Pinned to the wall of Nigel Farage's office is a map marking Reform's target areas. As the great patriot told me, nearly all of his strongest opportunities sit in Britain's former mining towns.
Woke elites have failed us all, but few places have been let down as badly as these deprived communities. For half a century the globalists have treated these once-proud hives of industry with nothing but contempt, using them as dumping grounds for criminals and migrants.
On Brexit and on the grooming gangs, the people of these towns were dismissed as too thick for their democratic voice to count. Labour took their votes for granted, and CCHQ was too busy admiring itself in the mirror to make any effort at all. Whatever you make of Reform, they deserve a shot. They can hardly do any worse.
And they might just do a LOT better! What if these broken communities could be hauled back from the brink and turned into the most prosperous and high-tech places on the planet?
But how?
The case for underground Small Modular Reactors
The single most exciting opportunity in front of us is building our next-generation nuclear and AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities. The future of nuclear is not the vast power stations of old, but Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Roughly the size of a shipping container, these are safer, less contentious and more economical. Several countries, the UK included, already have SMRs in trial or approaching regulatory approval. Finland leads the field, aiming to have several operational by 2030, with all of its sites located in underground caves.
For economics and practicality, this changes everything. Siting reactors underground sidesteps the decades of planning and environmental wrangling that dog conventional nuclear projects such as Hinckley Point, which on their own can run into billions. Security also becomes far simpler. A conventional plant demands a full military garrison and an emergency services brigade on standby around the clock, and in an age of drone warfare even that may no longer suffice. An underground SMR, by contrast, has just one way in. Twenty metres of solid rock is enough to shield it from even the most powerful nuclear weapons.
That blast shield cuts both ways. Being smaller, SMRs are far less dangerous than conventional reactors, and the enclosed pressure underground acts as a natural safety valve. Even if something goes badly wrong, metres of natural rock make a far better blast shield than a concrete lid: you simply close the blast doors and seal up the hole. As the saying goes, who gives a Fukushima? Taken together, small underground reactors are another level of safe compared with conventional ones, and those same safety features mean they can be sited nearer to population centres, exactly as Finland is doing.
Disused mines: the perfect home for AI and nuclear
Here in the UK we don't even need caves. We have over 1,300 disused underground mines, most of them several kilometres long and some more than a thousand metres deep. With all that space and SMR power on tap, those mines are also the ideal location for energy-hungry AI server centres. Once again, being deep underground brings the vital advantages of low temperature fluctuations and maximum security. That security is essential if AI servers are to hold our personal data, drive our cars and run everything from banks to government departments. This is not science fiction: the leading players in AI, including Meta, Google and Amazon, are already commissioning adjoining AI and SMR sites.
Predictably, Two-Tier Kier and his lefty lackies are making a mess of it. Driven by pure spite, they want to trash local planning democracy in order to wreck our cherished landscapes, communities and farms for their concrete socialist projects. So much for environmentalism.
Yet a better solution lies right under our feet: an underground AI and nuclear revolution that delivers safety, security and conservation while levelling up the most deserving parts of our economy. That really is a big win.
Share your ideas on Policy Platform
This is just one of dozens of ideas to save the country that we are gathering on Policy Platform, Great British PAC's brand new forum for the people's favourite ideas. If you like an idea you can vote for it, add your own, upvote your favourites and comment on any of them. We will be sharing the best of these with the biggest names on the British right, to get them ready for the new government.
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Andrew Hunt, Great British PAC Policy Director
