Cumbria MP launches plan to deliver ‘thousands' of jobs
The plan is a more detailed version of one he published before the 2024 General Election which laid out his priorities if elected as the area's MP.
Included are proposals to grow West Cumbria's nuclear industry by capitalising on the government's plan for plutonium disposition and unlocking land for new nuclear at Moorside.
The plan also highlights the need to expand the Port of Workington to open up West Cumbria's economy to new markets and create further opportunities to diversify away from reliance on nuclear decommissioning whilst also supporting future work at Sellafield.
Writing exclusively for The Whitehaven News this week, Mr MacAlister says the plan 'sets out a roadmap for a prosperous and diverse economy in West Cumbria'.
Central to the plan is the case for unlocking land at Moorside, which has been the 'biggest barrier' to securing new nuclear power generation in West Cumbria since the collapse of the NuGen deal in 2018. According to Mr MacAlister, unlocking this land is 'absolutely critical' to West Cumbria's nuclear future.
Mr MacAlister said: 'West Cumbria is the birthplace of the civil nuclear industry, representing the first clean energy revolution in the last century. It has a rich industrial heritage in mining and steel.
'Yet for all of our history, and our ongoing world leading work in nuclear decommissioning, there is huge untapped potential. There are many occasions when West Cumbria has been a pioneer community, and it should be again. That's why I have published this ambitious industrial plan to lay out the direction of travel to secure growth and jobs for our area.
'Central to this is unlocking land at Moorside where we could site small modular reactors and the industry they could power, which has been my top priority as your MP. I have spent endless hours over recent months making the case for this locally and nationally.
'I've held debates in Parliament, had more meetings with ministers on this than any other topic, and established the Cumberland Nuclear Future Board with Cumberland Council to bring together local partners united in our goal to secure our nuclear future.
'Once we have an agreement on use of the land we can motor ahead with attracting nuclear developers to the area, utilising the combination of a great plot of land, our existing nuclear industrial base, and a willing community. I'm doing everything I possibly can to get this over the line.
'I want to emphasise the partnership between me, Cumberland's other MPs, Cumberland Council, the NDA, Sellafield Ltd and unions representing our nuclear workforce who have been working closely together on this for many months.
"Our community is clear; we want and deserve new nuclear.'
Mr MacAlister is hosting a public meeting to launch his industrial plan and discuss his plan for new nuclear in West Cumbria on Thursday, June 26 at 6pm in Whitehaven.
Anyone wishing to attend can sign up at joshmacalister.uk/meetjosh or by calling his office on 01946 458023 and leaving your full name and address. Venue details will be provided following registration.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
The dam is breaking on Britain's illegal immigration crisis — and the results could be ugly
Britain's Labour government is in trouble: Its program of massive third-world immigration from places like Pakistan and Somalia is wildly, overwhelmingly unpopular. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his leftist captive media, Britons themselves have discovered just how unpopular it is. Advertisement You might think that's absurd — if mass immigration is unpopular, how can everyone not know it? Everyone doesn't know it because the government has been policing speech about immigration. Any criticism of open borders, lax enforcement or — worst of all — immigrant crime has been punished as 'racist' and 'hate speech' by the Starmer regime. Advertisement The point of this isn't to reduce racism or hate (heck, the censorship likely make that worse), but to make it harder for people to realize just how many of their fellow citizens feel the same way they do. For years, Britain has stifled reports of immigrant rape gangs in places like Rotherham and has persecuted those who have called attention to them, even jailing some. And as the government gives light sentences to child rapists, it's imprisoning moms for tweets on grounds of 'inciting race hatred.' It's all to construct and maintain something known as 'preference falsification,' a move usually practiced by authoritarian regimes. Advertisement The trick is, you make citizens pretend that they believe what the government says, and fake their approval of what it does. You promote marches and demonstrations and speech in favor of the government's preferred positions, and you severely punish marches and demonstrations and speech that oppose the government's favored positions. You give excuses, like 'stopping counterrevolutionary activity' or 'fighting hate speech,' for shutting down any opposition. You may even have informers to ferret out wrongthink and report it to the authorities, or to employers, or to third parties who will engage in extralegal (but government-supported) harassment. Advertisement If you do it right, you can have upward of 90% of your population hating you and your policies, but doing and saying nothing about them — because everyone in that 90% thinks they're part of a tiny minority. Resistance will seem to be futile. This works. Until it doesn't. The problem with preference falsification is that sooner or later some event or development can make people realize that what they've been told is popular is, in fact, very unpopular. When this happens, as Duke University scholar Timur Kuran writes in his book 'Private Truths, Public Lies,' the result is a 'preference cascade.' When large swaths of the population realize their dissident views are in fact widely held, they become less afraid of the government — and less hesitant about sharing their true sentiments. Advertisement And that's what's happening now in Britain, after a string of cases in which migrants sexually assaulted local girls and women. Across the United Kingdom, people — including large numbers of middle-aged and middle-class women, not the 'far-right' skinheads that Starmer and his ilk claim stoke all anti-immigrant sentiment — are protesting outside the hotels where the government is housing illegal migrants, shouting 'Send them home!' and 'Protect our girls!' The demonstrations in the last two weeks — featuring thousands of people carrying St. George flags, the traditional symbol of England — are too big to hide, and they're cropping up in every corner of the nation, organized largely on Facebook and other social media. Starmer has gotten the government-controlled media to present its spin and to black out or soft-pedal most bad news. Advertisement But news gets out in other ways. In particular, Elon Musk's maintenance of X as a free-speech zone has made it much harder for the ruling elites to keep people in the dark. Now the government is scared, alternating between overweening demands and ignominious retreats. After London police tried to ban protests outside migrant hotels, authorities walked it back with a 'clarification' that the ban applied only to specific protesters. Advertisement Questionable groups of masked, thuggish 'counterprotesters' have been allegedly delivered to marches in police buses — only to find themselves outnumbered and pushed back by the throng. Sometimes preference cascades presage major political changes; other times, as in the famous case of Nicolas Ceausescu's communist Romania, they produce violent revolution. (One thing about preference falsification is that it often keeps the government in the dark, too — Ceausescu genuinely believed his people loved him, until shortly before he was hauled out and shot.) Advertisement The British establishment would have been better served to let its citizens debate the immigration question openly and fairly. It didn't do so because it knew it would lose such a debate. Instead, it foisted open borders on a nation that didn't want them, then tried to silence opposition. Now we're watching as the regime's strategy collapses. Will it end in Starmer's ouster — or worse, in violence? Either way, the aftermath will be ugly. Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the blog.
Bloomberg
3 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Reeves Has a £51 Billion Fiscal Hole to Fill, UK Think Tank Says
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is facing a £51 billion ($68 billion) shortfall to fill at the autumn budget, according to a prominent economic think tank that warned she will likely need to break Labour's pledge not to raise major taxes. Slow growth, higher-than-expected borrowing and U-turns on plans to cut welfare spending mean Reeves is on track to miss her rule to match day-to-day spending with tax revenue in 2029-30 by £41 billion, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said on Wednesday.
Boston Globe
5 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Rwanda agrees to take deportees from the US
The State Department said the US 'works with Rwanda on a range of mutual priorities' but wouldn't comment on details of the deportation deal and what it called diplomatic conversations with other governments. Advertisement The US sent 13 men it described as dangerous criminals who were in the US illegally to South Sudan and Eswatini in Africa last month and has said it is seeking more agreements with African nations. It said those deportees' home countries refused to take them back. The US has also deported hundreds of Venezuelans and others to Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador under President Donald Trump's plans to expel people who he says entered the US illegally. In March, using an 18th-century wartime law, the US deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, where they were immediately transferred to a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which was built to hold alleged gang members. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths as well as cases of torture inside its walls. Advertisement Rwanda attracted international attention and some outrage when it struck a deal in 2022 with the UK to accept migrants who had arrived in the UK to seek asylum. Under that proposed deal, their claims would have been processed in Rwanda and, if successful, they would have stayed there. The contentious agreement was criticized by rights groups and others as being unethical and unworkable and was ultimately scrapped when Britain's new Labour government took over. Britain's Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the deal was unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe third country for migrants. The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for the African countries it has entered into secretive deals with to take deportees. It sent eight men from South Sudan, Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, and Vietnam to South Sudan in early July after a US Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for their deportations. They were held for weeks in a converted shipping container at an American military base in Djibouti as the legal battle over their deportations played out. South Sudan, which is tipping toward civil war, has declined to say where the men are being held or what their fate is. The US also deported five men who are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen, and Laos to the southern African kingdom of Eswatini, where the government said they will be held in solitary confinement in prison for an undetermined period. A human rights lawyer in Eswatini said the men are being denied access to legal representation there and has taken the authorities to court. Eswatini is Africa's last absolute monarchy, and the king rules over the government, and political parties are effectively banned. Advertisement Both South Sudan and Eswatini have declined to give details of their agreements with the US. Rwanda, a relatively small country of some 15 million people, has long stood out on the continent for its recovery from a genocide that killed over 800,000 people in 1994. It has promoted itself under longtime President Paul Kagame as an example of stability and development, but human rights groups allege there are also deadly crackdowns on any perceived dissent against Kagame, who has been president for 25 years. Government spokesperson Makolo said the agreement with the US was Rwanda doing its part to help with international migration issues because 'our societal values are founded on reintegration and rehabilitation.' 'Those approved [for resettlement in Rwanda] will be provided with workforce training, healthcare, and accommodation support to jumpstart their lives in Rwanda, giving them the opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world over the last decade,' she said. There were no details about whether Rwanda had received anything in return for taking the deportees. Gonzaga Muganwa, a Rwandan political analyst, said, 'appeasing President Trump pays.'
