It is a strange sort of privatisation where one government sells its assets to another government. The UK is on the verge of selling British Energy, the UK’s nuclear power provider, to EDF, the French state-owned energy company. Although the company’s foreign ownership is not troublesome, the deal highlights structural problems with the UK energy market.

EDF is an excellent candidate for running Britain’s nuclear power plants and building new reactors. The fact that it is owned by the French state is of no importance. EDF can be trusted to behave like a conventional commercial enterprise and there is no strategic reason to prevent a French company from running UK nuclear power plants. EDF is not Gazprom and France is not Russia.