamping exercise. And the longer it goes on, the more we discover just what a grubby and seedy little process it really is.

That's why Greenpeace issued a formal complaint to the Market Research Standards Board about the role of Opinion Leader Research (OLR), the pollsters employed by the government to run the show. We think OLR has broken its industry's own code of conduct by designing questions and materials for the public that are misleading and factually inaccurate. Designed, you might say, to get the answer on nuclear power that the government wants rather than allowing people to make up their own minds. Opinion Leader Research told Channel 4 News: "We refute the points made in the complaint. We believe our work is carried out to the highest professional standards. Opinion Leader Research will cooperate fully with the MRS investigation." We await the verdict.

Some participants apparently saw through the spin. One contacted Greenpeace to say that she "left the event in Edinburgh feeling furious with the government's blatant marketing of nuclear power", adding that the "participants of Talking Energy were pushed up against a wall, so they had no choice but to support a new generation of nuclear power plants."

Can this really be the sort of consultation Gordon Brown had in mind when he talked of having "a very different form of conversation" with the public, with "politicians learning from everyday experience, people engaging in genuine discussion"? It's clear to us this self-styled conversation consists of a bullying monologue based on shockingly skewed information designed to scare people into accepting new nuclear power - a climate red herring if ever there was one.