Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wind and solar acolytes fail to mention that the ‘inevitable transition’ includes hours spent sitting freezing or boiling in the dark.

Power rationing by postcode is the new normal in Australia, as grid managers attempt to deal with the chaotic delivery of wind and solar. Former energy users are being encouraged not to use energy in order to prevent the grid from a total ‘system black’. And when encouragement fails, the grid manager simply cuts their access to power for hours on end.

New South Wales has a Liberal government hellbent on killing off their reliable coal-fired power plants in order to make way for more wind turbines and solar panels – on their current (woeful) performance, Matt Kean and his band of rent-seeking mates should be careful what they wish for.

Set out above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output from all of the whirling wonders…

The discussion about the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is not new. Back in 2020, in the Internal Market Bill, the UK Government brought forth its volition to unilaterally amend the conditions of its Brexit agreement with the EU and several pieces were written then on the issue. In the last few days, the UK Government has returned to the issue which had in the meantime been frozen, by issuing though this time also a legal statement meant to embalm this initiative to the wider compliance of the UK with international law. Albeit the statement’s reference to the doctrine of necessity in international law is not convincing, the issuing per se of such statement, must be heralded as good news. In 2020, when the UK announced that it was ready to revise the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stated that the Bill would indeed break international…

Two weeks ago, the UK Government published its consultation document on Scotland’s Constitutional Future, in which it stated its view that the Scottish Parliament has no power to enact legislation authorising a referendum on the question whether Scotland should become independent from the United Kingdom.  Last week, the Scottish Government published its own consultation paper, Your Scotland, Your Referendum, claiming that the Scottish Parliament can validly authorise the asking of at least some questions about independence, although the document is ambiguous as to whether the Scottish Government believes that it has power to ask its preferred referendum question, namely ‘Do you agree that Scotland should become an independent country?’.

The legality or otherwise of an independence referendum is, from one perspective, a narrow point: a matter merely of process, which could be authoritatively resolved by an express grant of power from either the UK Government (under s.30 of the…

The Reserve Bank Governor appears to have been communing with his tree gods again, and last week released a speech he’d delivered online to an overseas audience headed “Why we embraced Te Ao Maori”. It isn’t clear quite how many people were in the audience for this commercial event run by the Central Banking (private business) publications group, but I’m guessing not many. The stream Orr spoke in featured just him, a panel discussion on how “digital finance can drive women’s inclusion”, and a presentation on “how can central banks put climate change at the core of the governance agenda”. While it was called the “governance stream”, a better label might be the woke feel-good stream, far removed from the purposes for which legislatures set up central banks.

In many ways, the smaller the overseas audience the better, and I guess his main target audience was probably domestic anyway…

Was the French 2022 honeymoon election one that defies the usual impact of such election timing? Not to offer a spoiler, but the answer is yes and no.

Back around the time of the presidential runoff, I restated what I often say about elections for assembly held shortly after a presidential election: they are not an opportunity for the voters to “check” the president they have just chosen; presidential and semi-presidential systems just do not work that way. Well, usually. It seems hard to escape the notion that voters did just that–by holding Emmanuel Macron’s allies in Ensemble to less than a majority of seats, and by delivering bigger than expected seat totals to the Mélenchon-led united left (Nupes) and even to Le Pen’s National Rally (RN).

There will not be cohabitation, which was what I really meant in the French context when saying that honeymoon elections were not an…

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 and his wife Duchess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. William succeeded his elder brother King George IV, becoming the last king and penultimate monarch of Britain’s House of Hanover.

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…