Utopia, you are standing in it!

A new bill currently before parliament alters the rules governing the periodic redrawing of the UK’s parliamentary constituencies, most notably by replacing a requirement to limit the House of Commons to 600 MPs with a new fixed size, set at the current 650. But, as Ron Johnston, David Rossiter and Charles Pattie show, the new rules are just as likely as those they replace to result in major disruption to the constituency map at all future reviews. 

In 2011, the coalition government passed the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act, which changed the rules guiding how the UK’s parliamentary constituencies are drawn up. Boundary reviews were to take place every five years (more frequently than before). Almost all new seats (with four exceptions) were to have electorates within +/-5% of the national quota (the average electorate). And the House of Commons was to be reduced in size from…

Although it is sometimes introduced as the most famous of all US World War II aircraft, there are many who will argue that Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress ranks equally with several other superb machines which became available to the US Army at just the right moment. The North American P-51 Mustang has its ardent advocates for pride of place in the USAAF’s wartime armoury, but it was a child of war, conceived to live, fight and endure in the battle-torn skies of Europe. The origin of the Fortress was very different, its gestation long and troubled.

In the first few years after World War I the US Army Air Corps’ Brigadier General William (‘Billy’) Mitchell began his campaign in favour of strategic bombing, demonstrating (perhaps inconclusively) the ascendancy of bomber over battleship in July 1921 and September 1923 by the destruction of captured or obsolete warships anchored at sea. His…

By Nic Lewis

Key points about the recent Nature paper by Flaxman and other Imperial College modellers

Covid-19 has put many things on hold, but not the transgender thought police. JK Rowling had been in their sights since Christmas when she tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, who had lost her job at a think tank after questioning whether trans women were women (spoiler: we are not — we are the other sex).

When the children’s author accidentally tweeted the contents of her clipboard last Friday the thought police reached new levels of apoplexy. Not for anything Rowling had said: the tweet was swiftly deleted and an explanation given. She was condemned for what she had been reading.

The bigger the lie, the more likely the dupe will believe it, which is game played by renewable energy rent seekers with the line that subsidised wind and solar are the answer to our economic recovery.

Just how that might work, is anybody’s guess? If heavy reliance on intermittent wind and solar sent power prices into orbit in Germany, Denmark and South Australia (which suffer the world’s highest power prices), why would following their lead improve our economic prospects?

Alan Moran tackles the topic with his usual analytic flair in a pair of essays that follow below.

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop
Quadrant Online
Alan Moran
9 June 2020

Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an…

Single and separate sex services are provided to meet the needs of people of one sex or the other. Often this need is simply for a place to undress, wash, and undertake bodily functions with privacy and dignity, in order to take part in public life such as at the gym, pub, clothing shops, school, university, train station or at work.

In the UK this basic privacy is provided for under the Equality Act – Schedule 3 Paragraph 27 (6)

This section of the law reflects some facts of life that were until quite recently taken for granted – people come in two sexes, people can usually recognise the sex of other adults, and there are circumstances (especially involving undressing and being vulnerable) where it is reasonable to object to having to share a space with a member of the opposite sex.

Single sex spaces are created by institutions setting…

I like this ad not because it compares Trump with George Wallace (Trump is more subtle in his bigotry), but because it reminds us what real leaders sound like—and we all know that they sound nothing like Trump.

The Lincoln Project is a PAC formed by Republicans and former Republicans whose goal is to ensure that Trump doesn’t get reelected. Their webpage says this:

We do not undertake this task lightly nor from ideological preference. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.

Amen to that last sentence. And now the ad:

Climate theory used to hold that there was a link between the amount of extreme weather and the equator-pole temperature gradient, meaning that warming poles should mean less of it, not more. But nowadays almost anything unusual can be labelled extreme weather by alarmists, creating headlines but no understanding of the climate.
– – –
A new Global Warming Policy Foundation report from retired physicist Ralph Alexander, Ph.D. (Oxford University) supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion there is limited scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change to increases in extreme weather, says H.Sterling Burnett.

Alexander’s conclusions are also confirmed by recent documents produced by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and meteorologist Anthony Watts on the Climate at a Glance website.

Alexander’s paper begins by remarking, “The purported link between extreme weather and global warming has captured the public imagination and attention of the mainstream media far more than any…

William IV (William Henry; August 21, 1765 – June 20, 1837) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from June 26, 1830 until his death in 1837. William was the third son of King George III, William succeeded his elder brother King George IV, becoming the last king and penultimate monarch of Britain’s House of Hanover.

William, Duke of Clarence.

William served in the Royal Navy in his youth, spending time in North America and the Caribbean, and was later nicknamed the “Sailor King”. In 1789, he was created Duke of Clarence and St Andrews. In 1827, he was appointed as Britain’s first Lord High Admiral since 1709.

In the Drawing Room at Kew Palace on July 11, 1818, William married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, the daughter of Georg I, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and Luise-Eleonore of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. William apparently remained faithful to the…

Robin D. G. Kelley is a Professor, in UCLA’s Department of African American Studies and a Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History. His new op-ed in the New York Times asks a provocative question, and I doubt that anybody here is going to say “Yes, property is more valuable than black lives.” But I’m not sure that that sentiment is in fact the case—except, of course, for those Republicans and conservative news outlets who do use looting as an excuse to ignore the sudden but eloquent calls for the elimination of racism.

In fact, although Kelley concentrates on looting, and says that the media emphasizes it as a way to distract attention from the point of the demonstrations, there’s the issue of violence in general, which is the one I’ve concentrated on. There is violence by demonstrators against police and others…

In an increasingly woke New York Magazine, there are two breaths of fresh air: Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait. Chait, like me, calls himself a liberal but spends a not inconsiderable amount of time excoriating the excesses of the Left, an endeavor he extends and explains in this week’s column (click on screenshot to read it):

Chait’s theme is based on a couple of examples of Authoritarian Left social-media hounding. Several involve something that seems to have become anathema to the Left: calling out those protestors, especially in antiracist demonstrations, who commit violence, arson, looting, and so on. Although nobody explicitly approves of this behavior, even mentioning it now brings a “yes but. . .” from certain segments of the Left. I myself have been criticized for decrying violence (mostly on the grounds that “it was minor and look at Trump on the other side”), and I won’t…

Harsh criticism, mainly from politicians and the travel industry has been expressed regarding the new government policy, according to which, and from 8 June, nearly all international arrivals at UK ports must quarantine for 14 days. It is surprising that very little has been said about the clear illegality of this policy, despite a very recent judicial review process that has been brought against the policy by a few airline companies. In this post it is argued that the quarantine policy is irrational, unreasonable and disproportionate – and therefore illegal. A preliminary note about the differences between rationality and reasonableness will be followed by applying rationality, reasonableness and proportionality to our case. 

Rationality and Reasonableness

Even though UK courts have been applying the concepts ‘rationality’ and ‘reasonableness’ indistinguishably, it is both conceptually possible and helpful to treat them as two separate grounds of review. Whereas ‘reasonableness’ is a…