Who built Drax?

There is an irony in today's demonstrations at Drax power station. As the late Paul Foot recalled in what must have been one of his last columns for the Guardian:

The decision to build Drax B was taken by a Labour government in 1977 after what Tony Benn - the energy secretary at the time - tells me was a "tremendous battle" with the nuclear industry and big business, which was ideologically suspicious of publicly owned industry and/or the National Union of Mineworkers.

This is something to remember when Benn complains that George W. Bush has "torn up the Kyoto treaty on global warming".

Twenty years ago the fashionable cause was to demand that the coal industry be kept open. Today it is, by implication, to demand that it be closed down. I wonder how many of the people protesting against Drax today campaigned in support of the miners' strike in the 1980s?