Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…