Workforce up in arms as bosses ban Nick Griffin from Sellafield
WORKERS at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria are angry that a planned visit by the British National Party MEP Nick Griffin, has been pulled at the last minute after bosses vetoed the fact-finding mission.
Nick Griffin and his team of nine advisers, which included a leading industry expert, were due on site on Monday 26th October after all the arrangements and security issues had been agreed with the Sellafield Visits Management.
The MEP had requested the tour of the plant because he is a supporter of nuclear power and sits on the European Parliament’s environment committee. He is particularly concerned that the powerful Wind Farm lobby is dictating the energy agenda at the moment and he hoped that a visit to Britain’s main nuclear power plant would help provide him with the necessary information to redress this imbalance.
But just days before Nick Griffin was due in Cumbria, Nuclear Management Partners, a majority foreign owned consortium of Areva of France, URL Washington Group of America and Amec of Britain, which operates the site, pulled the plug on the visit claiming that this was because it would “prove an unnecessary distraction to the workforce.”
It was this statement that angered workers.
In June, at the County Council elections in Copeland, British National Party candidates stood in every ward and polled a 19% vote share which was one-in-five of those who voted. Sellafield is in Copeland and the majority of the workforce live in the constituency.
Presumably the Sellafield owners were concerned that with this level of support for the BNP amongst its workforce, the visit might cause disruption as workers clamoured to meet their MEP, but one union representative said this claim was a red herring.
“Copeland has been staunch Labour for most of my lifetime and has only turned to the BNP in the past 18 months. We have had a string of leading Labour politicians coming to Sellafield over the years and they have never “distracted” their supporters amongst the workforce, so why should the BNP be any different.”
Sellafield Limited then issued another statement claiming that it was on-site security which was now the issue and this led a British National Party spokesman to retort:
“If Sellafield’s on-site security can’t cope with Mr Griffin’s visit then the plant has some very serious security issues.”.
