Utopia, you are standing in it!

• BRYCE EDWARDS writes –

 The Labour Party used to advocate for a properly-funded, multi-platform public broadcaster. There was real merit in the proposal to set this up when Labour campaigned for it in 2017. After all, New Zealand lacks a public broadcaster along the lines of the BBC or the ABC. And the idea of merging RNZ and TVNZ meant that synergies, together with proper funding, could finally produce a broadcaster that would enhance democracy and New Zealand society. The idea had hints of transformation about it.
 
The plan was also to update public media for the 21st century in which the future is clearly digital. Public media needed to be online and less reliant on TV and radio. By future-proofing the public broadcasters, setting up new digital offerings that would coexist with the mega tech companies, public media operating in the public interest could survive and prosper.

Frequently people think that there are only two ways address flexibility in a constitution: to legally entrench an entire document and to protect it with strong judicial oversight, or to have a political constitution and a sovereign parliament, which, in the words of A.V. Dicey, ‘has … the right to make or unmake any law whatever….’ One aspect of this sovereignty is that parliament cannot bind itself: ‘That Parliaments have more than once intended and endeavoured to pass Acts which should tie the hands of their successors is certain, but the endeavour has always ended in failure.’

Parliament has regularly used language limiting its future options. The Bill of Rights (1688) says that the rights declared there ‘shall be declared, enacted, and established by Authority of this present Parliament, and shall stand, remain, and be the Law of this Realm for ever’. More recently, Parliament promised in the European Union…

The publication of the Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future is attracting widespread attention.  The centrepiece of its constitutional content is the replacement of the House of Lords with a new second chamber with new composition and a reformed role, which would have particular responsibility for territorial aspects of the constitution (discussed here) and act as guardian of (newly) entrenched elements of the constitution –not just in the devolution context but also more widely. 

This post develops in preliminary form some doubts about the radicalism of the entrenchment aspect of these proposals.Whilst they appear to have many of the trappings of radicalism (the language of entrenchment, a new hierarchically superior category of legislation, a novel role for the supreme court in the legislative process, suggestions of super-majorities and so on) I want to suggest that this aspect of the Report is in fact rather cautious.I’ll make four interrelated…

A documentary, five years in the making, about the slow-footed race-against-time to finish an epic “three volume” biography of Lyndon Johnson’s fifth and final volume before the researcher/author and his editor pass away from very old age is nobody’s idea of an easy sale — not to a film distributor, nor to most filmgoers.

Even the title — “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” — seems ironic, if not oxymoronic. “Turn every page” and “adventures?”

But filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb (“Romeo Romeo” was hers), daughter of 90something editor Robert Gottlieb, has produced a filmed appreciation not just of her father and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Caro and their epic final collaboration. It’s a film about a decades-long deep dive into “power” in America and a monument to a sort of life-long collaboration we will never see again.

Turn every page” was a discipline passed on to…

Wind power comes with a staggering price tag, taking these things out to sea sends those costs into orbit: intermittent offshore wind power is six times the cost of gas-fired power that’s always available on demand.

Placing giant industrial wind turbines miles offshore is costly enough, but the rising costs of attempting to maintain them (and the transmission cables connecting them) in a highly corrosive marine environment are positively punitive.

So much so, that even the grandest of offshore plans have hit the skids, as Robert Bryce details below.

Scuttled Offshore Wind Plans Are Good News For Ratepayers, North Atlantic Right Whales
Forbes
Robert Bryce
18 November 2022

The hype about offshore wind energy keeps getting scuttled by reality. That’s the clear conclusion from last month’s announcement that Spanish utility company, Avangrid, was halting work on the proposed 1,200-megawatt Commonwealth Wind project because it was “no longer viable.” The…

The rule of law is a fundamental principle underpinning the UK constitution. Its core principles include limits on state power, protection for fundamental rights and judicial independence. Lisa James and Jan van Zyl Smit argue that upholding the rule of law is a responsibility shared between politicians, officials and the public – with ministers and MPs having important roles to play.  

Background

The rule of law is frequently cited in political debate, and is a key topic monitored by those worried about democratic backsliding. But what is it, and why is it so important?

The rule of law is one of the fundamental principles underpinning constitutional democracies, and its importance is not seriously questioned in any modern democratic state. But like other constitutional principles, long-running debates exist about how it can most effectively be implemented.

This briefing explains the central concepts constituting the rule of law under three broad…

That the nuclear-powered French pay prices around half that suffered by their wind and solar-obsessed German neighbours is the kind of barebones fact the wind and sun cult absolutely hate.

The French set the benchmark for generating clean, safe and reliable nuclear power; they’ve been doing so for nearly 60 years and still get over 75% of their electricity from their nuclear plants, and export large volumes of what they generate to power-starved Germans and Brits.

The French put paid to the lie that nuclear power is expensive; the French power consumer pays around half what wind and solar-powered Danes and Germans do (see above). Since Vladimir Putin’s adventure in Ukraine, German power prices have rocketed, further still, recently hitting a record 40 US cents per kWh.

And the French don’t suffer the indignity of routine power rationing and blackouts like their German neighbours, when the sun sets and/or…

Does entering into a coalition government imply that a political party is a “veto player”? Some scholars would say yes, while others raise cautions about such a generalization. I would side with those who sound the caution and say that it depends.

The issue arises because in Israel, the Otzma Yehudit party leader, Itamar Ben Gvir, has issued another demand that is gumming up the process of forming what in theory should be a highly compact minimum winning coalition of the right–orthodox bloc in Israel.

According to the Times of Israel, Ben Gvir said “We want a deputy in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation” and without this, “we can’t form a government.” The news update notes that a spokesman has clarified that he means that veto power is his intention with this demand.

As the article notes, the rules of procedure for the Ministerial Committee for Legislation are subject…

Their self-inflated ‘virtue’ has a price, and you’re paying it, every red cent of it. That last jaw-dropping power bill has their fingerprints all over it. So do the occasions when thousands are left sitting freezing or boiling in the dark; when cash-strapped businesses are forced to sack staff to cut their overheads so they cover their escalating power bills; when struggling families power forced to choose between food on the table and light and power.

The moment when neo-Marxist ideologues grabbed the tiller and engineers were relegated to the pages of history, things were never going to pan out all that well for power consumers.

The destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies was inevitable; but that result was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable.

Alexandra Marshall explains precisely why.

This is war: Renewables vs the West
Spectator Australia
Alexandra Marshall
14 November 2022

The future of…

(John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States)

At a time when most Americans believe they are witnessing the most divisive political campaign they have ever experienced, they need only to turn the clock back to the 1828 presidential campaign when Andrew Jackson, angry because he believed the previous election had been stolen because of a “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, launched a nasty and personal attack against Adams as early as his inauguration resulting in Jackson’s eventual victory.  This political clash is just one component of James Traub’s excellent new biography, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: MILITANT SPIRIT.  Adam’s the son of our second president was a rather enigmatic and recalcitrant figure who seemed to always answer to principle, not political expediency.  His diplomatic career consisted of ministerial posts in the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, England, as well as serving as Secretary of State.  His political…

Ross McKitrick reports at Financial Post The Parliamentary Budget Officer just debunked climate alarmism, This is the opposite of an ’emergency’ or ‘crisis’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2020. PHOTO BY ADRIAN WYLD/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES

The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) recently released a report on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on Canadian GDP growth over the next 80 years. I’ve written previously about the recent economics literature investigating the link (or lack thereof) between global warming and economic growth. It’s a fascinating topic and I’ve been actively working with on it one of our PhD students for several years. While I would quibble with some aspects of the PBO report, the overall conclusions are not out of line with mainstream thinking on the topic.

Which is why the findings are so…