Nukes consultation: it's a stitch up

Dear, oh dear, oh dear. Who would have guessed it? Gordon Brown's public consultation on nuclear power is being fixed by his favourite market research company who has been charged with carrying out the polling? And the sad thing is that it all sounds so familiar.

Not so long ago, when he accepted the role to lead this country, he said that he wanted to ring in a new era of politics – to listen to the British people. He boldly stated that the "best way of drawing up policies will not be discussions in government departments, but listening and learning – and involving and engaging the voices" of you and I. He wanted to build "trust in our democracy" by embracing a "more open form of dialogue for citizens and politicians to genuinely debate problems and solutions". And, as those words still echo through Westminster, the truth is that this government is no different from the one that was so badly tarnished with dodgy dossiers and spin.

However, last night Channel 4 News reported (you'll be able to watch it online for the next seven days) that twenty "senior academics" will be writing to the government as they believe that the process was "deliberately skewed" and participants were "misled". Dr Paul Dorfman, a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick, said that questions put to the public were "framed in a particularly ambiguous way in order to get a particular answer". And someone involved in the process, who wished to remain anonymous, said they felt the government's view was "bludgeoned" into the heads of the participants. Pretty strong stuff.

When we, along with Friends of the Earth, WWF and other members of the Green Alliance pulled out of the consultation, the good people at The Sun and The Times hailed Greenpeace's withdrawal from the government's ongoing nuclear "consultation" as a further proof of the green movement's visceral hatred of the so-called nuclear renaissance, suggesting that our actions were a thinly-veiled attempt to get us all "huddled round wood fires, eking out a living by candle-light". Now it's come to light that professional observers of the consultation are similarly displeased with the government's increasingly desperate attempts to spin us into accepting new nuclear power plants.

For some reason, 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 a day. Positive messages about nuclear were made as statements of fact – "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?"

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."

Some participants apparently saw through the spin. One contacted Greenpeace (pdf) 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". Others left comments on our blog about their experiences of the consultation.

Despite entering into this consultation (which don’t forget a High Court judge ordered to 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 to us 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 has 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, who have pocketed millions of pounds worth of contracts from the government, has broken its industry's own code of conduct by designing questions and materials for the public that are deliberately 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.

An investigation could derail the government's consultation on nuclear power, a process which they're legally obliged to carry out before building new nuclear power stations.

For more on why nuclear power can't stop climate change (and what can), watch our film, The Convenient Solution.