Utopia, you are standing in it!

The final century and a half of Spanish colonial rule brought additional changes to the Andean political, social, and economic systems that had emerged during the age of Viceroy Toledo. From 1650 to 1750, the South American empire experienced declining mining production and tax revenues, which, from the perspective of the government in Spain, resulted in a century of depression and decline. At the same time, because the weaker imperial government intruded less on the lives of Andeans, the same century brought prosperity to local elites, who retained more resources to maintain a gracious lifestyle. Less exploitation also brought relief to indigenous populations, whose numbers finally began to recover in the 1700s. Only during the last decades of the eighteenth century did a new royal dynasty, the Bourbons, attempt to redress the empire’s loss of authority and revenue. By creating a more modern, activist state, the Bourbon monarchs, especially Charles…

Many modern constitutional systems, despite the prevalence of adult suffrage, forbid certain classes of person from participation in the most important aspects of the democratic process, whether by withholding the vote from them or by denying them the right to hold office. While the former has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature, the latter has been comparatively neglected.

In a recent article I aimed to redress this imbalance. The article – “Constitutional Disqualification: A Critique of English and English-Derived Law” published in the Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, Volume 14, Issue 2, October 2020, at pages 167-197 – starts by offering, quite generally, a taxonomy of such bans. It then appraises, with particular reference to the constitutions of the English-speaking world, some of the most common grounds for disqualifying persons from holding elective office and the various purposes that these might be thought to serve.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Virtual IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear fromDr Liam Liburd, at King’s College London. On 1 December 2020, between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Liam will be responding to your questions about his pre-circulated paper on the British Radical Right and opposition to Commonwealth immigration. Details on how to join the discussion areavailable hereor by contactingseminar@histparl.ac.uk.

On 20 April 1968, Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary, Enoch Powell (1912-1998), rose before the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham to deliver a speech that would become infamous in British political history. His ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech set forth a racist and apocalyptic vision of Britain ruined by Commonwealth immigration. In what was intended as a frightening picture of the future, Powell raised the spectre of a nation in which ‘the black…

A MW of intermittent offshore wind power capacity costs up to 17 times the cost of a thoroughly reliable MW of gas-fired power generation. And, whereas, the latter is available around-the-clock, the former is available when Mother Nature deems fit. And she tends to be a temperamental, old cow.

One particular wheeze among Britain’s renewable energy rent seekers, is to float wind turbines on pontoons and anchor them to the seafloor.

At first blush, this was meant to reduce the capital cost of running these things offshore. However, as Andrew Montford details below, the reverse is true.

A standard offshore turbine has a per MW capital cost of around 5 to 6 times that of gas-fired power. But – according to the figures produced by one floating wind farm operator, the capital costs ratio per MW for floating wind turbines is a mind-boggling 17 times that of a gas-fired turbine…