Utopia, you are standing in it!

This month marks the 141^st anniversary of the first use of the secret ballot to elect an MP, at a by-election in the Yorkshire borough of Pontefract. Before the 1872 Ballot Act, and throughout the period covered by our Victorian Commons project, MPs who faced a contest were elected in public by viva voce voting at a designated polling booth.

At its most basic the booth was little more than a table with chairs for the poll clerks, who would ask electors to confirm their identity and qualification (sometimes with an oath) before inquiring how they wished to vote, often surrounded by cheering onlookers and the agents of the candidates. The voter would state his preferences – “I vote for William Biggs and Thomas Harding” or “I give a plumper for James Gordon” –  and the clerk would then mark the choices in an official poll book, based…

As voters across the country head to the polls this month, we thought it was an ideal opportunity to look back at some of the research on 19th century elections we have featured in our blogs over the past few years. These draw on our work for the History of Parliament’s House of Commons, 1832-68 project, which is producing biographical profiles of the 2,591 MPs who sat between the first and second Reform Acts and accounts of the 401 constituencies in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales across the nine general elections which took place during this period. You can find more details about our project here.

The system under which electors cast their votes between 1832 and 1868 was very different in many ways from the modern British electoral system. As our editor, Philip Salmon, explains in this post, before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872…

In light of recent proceedings in the United States, in our latest blog Dr Charles Moreton, senior research fellow with our medieval project, House of Commons 1461-1504, discusses the historic origins of impeachment in English parliaments…

Thanks to the actions of Donald Trump’s political opponents in the United States, impeachment is very much in the news at the moment. It is therefore an opportune moment to consider the English parliamentary origins of the process.

The first recorded example of parliamentary impeachment dates back to the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376. This, the penultimate Parliament of Edward III’s reign, was an assembly of great consequence which also saw the first record of the election of a Speaker by the Commons. Highly critical of the government, the Lower House submitted the longest list of petitions ever sent to a King in a medieval Parliament, conducted its own investigations into maladministration and…

Germany’s obsession with intermittent wind and solar was never going to end well. Power prices are now the highest in Europe, if not the world. But paying for power is only a problem for those Germans who are lucky enough to be supplied with it.

Wherever there’s an attempt to run on sunshine and breezes, power consumers find themselves in a perpetual game of musical chairs.

Delivering electricity at chaotic random intervals, thanks to sunset and calm weather, wind and solar are bound to leave power punters short. And the more reliance that’s placed on that heavily subsidised pair, the more disappointed consumers there will inevitably be.

And nowhere is that truism more evident than Germany, as Paul Homewood details below.

The looming German capacity crunch
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
27 January 2020

A pertinent update from Timera:

The looming German capacity crunch
The…

by Judith Curry

The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C  is now published [link].

Other posts have addressed the murky science underneath the claim that burning fossil fuels makes the earth warmer, and the alarmist claims that a warmer world is more dangerous than a colder one. This post takes up the issue that even if rising human CO2 emission were causing dangerous warming, what are the likely consequences of policies to cut down on carbon-based energy. Text below in italics comes from sources listed as links at the end.

This issues arises in the US context because presidential candidates of leftist stripes have pledged to do away with fracking operations and forego the resulting boom in natural gas and tight oil production.

The Narrative

“I will ban fracking—everywhere.”
— Elizabeth Warren

“Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands.”
— Bernie Sanders

“I favor a ban on new fracking and a rapid end…

Well, Her Highness has a short summary of the worst aspects of 2019 in The Critic (click on screenshot). By “worst”, of course, I mean that the year was packed with incidents that offended the faux wokeness of Ms. McGrath (if that’s her right pronoun).

An excerpt from her litany of 2019’s outrages:

We all thought that 2019 was the worst year in human history thus far. We were wrong: 2020 is already turning out to be an utter disaster for social justice. On New Year’s day I had the misfortune of seeing Toy Story 4 with my seven-year-old niece (formerly my nephew) at my local cinema.

I was shocked at the lack of diverse representation, and even more shocked to see that there were people of colour in the audience who appeared to be enjoying themselves. I later read an article in the Hollywood Reporter by a middle-class white…

Reader Bryan called my attention to this video from 2016 in which Brady and Keith, who “uncover science treasures”, visit the Council Room of Britain’s Royal Society. Among the treasures they examine are the famous portrait of Darwin that you’ve surely seen, and a nice scale model of H.M.S. Beagle.  As I noted in my Darwin lecture in Antarctica, the Beagle was very small: 27.5 m (90 feet) long and just 7.5 m (24 feet) across. That is tiny!

They then examine what appears to be a first edition of the four-volume account of the Beagle’s voyage (actually the voyages of two ships: the set is called The Narrative of the Voyages of H.M. Ships Adventure and Beagle), which includes the famous volume by Darwin known as The Voyage of the Beagle. This set was given to the Royal Society by Darwin and his captain, Robert FitzRoy.

Pity…

On this date in history: February 10, 1840. Her Majesty Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland married her maternal first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Victoria once complained to her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, that her mother’s close proximity promised “torment for many years”, Melbourne sympathized but said it could be avoided by marriage, which Victoria called a “schocking alternative”. Although a marriage between Victoria and her cousin Prince Albert had been encouraged by the Coburg family, specifically King Leopold I of the Belgians since 1936, Victoria was ambivalent at best toward the arrangement.

The idea of marriage between Albert and his cousin, Victoria, was first documented in an 1821 letter from his paternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, (Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf) who said that he was “the pendant to the pretty cousin”.

Victoria did however, show interest in Albert’s education…

Enormous expense, twenty times more wind turbines, hydrogen production, much less meat eating, carbon capture, hard ‘lifestyle changes’ and so on. Maybe travel to work on a flying pig – and all for what?

It won’t be easy, but clean energy analyst Chris Goodall believes that the UK is entirely capable of becoming carbon neutral, says BBC Science.

Belatedly, the world has realised it has to eliminate greenhouse gases within a few decades.

The UK has promised ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. Is this is an achievable aim? How much will it cost? In what ways will our lifestyles need to change?

Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing series of posts documenting BDS fails.

Political

Sudan gives Israel initial okay for overflights- official

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan has agreed to allow flights heading to Israel to cross its airspace, a military spokesman said on Wednesday, two days after Sudan’s military head of state held a surprise meeting with Israel’s prime minister.

Israel officially allows Israelis to travel to Saudi Arabia

Jordan gets first natural gas supplies from Israel

Under the agreement, the U.S.-Israeli consortium will supply Jordan gas for 15 years from the field in the Mediterranean.

The deal has faced opposition in Jordan where many view Israel as an erstwhile enemy. Activists and parliamentarians have lobbied the…

I came upon this article when someone sent me the tweet below (I don’t know who Cathy Young is). The caption is pretty snarky, but the article in The Atlantic  by Megan Garber, which you can access by clicking on the link or the bottom part of the tweet, justifies the snark. It’s really a pretty dire article that criticizes due process because in some cases (read: accusations of sexual misconduct), “due process” involves making the witnesses uncomfortable or upset, and causing harm. And it can’t guarantee justice.

The article is about how the defense lawyers for Harvey Weinstein have been going pretty strongly…