"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Question. Please tell me that Truss and Johnson are making *the same* trip to Balmoral. As in both on the same plane / helicopter.
I mean, it would make material sense, but I assume from a security point of view, they shouldn't? Should there be an incident, you would lose both the current and presumed PM in one fell swoop.
What if due a navigation error the aircraft of one crashes into the aircraft of the other. Anyone thought of that?
Or one preempts that possibility by shooting the other one down? Prisoner's dilemma.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
I have to say, I initially thought you were talking absolute nonsense, and then I looked up what people were saying in the relevant period.
The invasion of Afghanistan shocked many people into realising that moderation had not been met with moderation. We have no wish to return to the so-called “cold war” of the early 1950s. It is not we who have imperial ambitions. We are not imposing our will on other countries by force of arms. We respect the sovereignty of others. We welcome the strong reassertion of this principle by the non-aligned movement in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher, 16 April 1981
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
With that said, I understand entirely (and broadly support) the revision of the term "Cold War" to refer to the entire period of ideological conflict between Communism and democratic/capitalist powers, rather than just the early period. In the 1980s, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know they wouldn't need to use the term Third World War at any point.
“Here’s my strategy on the Cold War – we win, they lose.” Ronald Reagan, June 1988
I certainly remember the Cold War happening in the 1980s, and everyone calling it that at the time.
There's also this from Margaret Thatcher in August 1990:
“Today we are coming to realise that an epoch in history is over…For more than 40 years that Iron Curtain remained in place. Few of us expected to see it lifted in our lifetime. Yet with great suddenness, the impossible has happened. Communism is broken, utterly broken… We do not see this new Soviet Union as an enemy but as a country groping its way towards freedom. We no longer have to view the world through a prism of East-West relations. The Cold War is over.”
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
But that's a game about syntax rather than the semantic of what was actually happening.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her.
No flies on you, Vern.
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
Is this Blackadder or is this reality?
I don't think they're trying to inconvenience Truss particularly. They're trying to poke Johnson in the eye.
The Queen is hardly going to go out of her way to interrupt her summer break for a new PM most Tory MPs did not vote for and who even most Tory members would have preferred Badenoch to and who has not yet won a general election and on current polls is not likely to. The fact she is over 90 and not in the best of health for too frequent journeys only confirms that.
Plus given Truss was a republican in her youth makes it clear to her from day 1 she is still Her Majesty's chief minister not a President
If these were the reasons that the Queen isn't doing this, that seems like an even more important reason to be rid of the monarchy than the carbon footprint of keeping silly traditions.
The idea that the monarch should be able to inconvenience an elected politician, because of their supposed lack of mandate or their political views, is absurd...
Where's your sense of humour ?
It's just HMQ's little joke about who's sub and who's dom.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her.
No flies on you, Vern.
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
Is this Blackadder or is this reality?
I don't think they're trying to inconvenience Truss particularly. They're trying to poke Johnson in the eye.
The Queen is hardly going to go out of her way to interrupt her summer break for a new PM most Tory MPs did not vote for and who even most Tory members would have preferred Badenoch to and who has not yet won a general election and on current polls is not likely to. The fact she is over 90 and not in the best of health for too frequent journeys only confirms that.
Plus given Truss was a republican in her youth makes it clear to her from day 1 she is still Her Majesty's chief minister not a President
It's amusing to see your desperation to deflect from the fact the Queen isn't up to doing her job anymore, into being a sly dig and about the Queen showing Truss who's boss.
The Queen would be ashamed of that idea if people thought it. If she were 40 years younger she'd 100% have made the journey, but she's 95 years old and not well. Both Boris and Liz (Truss not Windsor) know that and will make the journey so she doesn't have to. There's no ulterior motive.
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
Not least our new PM and her coming lessons in economics.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
I have to say, I initially thought you were talking absolute nonsense, and then I looked up what people were saying in the relevant period.
The invasion of Afghanistan shocked many people into realising that moderation had not been met with moderation. We have no wish to return to the so-called “cold war” of the early 1950s. It is not we who have imperial ambitions. We are not imposing our will on other countries by force of arms. We respect the sovereignty of others. We welcome the strong reassertion of this principle by the non-aligned movement in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher, 16 April 1981
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
With that said, I understand entirely (and broadly support) the revision of the term "Cold War" to refer to the entire period of ideological conflict between Communism and democratic/capitalist powers, rather than just the early period. In the 1980s, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know they wouldn't need to use the term Third World War at any point.
“Here’s my strategy on the Cold War – we win, they lose.” Ronald Reagan, June 1988
I certainly remember the Cold War happening in the 1980s, and everyone calling it that at the time.
I had friends working in Frankfurt in the mid-80s, to them the question over the arrival of the Red Army was not “if” but “when?”.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
As I understand it the government is trying to uncouple renewables from the system.
they've sold - and hence the revenues from the generators as the wholesale price of electricity will be miles above the strike price. Just plug it all into an excel spreadsheet taking care to eliminate circular errors and hey presto a slightly cheaper electricity price.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this isn't how it's done at the moment with the price simply being set by the final and most expensive element, gas.
Yeah, I'm with Octopus for my electricity and they are often emailing saying they're sorry prices are going up when they get their energy from 100% renewables because of the way market prices work. It must be said though, I got solar panels during lockdown and I've already had a few months this year where the amount they made paid that month's cost on the panels - which when I bought them was not likely to be a thing for a decade.
Sounds huge. What's the SEG and export ? in pounds and pence ? The export part of my panels is likely to earn me ~ £130 this year (1/2 * 4328 KwH * £0.0599) on the old FIT scheme.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
But that's a game about syntax rather than the semantic of what was actually happening.
Bobbitt of course sees the period from 1914-1991 as one continuous era in his views of what constitutes an epochal, or long war.
As it is put by wiki:
" "epochal war', a historical construction that embraces several conflicts thought to be separate wars by the participants, and the notion of the "Long War", a conflict which embraces the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam wars and the Cold War. "
So 1991 for Bobbitt. And he is a pretty good source. But I certainly take @Dynamo's point of it being open to interpretation.
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
Not least our new PM and her coming lessons in economics.
Basic arithmetic
And her dad a maths professor...
(Though not all of them are great at basic arithmetic.)
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
What's the Pratchett joke - "There is a saying: It won't get better if you picket."
I would say that we are getting to a place where I can't see how it gets any better unless people kick off. Unless Truss is the perfect Manchurian candidate, trained from birth to get to the seat of power to only then unleash her lefty republican side, and this leadership campaign is all part of the act - we're beyond buggered. The numbers of people who already use food banks, or choose between heating and eating is unacceptable, that number will surge beyond belief. And after people showed that they were willing to do lockdown to save nan and grandad, they won't be happy for them to die in a cold snap because they couldn't afford to turn the heating on without taking money out against the house.
I've heard some civil servants I know say that relief will have to happen - that Truss will see the reports and the analysis and just not be able to do anything but - and I still don't see it.
Yes. Even Tracy Horrobin in The Archers has just visited a food bank.
That. Is. The End of Times.
A former colleague, Tom Levitt, runs a scheme of interest-free microloans for essential food supplies, now working with Iceland (the supermarket). They are running at 50 THOUSAND applications per week.
Meanwhile, a friend working in the Foreign Office tells me that they are balloting for a strike, after a pay offer of a few per cent.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Hahahaha.
What utter garbage. Everyone thought the Cold War was still going on in the 80s. Why do you think programmes like Threads or When The Wind Blows were made? Of course you won't remember Protect and Survive because you were probably in a school somewhere outside Moscow.
Both Reagan and Thatcher referred to the Cold War as being ongoing regularly during the 80s. I would consider them both to be respected.
Historians at the time including John Lewis-Gaddis made regular reference to the Cold War as an ongoing event.
And, moving beyond the 1980s, Robert Service, one of the foremost British historians on the Cold War and Soviet Russia has written extensively about it including a book entitled, unsurprisingly, The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
I have to say, I initially thought you were talking absolute nonsense, and then I looked up what people were saying in the relevant period.
The invasion of Afghanistan shocked many people into realising that moderation had not been met with moderation. We have no wish to return to the so-called “cold war” of the early 1950s. It is not we who have imperial ambitions. We are not imposing our will on other countries by force of arms. We respect the sovereignty of others. We welcome the strong reassertion of this principle by the non-aligned movement in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher, 16 April 1981
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
With that said, I understand entirely (and broadly support) the revision of the term "Cold War" to refer to the entire period of ideological conflict between Communism and democratic/capitalist powers, rather than just the early period. In the 1980s, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know they wouldn't need to use the term Third World War at any point.
“Here’s my strategy on the Cold War – we win, they lose.” Ronald Reagan, June 1988
I certainly remember the Cold War happening in the 1980s, and everyone calling it that at the time.
There's also this from Margaret Thatcher in August 1990:
“Today we are coming to realise that an epoch in history is over…For more than 40 years that Iron Curtain remained in place. Few of us expected to see it lifted in our lifetime. Yet with great suddenness, the impossible has happened. Communism is broken, utterly broken… We do not see this new Soviet Union as an enemy but as a country groping its way towards freedom. We no longer have to view the world through a prism of East-West relations. The Cold War is over.”
Yeah, but apart from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher…..
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
What's the Pratchett joke - "There is a saying: It won't get better if you picket."
I would say that we are getting to a place where I can't see how it gets any better unless people kick off. Unless Truss is the perfect Manchurian candidate, trained from birth to get to the seat of power to only then unleash her lefty republican side, and this leadership campaign is all part of the act - we're beyond buggered. The numbers of people who already use food banks, or choose between heating and eating is unacceptable, that number will surge beyond belief. And after people showed that they were willing to do lockdown to save nan and grandad, they won't be happy for them to die in a cold snap because they couldn't afford to turn the heating on without taking money out against the house.
I've heard some civil servants I know say that relief will have to happen - that Truss will see the reports and the analysis and just not be able to do anything but - and I still don't see it.
Yes. Even Tracy Horrobin in The Archers has just visited a food bank.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
I have to say, I initially thought you were talking absolute nonsense, and then I looked up what people were saying in the relevant period.
The invasion of Afghanistan shocked many people into realising that moderation had not been met with moderation. We have no wish to return to the so-called “cold war” of the early 1950s. It is not we who have imperial ambitions. We are not imposing our will on other countries by force of arms. We respect the sovereignty of others. We welcome the strong reassertion of this principle by the non-aligned movement in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher, 16 April 1981
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
With that said, I understand entirely (and broadly support) the revision of the term "Cold War" to refer to the entire period of ideological conflict between Communism and democratic/capitalist powers, rather than just the early period. In the 1980s, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know they wouldn't need to use the term Third World War at any point.
They were seriously worried that the Third World War was about to kick off, over KAL007, in fact. Andropov thought the US would launch a missile strike under cover of NATO exercises and put all his forces on maximum alert. In fact, I believe a radar error led to an alarm of a nuclear strike being raised, but as the key officer was off duty at the time it wasn’t transmitted to Moscow until they realised it was a false alarm.
What was different was something of a tendency to downplay it in public, unlike in the 1960s when the instinct was to use rhetoric for political advantage. This was particularly true in the USSR.
I can therefore understand there may have been those who didn’t realise just how high the tension was, but it’s a total nonsense to say it was over and literally nobody was talking about it.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
OK I am going to post something that is probably ridiculously stupid so I await the responses ridiculing me (it will be along the lines of one of our more notorious posters in its simplicity, which is usually stupidly impossible). Particularly interested in @Richard_Tyndall's views.
Firstly to state, as I have done before, I do not believe in windfall taxes or caps for private industries, but we are in exceptional and extraordinary times.
Ideally we want to keep power supplies for both residents and business around what they were before the big hikes due the large increase in wholesale prices. Not just for hardship purposes, but to control inflation. We are faffing around with all sorts of schemes that will leave holes all over the place (particularly for businesses) and are very complex.
Why not windfall tax the wholesale supplies equivalent to the difference in current commodity price over the more normal price they would have charged before the commodity price increased and pass that onto the retail suppliers so they are basing their retail prices on the previous normal price rather than the higher wholesale price they are paying.
Suspect there are all sorts of flaws in that in terms of complexity and also issue with wholesale providers that aren't UK based.
OK standing by for the flak.
The coming problem over the winter, is primarily caused by a 15-20% shortage of supply. How does your proposal result in 15-20% less usage, if it removes most of the price signals to consumers and businesses?
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
As I understand it the government is trying to uncouple renewables from the system.
they've sold - and hence the revenues from the generators as the wholesale price of electricity will be miles above the strike price. Just plug it all into an excel spreadsheet taking care to eliminate circular errors and hey presto a slightly cheaper electricity price.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this isn't how it's done at the moment with the price simply being set by the final and most expensive element, gas.
Yeah, I'm with Octopus for my electricity and they are often emailing saying they're sorry prices are going up when they get their energy from 100% renewables because of the way market prices work. It must be said though, I got solar panels during lockdown and I've already had a few months this year where the amount they made paid that month's cost on the panels - which when I bought them was not likely to be a thing for a decade.
What portion of your power are you exporting at 4.1p ? /kwh ?
I'm on a flexible tariff, which averaged out at exporting at 16.46p / kWh over spring and summer. Current average for July and August has been 26.95p / kWh.
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
I have to say, I initially thought you were talking absolute nonsense, and then I looked up what people were saying in the relevant period.
The invasion of Afghanistan shocked many people into realising that moderation had not been met with moderation. We have no wish to return to the so-called “cold war” of the early 1950s. It is not we who have imperial ambitions. We are not imposing our will on other countries by force of arms. We respect the sovereignty of others. We welcome the strong reassertion of this principle by the non-aligned movement in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher, 16 April 1981
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
With that said, I understand entirely (and broadly support) the revision of the term "Cold War" to refer to the entire period of ideological conflict between Communism and democratic/capitalist powers, rather than just the early period. In the 1980s, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know they wouldn't need to use the term Third World War at any point.
They were seriously worried that the Third World War was about to kick off, over KAL007, in fact. Andropov thought the US would launch a missile strike under cover of NATO exercises and put all his forces on maximum alert. In fact, I believe a radar error led to an alarm of a nuclear strike being raised, but as the key officer was off duty at the time it wasn’t transmitted to Moscow until they realised it was a false alarm.
What was different was something of a tendency to downplay it in public, unlike in the 1960s when the instinct was to use rhetoric for political advantage. This was particularly true in the USSR.
I can therefore understand there may have been those who didn’t realise just how high the tension was, but it’s a total nonsense to say it was over and literally nobody was talking about it.
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
i don’t think you even need to use the words “in education”.
The only people (relatively) immune from the difficulties of this winter will be those on high professional salaries with no dependents. Even then they will encounter some inconvenience from the knock-on effects.
Like me? Not that I have a salary.
I say again incidentally that with things as they stand it's very very hard to see 90% of private schools making it to Christmas. Either they will have to push their fees to astronomical levels, or they will run out of cash within hours of turning the heating on.
And what happens to their pupils then?
And yes, I take your point on 'in education.' How do hospitals cope?
Boarding schools were built on cold showers and little heating, I am sure most will survive. The top ones of course like Eton and Winchester have fees of around £30,000 a year
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
No no. Apparently everyone agreed the cold war was over. The Soviets certainly did when they put their missile forces on high alert believing the only way to survive the imminent nuclear war was to initiate it themselves.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
As I understand it the government is trying to uncouple renewables from the system.
they've sold - and hence the revenues from the generators as the wholesale price of electricity will be miles above the strike price. Just plug it all into an excel spreadsheet taking care to eliminate circular errors and hey presto a slightly cheaper electricity price.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this isn't how it's done at the moment with the price simply being set by the final and most expensive element, gas.
Yeah, I'm with Octopus for my electricity and they are often emailing saying they're sorry prices are going up when they get their energy from 100% renewables because of the way market prices work. It must be said though, I got solar panels during lockdown and I've already had a few months this year where the amount they made paid that month's cost on the panels - which when I bought them was not likely to be a thing for a decade.
What portion of your power are you exporting at 4.1p ? /kwh ?
I'm on a flexible tariff, which averaged out at exporting at 16.46p / kWh over spring and summer. Current average for July and August has been 26.95p / kWh.
Blimey. Does your fuel supply have to be with Octopus to enjoy those great rates though. Their website says 4.1p SEG !
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
I read that under the contracts for difference regime it's HMG which is pocketing the large difference between the current wholesale price for GB electricity and the strike price agreed for wind energy. If true we could all benefit from the advantages of wind energy if the green levy on energy bills was changed to a green rebate with that money.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
As I understand it the government is trying to uncouple renewables from the system.
they've sold - and hence the revenues from the generators as the wholesale price of electricity will be miles above the strike price. Just plug it all into an excel spreadsheet taking care to eliminate circular errors and hey presto a slightly cheaper electricity price.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this isn't how it's done at the moment with the price simply being set by the final and most expensive element, gas.
Yeah, I'm with Octopus for my electricity and they are often emailing saying they're sorry prices are going up when they get their energy from 100% renewables because of the way market prices work. It must be said though, I got solar panels during lockdown and I've already had a few months this year where the amount they made paid that month's cost on the panels - which when I bought them was not likely to be a thing for a decade.
What portion of your power are you exporting at 4.1p ? /kwh ?
I'm on a flexible tariff, which averaged out at exporting at 16.46p / kWh over spring and summer. Current average for July and August has been 26.95p / kWh.
Blimey. Does your fuel supply have to be with Octopus to enjoy those great rates though. Their website says 4.1p SEG !
They are my electric supplier as well, yeah. It helps that I also (recently) have started living alone, so my costs are much lower than the average household, but this summer has been really good.
Liz Truss, however long her tenure, is destined to become quite a good quiz answer in a few decades: “who was the first/only of Elizabeth II’s PMs not to be appointed at Buckingham Palace”?
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
The USSR was unwound into the Commonwealth of Independent States which, bizarrely, continues to exist on paper. Ukraine was a founder member and, apparently, has not yet formally exited in spite of repeated provocations.
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
No no. Apparently everyone agreed the cold war was over. The Soviets certainly did when they put their missile forces on high alert believing the only way to survive the imminent nuclear war was to initiate it themselves.
It was all love and peace.
When I lived in Germany in the early 70s the NATO forces certainly seemed to be under the illusion that they were operating under imminent threat of a massive attack. And that weird wall built across the Hartz mountains to keep the citizens of East Germany locked in suggested everything was not entirely rosy. In 1979 when I went to the Soviet Union we got presented with the thoughts of Leonid Brezhnev at the airport and were spied on constantly during our visit. Later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and I remember the US in particular giving lots of weapons to those jolly chaps in the hills there. My memory was that there was real fear in the early 1980s that Solidarity would go the same way as the Czech Spring in 1968 and there were persistent rumours of Russian intervention.
But, hey, no doubt this was all a misunderstanding really.
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
Can I reverse your challenge and ask you to name a respected figure who did argue between 1972 and 1988 that the Cold War was a thing of the past?
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
Not least our new PM and her coming lessons in economics.
Basic arithmetic
And her dad a maths professor...
(Though not all of them are great at basic arithmetic.)
Though the story of Truss asking random mental arithmetic questions in interviews and meetings is more relevant here.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her.
No flies on you, Vern.
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
Is this Blackadder or is this reality?
I don't think they're trying to inconvenience Truss particularly. They're trying to poke Johnson in the eye.
The Queen is hardly going to go out of her way to interrupt her summer break for a new PM most Tory MPs did not vote for and who even most Tory members would have preferred Badenoch to and who has not yet won a general election and on current polls is not likely to. The fact she is over 90 and not in the best of health for too frequent journeys only confirms that.
Plus given Truss was a republican in her youth makes it clear to her from day 1 she is still Her Majesty's chief minister not a President
If these were the reasons that the Queen isn't doing this, that seems like an even more important reason to be rid of the monarchy than the carbon footprint of keeping silly traditions.
The idea that the monarch should be able to inconvenience an elected politician, because of their supposed lack of mandate or their political views, is absurd.
I personally have some sympathy for a 90 yo who doesn't want to leave their house due to health issues; that describes my grandfather pretty well. But he also understood doing that meant giving up a lot of things he liked or wanted to do. Lizzie should abdicate, for herself, and for the country. Preferably there would be no new monarch and we could decide to be a republic, and leave the Windsor family with their favourite estate and nationalise the rest.
No it isn't, the Prime Minister is only the Monarch's Chief Minister after all.
Truss has not won a general election yet and did not even win the votes of most Tory MPs. A reminder that she will for now only serve at the pleasure of the Monarch is entirely apt
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
The article I cited was from 1983. Took me five seconds. It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
Dynamo will no doubt say the author wasn't sufficiently respected. ...find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past...
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
Can I reverse your challenge and ask you to name a respected figure who did argue between 1972 and 1988 that the Cold War was a thing of the past?
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
Not least our new PM and her coming lessons in economics.
Basic arithmetic
And her dad a maths professor...
(Though not all of them are great at basic arithmetic.)
Though the story of Truss asking random mental arithmetic questions in interviews and meetings is more relevant here.
Better than her usual random mental answers though.
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
The USSR was unwound into the Commonwealth of Independent States which, bizarrely, continues to exist on paper. Ukraine was a founder member and, apparently, has not yet formally exited in spite of repeated provocations.
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
And that is what is considered the end of the Cold War by all respectable historians and commentators - descriptions that certainly don't apply to Dynamo and Chelyabinsk
BREAKING: EU foreign ministers have just agreed to fully suspend the union's 2007 visa facilitation agreement with 🇷🇺#Russia, announces 🇪🇺foreign affairs chief @JosepBorrellF in Prague.
He says Russians entering neighboring EU states present a "security risk"
Reading stuff on a couple of friends WhatsApp groups that their schools in England are in deep shit. Expecting big problems with kids coming in cold with no money for lunch. And their own energy bills creating a crisis of how they stay open
And up here? My son's academy is talking about a three-day week. Which just sends kids home where they won't get heated either.
A sneering "I'm not giving out handouts to the workshy" will not cut it.
I'm so glad it isn't my problem. I really do feel I got out at the right moment.
Mrs RP and her colleagues look likely to strike. They accept that there are bigger budget issues for the LA, but their three parts of fuck all salary needs to increase to more than the proposed 3.0002 parts of fuck all.
I don't blame them, but that will make all problems much worse.
I think this year in education is going to be absolute chaos. On all levels, for everyone.
What's the Pratchett joke - "There is a saying: It won't get better if you picket."
I would say that we are getting to a place where I can't see how it gets any better unless people kick off. Unless Truss is the perfect Manchurian candidate, trained from birth to get to the seat of power to only then unleash her lefty republican side, and this leadership campaign is all part of the act - we're beyond buggered. The numbers of people who already use food banks, or choose between heating and eating is unacceptable, that number will surge beyond belief. And after people showed that they were willing to do lockdown to save nan and grandad, they won't be happy for them to die in a cold snap because they couldn't afford to turn the heating on without taking money out against the house.
I've heard some civil servants I know say that relief will have to happen - that Truss will see the reports and the analysis and just not be able to do anything but - and I still don't see it.
Yes. Even Tracy Horrobin in The Archers has just visited a food bank.
That. Is. The End of Times.
A former colleague, Tom Levitt, runs a scheme of interest-free microloans for essential food supplies, now working with Iceland (the supermarket). They are running at 50 THOUSAND applications per week.
Meanwhile, a friend working in the Foreign Office tells me that they are balloting for a strike, after a pay offer of a few per cent.
I have heard from a friend, who is a magistrate, that they have been given briefings by judges and others on their legal position and responsibilities during large-scale riots. I do not think this is normal.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
I read that under the contracts for difference regime it's HMG which is pocketing the large difference between the current wholesale price for GB electricity and the strike price agreed for wind energy. If true we could all benefit from the advantages of wind energy if the green levy on energy bills was changed to a green rebate with that money.
Is it true?
Hopefully. If it is it can be rectified. The alternative is that the difference has been flogged off by the treasury already...
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
I've provided a long list already. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.
OK I am going to post something that is probably ridiculously stupid so I await the responses ridiculing me (it will be along the lines of one of our more notorious posters in its simplicity, which is usually stupidly impossible). Particularly interested in @Richard_Tyndall's views.
Firstly to state, as I have done before, I do not believe in windfall taxes or caps for private industries, but we are in exceptional and extraordinary times.
Ideally we want to keep power supplies for both residents and business around what they were before the big hikes due the large increase in wholesale prices. Not just for hardship purposes, but to control inflation. We are faffing around with all sorts of schemes that will leave holes all over the place (particularly for businesses) and are very complex.
Why not windfall tax the wholesale supplies equivalent to the difference in current commodity price over the more normal price they would have charged before the commodity price increased and pass that onto the retail suppliers so they are basing their retail prices on the previous normal price rather than the higher wholesale price they are paying.
Suspect there are all sorts of flaws in that in terms of complexity and also issue with wholesale providers that aren't UK based.
OK standing by for the flak.
The coming problem over the winter, is primarily caused by a 15-20% shortage of supply. How does your proposal result in 15-20% less usage, if it removes most of the price signals to consumers and businesses?
It doesn't. I did say my suggestion was probably ridiculously stupid.
Although I don't see politicians focused on that either. They are trying to mitigate the problem (badly).
Does that mean something like I suggest but only partially is sensible?
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
When we are using renewables, we aren't using as much Gas. We should then be able to store it for less windy/sunny times. This saves money later down the line, so in a way it is storing Renewable energy equivalent. Gas power stations are never turned off, they would therefore be running at less capacity. I am sure it is not a case of turning them on and off. Same for nuclear.
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
Fred Halliday wrote a book about the late seventies/early eighties, entitled The Second Cold War.
The only interesting things about the PMs having to go to Balmoral to do the job handover are:
1. Whether Truss waits in London for HMQ to invite her to Balmoral after Johnson has seen her to resign, or if she travels up to Scotland on the presumption that HMQ will invite her to be PM, and whether that means we have an unusually long periods without a PM.
2. What photos/media access will be provided of the process to stand in for the usual backdrop of government cars traveling between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and any clues that might provide for treasonous topics of speculation.
I didn't say they were very interesting, but I don't think there's any interest in anything else about it.
@zoltanspox BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
Hungary looking after number 1. Were they to be invaded by Russia I can't see anyone rushing to back them up...
It won't happen, but if they're invaded we're legally obliged to. NATO article 5.
That's I believe a misunderstanding of NATO Article 5.
We are committed to treating any attack on them as an attack on ourselves, but we are not obliged to take any specific action in response.
We could in theory respond with sanctions and nothing more, just as we could have responded to the invasion of the Falklands in that way if we'd chosen to.
That's not likely to happen but NATO doesn't compel action as people imagine it does.
BREAKING: EU foreign ministers have just agreed to fully suspend the union's 2007 visa facilitation agreement with 🇷🇺#Russia, announces 🇪🇺foreign affairs chief @JosepBorrellF in Prague.
He says Russians entering neighboring EU states present a "security risk"
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
The article I cited was from 1983. Took me five seconds. It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
..."a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s" If it's a new or second cold war, does the writer think that the "Cold War" is still going on? Or does he see it as two separate periods of east-west tension with détente in the middle, which we have subseqently elided into one?
The main burden of the Foreign Secretary's speech was naturally and rightly about the consequences, either foreseen or expected or hoped for, or feared perhaps by some, of the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting. The cold war is dead, it is said. We all hope so. It will take me a little time to adjust to that thought after 25 years of listening to the cold war being preached. When we think back through all those long periods—the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period—the cold war was a fact. It is a period through which we lived and the NATO and Warsaw pacts were a response to it. (James Callaghan, 28 June 1973)
Mr. Douglas Hurd, The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office: "It is natural that athletes—our athletes, all athletes—should be anxious to go to Moscow. The Government have always recognised and understood that, but people now clutch at arguments that have no validity in support of that stance. The whole thrust of the policies of the Western Alliance is undergoing a change. It is not a matter of the election campaign of the President of the United States. The analyses have varied from time to time, but there is no responsible Western leader who does not believe that the policies and stance of the Western alliance along the are of crisis vis-à-vis the Soviet Union should now undergo a change.
"A major effort is being made—sometimes in a ragged way, I agree—and several important decisions have not yet been taken. But a major change, a sea change, has taken place, inevitably, it seems to me, as a result of the Soviet invasion—"
Mr. Barry Sheerman, Huddersfield East: "A new cold war."
Mr. Hurd: "- with the aim not of punishing the Russians but of making it less likely that when and if the next opportunity presents itself they can take the same decision again. It is essentially a policy of deterrence. If we allow the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan to continue unchecked, it is likely to be repeated. That is the analysis not of President Carter, running for re-election, but of every responsible Western leader. It is a desperately serious judgment." (21 April 1980)
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
My preferred alternative is to gather up a huge store of cheap renewable energy in the breezy sunny summer, and use it in the cold dark winter.
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
The only interesting things about the PMs having to go to Balmoral to do the job handover are:
1. Whether Truss waits in London for HMQ to invite her to Balmoral after Johnson has seen her to resign, or if she travels up to Scotland on the presumption that HMQ will invite her to be PM, and whether that means we have an unusually long periods without a PM.
2. What photos/media access will be provided of the process to stand in for the usual backdrop of government cars traveling between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and any clues that might provide for treasonous topics of speculation.
I didn't say they were very interesting, but I don't think there's any interest in anything else about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
The article I cited was from 1983. Took me five seconds. It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
..."a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s" If it's a new or second cold war, does the writer think that the "Cold War" is still going on? Or does he see it as two separate periods of east-west tension with détente in the middle, which we have subseqently elided into one?
The main burden of the Foreign Secretary's speech was naturally and rightly about the consequences, either foreseen or expected or hoped for, or feared perhaps by some, of the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting. The cold war is dead, it is said. We all hope so. It will take me a little time to adjust to that thought after 25 years of listening to the cold war being preached. When we think back through all those long periods—the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period—the cold war was a fact. It is a period through which we lived and the NATO and Warsaw pacts were a response to it. (James Callahagn, 28 June 1973)
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
I read that under the contracts for difference regime it's HMG which is pocketing the large difference between the current wholesale price for GB electricity and the strike price agreed for wind energy. If true we could all benefit from the advantages of wind energy if the green levy on energy bills was changed to a green rebate with that money.
Is it true?
Hopefully. If it is it can be rectified. The alternative is that the difference has been flogged off by the treasury already...
We have a vast amount of political reportage in this country and yet something as fundamental to the current crisis as how the green subsidies work is somehow a mystery and not part of the conversation. Why is our political debate so poor and so divorced from factual details?
Off Topic. Demand For Solar Explodes Everywhere In Europe Except The UK "Sean O’Neill, a senior reporter for The Times, wrote that the pair are “displaying staggering ignorance” and “pandering to the whingeing nimbys in their tiny electorate.” In the Daily Telegraph, the paper’s chief city commentator Ben Marlow wrote, “Britain’s culture wars have reached such epically absurd proportions that even the sun is now the enemy.” https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/27/demand-for-solar-explodes-everywhere-in-europe-except-the-uk/
Always good to get an unbiased take from 'cleantechnica.com'.
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her.
No flies on you, Vern.
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
Is this Blackadder or is this reality?
I don't think they're trying to inconvenience Truss particularly. They're trying to poke Johnson in the eye.
The Queen is hardly going to go out of her way to interrupt her summer break for a new PM most Tory MPs did not vote for and who even most Tory members would have preferred Badenoch to and who has not yet won a general election and on current polls is not likely to. The fact she is over 90 and not in the best of health for too frequent journeys only confirms that.
Plus given Truss was a republican in her youth makes it clear to her from day 1 she is still Her Majesty's chief minister not a President
If these were the reasons that the Queen isn't doing this, that seems like an even more important reason to be rid of the monarchy than the carbon footprint of keeping silly traditions.
The idea that the monarch should be able to inconvenience an elected politician, because of their supposed lack of mandate or their political views, is absurd.
I personally have some sympathy for a 90 yo who doesn't want to leave their house due to health issues; that describes my grandfather pretty well. But he also understood doing that meant giving up a lot of things he liked or wanted to do. Lizzie should abdicate, for herself, and for the country. Preferably there would be no new monarch and we could decide to be a republic, and leave the Windsor family with their favourite estate and nationalise the rest.
No it isn't, the Prime Minister is only the Monarch's Chief Minister after all.
Truss has not won a general election yet and did not even win the votes of most Tory MPs. A reminder that she will for now only serve at the pleasure of the Monarch is entirely apt
It's remarkable how little respect you have for Her Majesty.
The Queen takes her duty seriously and has served with distinction for 60 years without engaging in such sly digs as you insinuate.
The only reason HMQ is not moving is due to her mobility issues due to her age which are known about. She is above such petty and vindictive games that you wish to engage in.
OK I am going to post something that is probably ridiculously stupid so I await the responses ridiculing me (it will be along the lines of one of our more notorious posters in its simplicity, which is usually stupidly impossible). Particularly interested in @Richard_Tyndall's views.
Firstly to state, as I have done before, I do not believe in windfall taxes or caps for private industries, but we are in exceptional and extraordinary times.
Ideally we want to keep power supplies for both residents and business around what they were before the big hikes due the large increase in wholesale prices. Not just for hardship purposes, but to control inflation. We are faffing around with all sorts of schemes that will leave holes all over the place (particularly for businesses) and are very complex.
Why not windfall tax the wholesale supplies equivalent to the difference in current commodity price over the more normal price they would have charged before the commodity price increased and pass that onto the retail suppliers so they are basing their retail prices on the previous normal price rather than the higher wholesale price they are paying.
Suspect there are all sorts of flaws in that in terms of complexity and also issue with wholesale providers that aren't UK based.
OK standing by for the flak.
This is similar to my suggestion the other day. I agree that we are in an extraordinary period equivalent to a war footing. Therefore the normal rules on business do not apply - just as they didn't apply on other such occasions.
If that premise is accepted then it seems reasonable to me that the Government can take any economic action it deems necessary to protect consumers, both domestic and business. Like you I think windfall taxes are a poor way to do things. at least when operating under normal circumstances and just being used to prop up Government finances due to their own mishandling. But I think it might be reasonable to set a maximum profit that energy companies are allowed to earn for the duration of the crisis - say 5 or 10%. Anything over that is used to support consumers on the basis of preventing businesses shutting down and financial ruin for individuals.
There is an argument made on here that the only way to properly deal with the crisis is to reduce consumption or increase supply. I agree with this. But the suggestion that this should be done by simply driving people and businesses into bankruptcy and ruin is ludicrous. The damage it will do to the economy and social well being of the country as well as to individuals will be far more damaging than anything that would result from Government intervention. It would be a classic case of 'the operation was a success but the patient died'.
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
My preferred alternative is to gather up a huge store of cheap renewable energy in the breezy sunny summer, and use it in the cold dark winter.
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
It's not that far off. It's both desirable and achievable.
Storage is coming on stream at volume within the next decade. By 2030 we should have more than 24 hours of electricity storage distributed across the country and it'll be growing fast. Once that point is reached we can start trying to surpass generating 100% of our consumption by renewables and be storing the excess, or exporting it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
The article I cited was from 1983. Took me five seconds. It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
..."a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s" If it's a new or second cold war, does the writer think that the "Cold War" is still going on? Or does he see it as two separate periods of east-west tension with détente in the middle, which we have subseqently elided into one?
The main burden of the Foreign Secretary's speech was naturally and rightly about the consequences, either foreseen or expected or hoped for, or feared perhaps by some, of the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting. The cold war is dead, it is said. We all hope so. It will take me a little time to adjust to that thought after 25 years of listening to the cold war being preached. When we think back through all those long periods—the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period—the cold war was a fact. It is a period through which we lived and the NATO and Warsaw pacts were a response to it. (James Callahagn, 28 June 1973)
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
It's interesting to presume the timeline of Cold War events on Wikipedia.
There was certainly a diminution of hostilities, and a number of East-West agreements during the 70s - and at least a couple of years where international conflicts were much less numerous - but the idea that conflict had been suspended completely at any point seems clearly mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_in_the_Cold_War#1970s
Had Dynamo opined that there existed a general consensus (with notable exceptions) during the latter half of the 1970s that the Cold War might have reached a fragile peace, then he wouldn't have been talking nonsense. Indeed I might have agreed.
To say there was any such consensus in either the 60s or the 80s is just risible. Czechoslovakia was invaded in bloody 1968.
The only interesting things about the PMs having to go to Balmoral to do the job handover are:
1. Whether Truss waits in London for HMQ to invite her to Balmoral after Johnson has seen her to resign, or if she travels up to Scotland on the presumption that HMQ will invite her to be PM, and whether that means we have an unusually long periods without a PM.
2. What photos/media access will be provided of the process to stand in for the usual backdrop of government cars traveling between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and any clues that might provide for treasonous topics of speculation.
I didn't say they were very interesting, but I don't think there's any interest in anything else about it.
Yes, I don't see what the issue is.
The Queen normally invites the prime minister and their spouse up to Balmoral for a short stay each summer I believe.
There should be some picturesque views from the TV helicopter (drone) following the prime minister to and from Balmoral - it will be a change from the car drive to and from Downing Street.
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
My preferred alternative is to gather up a huge store of cheap renewable energy in the breezy sunny summer, and use it in the cold dark winter.
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
The point @BartholomewRoberts makes regarding us always using all the wind power that is produced is an interesting one - I am sure it contradicts something somebody else has said @rcs1000? That wind operators switch off when the grid is full, and are still paid for doing so. Can anyone confirm the real situation?
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
No no. Apparently everyone agreed the cold war was over. The Soviets certainly did when they put their missile forces on high alert believing the only way to survive the imminent nuclear war was to initiate it themselves.
It was all love and peace.
When I lived in Germany in the early 70s the NATO forces certainly seemed to be under the illusion that they were operating under imminent threat of a massive attack. And that weird wall built across the Hartz mountains to keep the citizens of East Germany locked in suggested everything was not entirely rosy. In 1979 when I went to the Soviet Union we got presented with the thoughts of Leonid Brezhnev at the airport and were spied on constantly during our visit. Later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and I remember the US in particular giving lots of weapons to those jolly chaps in the hills there. My memory was that there was real fear in the early 1980s that Solidarity would go the same way as the Czech Spring in 1968 and there were persistent rumours of Russian intervention.
But, hey, no doubt this was all a misunderstanding really.
They say Bowie was a trendsetter but not in this case then - you did it first and he copycatted.
But anyway, the CW and Germany and the 80s, there was a v good (imo) tv trilogy, Deutschland 83/86/89. Quietly addictive.
According to that article we have gone from 11% renewables to 40% in a decade and the proportion will increase significantly when Dogger Bank comes online next year. It really is a remarkable achievement for which the government gets almost no credit whatsoever.
Jeez talk about rejoicing over tractor stats.
I am rejoicing. Can you imaging electricity bills if gas constituted 90% of the energy mix?
They'd be the same. The highest element, which is gas sets the price of the bill. Unless gas is completely eliminated from electricity production, or the algorithm changed that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.
I read that under the contracts for difference regime it's HMG which is pocketing the large difference between the current wholesale price for GB electricity and the strike price agreed for wind energy. If true we could all benefit from the advantages of wind energy if the green levy on energy bills was changed to a green rebate with that money.
Is it true?
Hopefully. If it is it can be rectified. The alternative is that the difference has been flogged off by the treasury already...
I can't see how HMG aren't going to have a huge pot of money from this over the winter and logically this should be shared with electricity consumers as a green rebate, and a large discount on the standing charge.
If the Treasury are holding onto this money so the politicians can claim the credit for giving this money back to us, when it should come back automatically as part of the CfD system, then that's an outrage and a big story. Why isn't there a journalist all over this?
This should be a big success story for the UK's prior investment in renewables now paying dividends. Instead journalists are going to let politicians claim credit for coming to our rescue, with our own money, during a crisis.
I think an argument could be made that the cold war basically ended with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and indeed East Germany, on 9th November 1989. After that the unwinding of the Soviet Empire, which had looked increasingly likely after the Solidarity campaign in Poland, became a matter of a relatively brief period of time. But the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is surely as good an end date as any.
No no. Apparently everyone agreed the cold war was over. The Soviets certainly did when they put their missile forces on high alert believing the only way to survive the imminent nuclear war was to initiate it themselves.
It was all love and peace.
When I lived in Germany in the early 70s the NATO forces certainly seemed to be under the illusion that they were operating under imminent threat of a massive attack. And that weird wall built across the Hartz mountains to keep the citizens of East Germany locked in suggested everything was not entirely rosy. In 1979 when I went to the Soviet Union we got presented with the thoughts of Leonid Brezhnev at the airport and were spied on constantly during our visit. Later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and I remember the US in particular giving lots of weapons to those jolly chaps in the hills there. My memory was that there was real fear in the early 1980s that Solidarity would go the same way as the Czech Spring in 1968 and there were persistent rumours of Russian intervention.
But, hey, no doubt this was all a misunderstanding really.
They say Bowie was a trendsetter but not in this case then - you did it first and he copycatted.
But anyway, the CW and Germany and the 80s, there was a v good (imo) tv trilogy, Deutschland 83/86/89. Quietly addictive.
Really liked that show. Bit surprised we had similar tastes in this instance!
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Given that the first paragraph says "Since the middle of 1979, east-west relations have been in a period of cold war, a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s", I wouldn't be quite so quick to hurl insults.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
In the context of Reagan's speech he's more saying "during that specific period of the Cold War".
No, he's clearly talking about the Cold War as if it was something that he viewed as being over when he was speaking in 1983. There's tension with Russia, but it's not the "Cold War".
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
It seems more like Dynamo is correct in that people in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the beginning of détente as ending the "Cold War", and them being in a new phase. Look how Thatcher's 1976 "Britain Awake" speech calls it the "Third World War" and not the "Cold War," for instance. That everybody elides the two phases later on, with the benefit of hindsight doesn't disguise that all the quotes people have found from the actual period Dynamo is talking about (i.e. not 1988 or 1991) support his argument - even those found by people who call him lazy and ignorant without actually taking the time to read what they're posting.
The article I cited was from 1983. Took me five seconds. It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
..."a new or second cold war comparable to the first cold war of the late 1940s and early 1950s" If it's a new or second cold war, does the writer think that the "Cold War" is still going on? Or does he see it as two separate periods of east-west tension with détente in the middle, which we have subseqently elided into one?
The main burden of the Foreign Secretary's speech was naturally and rightly about the consequences, either foreseen or expected or hoped for, or feared perhaps by some, of the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting. The cold war is dead, it is said. We all hope so. It will take me a little time to adjust to that thought after 25 years of listening to the cold war being preached. When we think back through all those long periods—the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period—the cold war was a fact. It is a period through which we lived and the NATO and Warsaw pacts were a response to it. (James Callahagn, 28 June 1973)
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
It's interesting to presume the timeline of Cold War events on Wikipedia.
There was certainly a diminution of hostilities, and a number of East-West agreements during the 70s - and at least a couple of years where international conflicts were much less numerous - but the idea that conflict had been suspended completely at any point seems clearly mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_in_the_Cold_War#1970s
Had Dynamo opined that there existed a general consensus (with notable exceptions) during the latter half of the 1970s that the Cold War might have reached a fragile peace, then he wouldn't have been talking nonsense. Indeed I might have agreed.
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
Of course it also raises the question of what do these people who say the Cold War ended in the early 60s call the thirty years of super power rivalry that followed? Everybody else seems to call it the Cold War. If everyone is wrong, what should we be calling it?
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
Of course it also raises the question of what do these people who say the Cold War ended in the early 60s call the thirty years of super power rivalry that followed? Everybody else seems to call it the Cold War. If everyone is wrong, what should we be calling it?
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
My preferred alternative is to gather up a huge store of cheap renewable energy in the breezy sunny summer, and use it in the cold dark winter.
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
The point @BartholomewRoberts makes regarding us always using all the wind power that is produced is an interesting one - I am sure it contradicts something somebody else has said @rcs1000? That wind operators switch off when the grid is full, and are still paid for doing so. Can anyone confirm the real situation?
We consume all that is generated (generating too much but not using it would damage the Grid) but there are extremely rare times that firms are paid not to generate. Those payments account for £1 per household in an annual bill I believe.
Around 5% of total UK grid capacity (when it's operating at full chat).
And when the wind doesn't blow? f8ck all.
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
Not as much money as buying hydrocarbons like gas costs.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the supply stops. When it stops, we don't get any electricity and we can't store it yet. So that's no power, depending on what the weather is. A bit like it was three hundred year ago,
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
I get the word intermittency, its just not that important since as it stands we always consume or export all of the wind energy produced. Whether it's a windy day, or a calm day.
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
My preferred alternative is to gather up a huge store of cheap renewable energy in the breezy sunny summer, and use it in the cold dark winter.
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
The point @BartholomewRoberts makes regarding us always using all the wind power that is produced is an interesting one - I am sure it contradicts something somebody else has said @rcs1000? That wind operators switch off when the grid is full, and are still paid for doing so. Can anyone confirm the real situation?
There have been a handful of occasions when a strong storm has passed through overnight and we haven't been able to use or export all the wind energy that could be generated.
These occasions have not yet been frequent enough for it to be economic to store the wind energy during those events for use at other times. We're talking about a few GWh a few times a year, whereas Dinorwig gets to shift energy from night to day every day.
As we add more wind capacity these events will become more frequent, and so it will become possible to make money by storing the electricity produced that would otherwise be wasted. It will come but we're not there yet.
The Unions surely would prefer Labour in government . Are they too thick to understand that for Labour they have to be careful to not give no 10 and the right wing press an open goal. Burnham grates on me , he seems to think he’s some Labour messiah . If he wants to go for leader he needs to resign from his job as mayor of Manchester and find a seat .
"There is no constitutional reason why the new PM should not be appointed in Balmoral. Indeed, some might think it pointless for the Queen at her age to travel to London for a purely formal ceremony."
And some don't even question whether it's pointful or not for the person supposedly appointed to run the government to fly 1000 miles to see the monarch in whichever castle happens to be most convenient for her?
If there were a president, it could be done by phone.
Reminds me of the 1951 general election - supposedly called because if it had had to be called a few months later there would have been difficulties because a member of the royal family ("king") would have been on holiday abroad ("visiting his Commonwealth realms").
*what an unfortunate name for a mass killing involving international diplomacy, by the way.
I've read some odd opinions on here over the years, but the idea that the Cold War was over before the 1980s may take the biscuit.
You're just ignorant.
Read some books about it.
Find me ONE respected author, academic, or politician writing in the mid-1980s who thought the "Cold War" was still going on.
When "Détente" was the thing in the early 1970s, do you think everyone thought it was a stage in the Cold War?
These are words, by the way. I'm talking about how words have been used, and how a word use has changed completely, with the previous use being squashed down the memory hole. And I'm totally right about this.
Hahahaha.
What utter garbage. Everyone thought the Cold War was still going on in the 80s. Why do you think programmes like Threads or When The Wind Blows were made? Of course you won't remember Protect and Survive because you were probably in a school somewhere outside Moscow.
Both Reagan and Thatcher referred to the Cold War as being ongoing regularly during the 80s. I would consider them both to be respected.
Historians at the time including John Lewis-Gaddis made regular reference to the Cold War as an ongoing event.
And, moving beyond the 1980s, Robert Service, one of the foremost British historians on the Cold War and Soviet Russia has written extensively about it including a book entitled, unsurprisingly, The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991.
I was at secondary school in the 80s and we definitely thought the Cold War was a real thing. We were all terrified we would be vaporised before we were allowed to lose our virginity. To now discover that there really wasn't such a thing is a bit of a surprise to say the least. Someone should have told those Greenham Common women too!
Here's the original statement we're all taking issue with:
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
Of course it also raises the question of what do these people who say the Cold War ended in the early 60s call the thirty years of super power rivalry that followed? Everybody else seems to call it the Cold War. If everyone is wrong, what should we be calling it?
It's just daft.
Even in the 1970s, was there a single year when at least one East German was not shot for the heinous crime of trying to escape to the West ? Culturally, what were film makers like Poland's Andrzej Wajda doing if the Cold War was over ?
Okay, this is the challenge: find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past. Bonus marks if you can find one who wrote near to the end of that period that the Cold War had continued all the way through that period without a break. (Which you won't be able to, because none did).
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
Fred Halliday wrote a book about the late seventies/early eighties, entitled The Second Cold War.
A cold war, brief respite, then another one. 47 to 91 all told.
Or THE cold war, looks like it might be petering out, takes off again. 47 to 91 all told.
Comments
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/096701068301400203
Which shows you're lazy as well as ignorant.
BREAKING: Hungary signs contract with Gazprom about max. 5.8 million m3 extra natural gas on a daily basis, on top of the contract quantity already in force. Hungary’s energy supply is safe.
https://twitter.com/zoltanspox/status/1564956216475926535
Panic over?
“Today we are coming to realise that an epoch in history is over…For more than 40 years that Iron Curtain remained in place. Few of us expected to see it lifted in our lifetime. Yet with great suddenness, the impossible has happened. Communism is broken, utterly broken… We do not see this new Soviet Union as an enemy but as a country groping its way towards freedom. We no longer have to view the world through a prism of East-West relations. The Cold War is over.”
And the costs of that are not zero. Flexing electricity generators to go from renewable to gas when there is no wind costs money.
I think What's happening here is that Dyanmo is considering the begining of Détente as the "end" of the Cold War period.
But that's a game about syntax rather than the semantic of what was actually happening.
It's just HMQ's little joke about who's sub and who's dom.
The Queen would be ashamed of that idea if people thought it. If she were 40 years younger she'd 100% have made the journey, but she's 95 years old and not well. Both Boris and Liz (Truss not Windsor) know that and will make the journey so she doesn't have to. There's no ulterior motive.
The trouble is that if the Russians cut off gas supplies completely, those storage tanks last 10 weeks.
Wind more than pays for itself now, and is subsidy free. Your objection to it, so wanting our bills to go up as we consume even more gas, is just odd.
The export part of my panels is likely to earn me ~ £130 this year (1/2 * 4328 KwH * £0.0599) on the old FIT scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gueffroy
As it is put by wiki:
" "epochal war', a historical construction that embraces several conflicts thought to be separate wars by the participants, and the notion of the "Long War", a conflict which embraces the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam wars and the Cold War. "
So 1991 for Bobbitt. And he is a pretty good source. But I certainly take @Dynamo's point of it being open to interpretation.
(Though not all of them are great at basic arithmetic.)
Meanwhile, a friend working in the Foreign Office tells me that they are balloting for a strike, after a pay offer of a few per cent.
What utter garbage. Everyone thought the Cold War was still going on in the 80s. Why do you think programmes like Threads or When The Wind Blows were made? Of course you won't remember Protect and Survive because you were probably in a school somewhere outside Moscow.
Both Reagan and Thatcher referred to the Cold War as being ongoing regularly during the 80s. I would consider them both to be respected.
Historians at the time including John Lewis-Gaddis made regular reference to the Cold War as an ongoing event.
And, moving beyond the 1980s, Robert Service, one of the foremost British historians on the Cold War and Soviet Russia has written extensively about it including a book entitled, unsurprisingly, The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991.
When the wind doesn't blow we have to use gas. The cost of the gas is the market price for gas, plus some extra to flex the generators onto gas.
The extra cost being the result of the intermittency of renewables.
Don't you get the word intermittency? don't you realise the implications of it?
What was different was something of a tendency to downplay it in public, unlike in the 1960s when the instinct was to use rhetoric for political advantage. This was particularly true in the USSR.
I can therefore understand there may have been those who didn’t realise just how high the tension was, but it’s a total nonsense to say it was over and literally nobody was talking about it.
https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/emergency-sos-iphone-how-set-up-contact-android-huawei-apple-phones-910499#:~:text=Press and hold the side button and one,countdown will start and an alert will sound.
- with vertigo (and no doubt other conditions) you can't make out the numbers on the phone, so this is potentially crucial.
File under "Now they tell me!" but may be useful to some of you at some point.
Note: the point at issue is one of historiography; this is not a discussion about the course of US-Soviet relations, which everyone knows were more friendly in 1990 than in 1980.
World nearly blew up repeatedly through that period.
Also have it set up to do an emergency video (useful for dangerous drivers).
Edit: Also really useful for UFO sightings!
It was all love and peace.
Is it true?
Hungary has had a gas deal with Russia throughout - and almost managed to sabotage the EU sanctions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_States
But, hey, no doubt this was all a misunderstanding really.
Truss has not won a general election yet and did not even win the votes of most Tory MPs. A reminder that she will for now only serve at the pleasure of the Monarch is entirely apt
Took me five seconds.
It says: "Since 1979 east-west relations have been in a period of cold war..."
Dynamo will no doubt say the author wasn't sufficiently respected.
...find a respected sovietologist or international relations head or statesman (not some nutter who thought e.g. that the Sino-Soviet split was fake) who wrote at some time between 1972 (ABM Treaty) and 1988 (Gorbachev's Law on Cooperatives) that the Cold War between "the West" and the USSR was still going on, rather than being something that lay in the past...
If we ever reach a point where it's a windy day and we can neither consume nor export the wind electricity generated then we will have a problem, but that has never happened and isn't likely to happen any time soon. Storage is coming in volume, but it's not needed just yet.
If it wasn't for wind power we'd be burning more gas all of the time. With wind we burn less gas most of the time.
What's your preferred alternative?
BREAKING: EU foreign ministers have just agreed to fully suspend the union's 2007 visa facilitation agreement with 🇷🇺#Russia, announces 🇪🇺foreign affairs chief @JosepBorrellF in Prague.
He says Russians entering neighboring EU states present a "security risk"
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1564967965837205506
Although I don't see politicians focused on that either. They are trying to mitigate the problem (badly).
Does that mean something like I suggest but only partially is sensible?
1. Whether Truss waits in London for HMQ to invite her to Balmoral after Johnson has seen her to resign, or if she travels up to Scotland on the presumption that HMQ will invite her to be PM, and whether that means we have an unusually long periods without a PM.
2. What photos/media access will be provided of the process to stand in for the usual backdrop of government cars traveling between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and any clues that might provide for treasonous topics of speculation.
I didn't say they were very interesting, but I don't think there's any interest in anything else about it.
We are committed to treating any attack on them as an attack on ourselves, but we are not obliged to take any specific action in response.
We could in theory respond with sanctions and nothing more, just as we could have responded to the invasion of the Falklands in that way if we'd chosen to.
That's not likely to happen but NATO doesn't compel action as people imagine it does.
If only that was the entire sentence!
The main burden of the Foreign Secretary's speech was naturally and rightly about the consequences, either foreseen or expected or hoped for, or feared perhaps by some, of the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting. The cold war is dead, it is said. We all hope so. It will take me a little time to adjust to that thought after 25 years of listening to the cold war being preached. When we think back through all those long periods—the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period—the cold war was a fact. It is a period through which we lived and the NATO and Warsaw pacts were a response to it. (James Callaghan, 28 June 1973)
Mr. Douglas Hurd, The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office: "It is natural that athletes—our athletes, all athletes—should be anxious to go to Moscow. The Government have always recognised and understood that, but people now clutch at arguments that have no validity in support of that stance. The whole thrust of the policies of the Western Alliance is undergoing a change. It is not a matter of the election campaign of the President of the United States. The analyses have varied from time to time, but there is no responsible Western leader who does not believe that the policies and stance of the Western alliance along the are of crisis vis-à-vis the Soviet Union should now undergo a change.
"A major effort is being made—sometimes in a ragged way, I agree—and several important decisions have not yet been taken. But a major change, a sea change, has taken place, inevitably, it seems to me, as a result of the Soviet invasion—"
Mr. Barry Sheerman, Huddersfield East: "A new cold war."
Mr. Hurd: "- with the aim not of punishing the Russians but of making it less likely that when and if the next opportunity presents itself they can take the same decision again. It is essentially a policy of deterrence. If we allow the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan to continue unchecked, it is likely to be repeated. That is the analysis not of President Carter, running for re-election, but of every responsible Western leader. It is a desperately serious judgment." (21 April 1980)
Its a fair way off sadly, but we need to be honest with people about that. There is no point deluding ourselves. Gas is going to be with us for a while, and a hard target for net zero is neither desirable nor achievable. We need to scrap it.
Clancy knew his onions. The first person killed off in the book was Putin - the Red October's political officer
In the 1980s, absolutely nobody said the cold war was still going on. Students of international relations mostly said it had ended long before, in the 1960s. A small minority said it had continued at a lower level until the early 1970s.
Now, whether it was 'the Cold War' or 'a cold war' 'the New Cold War' is I would suggest, irrelevant. The issue is the poster claimed it wasn't happening at all and that everyone thought it had ended. Which is clearly nonsensical as has been repeatedly demonstrated.
There were some people in the 70s who thought the Cold War had ended, and I think that's what's causing the confusion here. Because they may have been sincere, but they were also wrong. It kept going, just in a slightly different form, and flared up again after 1979.
The Queen takes her duty seriously and has served with distinction for 60 years without engaging in such sly digs as you insinuate.
The only reason HMQ is not moving is due to her mobility issues due to her age which are known about. She is above such petty and vindictive games that you wish to engage in.
If that premise is accepted then it seems reasonable to me that the Government can take any economic action it deems necessary to protect consumers, both domestic and business. Like you I think windfall taxes are a poor way to do things. at least when operating under normal circumstances and just being used to prop up Government finances due to their own mishandling. But I think it might be reasonable to set a maximum profit that energy companies are allowed to earn for the duration of the crisis - say 5 or 10%. Anything over that is used to support consumers on the basis of preventing businesses shutting down and financial ruin for individuals.
There is an argument made on here that the only way to properly deal with the crisis is to reduce consumption or increase supply. I agree with this. But the suggestion that this should be done by simply driving people and businesses into bankruptcy and ruin is ludicrous. The damage it will do to the economy and social well being of the country as well as to individuals will be far more damaging than anything that would result from Government intervention. It would be a classic case of 'the operation was a success but the patient died'.
https://twitter.com/BBCMoreOrLess/status/1564967972585742337
Peter Firth even has a passing resemblance to Vlad
Storage is coming on stream at volume within the next decade. By 2030 we should have more than 24 hours of electricity storage distributed across the country and it'll be growing fast. Once that point is reached we can start trying to surpass generating 100% of our consumption by renewables and be storing the excess, or exporting it.
"The last missiles left the base in 1991 as a result of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenham_Common_Women's_Peace_Camp
This was the formal end of the Cold War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty
There was certainly a diminution of hostilities, and a number of East-West agreements during the 70s - and at least a couple of years where international conflicts were much less numerous - but the idea that conflict had been suspended completely at any point seems clearly mistaken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_in_the_Cold_War#1970s
Had Dynamo opined that there existed a general consensus (with notable exceptions) during the latter half of the 1970s that the Cold War might have reached a fragile peace, then he wouldn't have been talking nonsense. Indeed I might have agreed.
To say there was any such consensus in either the 60s or the 80s is just risible.
Czechoslovakia was invaded in bloody 1968.
There should be some picturesque views from the TV helicopter (drone) following the prime minister to and from Balmoral - it will be a change from the car drive to and from Downing Street.
But anyway, the CW and Germany and the 80s, there was a v good (imo) tv trilogy, Deutschland 83/86/89. Quietly addictive.
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dashboards/cfd/levy-dashboards
I can't see how HMG aren't going to have a huge pot of money from this over the winter and logically this should be shared with electricity consumers as a green rebate, and a large discount on the standing charge.
If the Treasury are holding onto this money so the politicians can claim the credit for giving this money back to us, when it should come back automatically as part of the CfD system, then that's an outrage and a big story. Why isn't there a journalist all over this?
This should be a big success story for the UK's prior investment in renewables now paying dividends. Instead journalists are going to let politicians claim credit for coming to our rescue, with our own money, during a crisis.
https://twitter.com/toryboypierce/status/1564856846631960577?s=20&t=ZMDMLDUsasDToZjUH_rb5w
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1564929633207853056?s=20&t=ZMDMLDUsasDToZjUH_rb5w
It's not a significant problem.
These occasions have not yet been frequent enough for it to be economic to store the wind energy during those events for use at other times. We're talking about a few GWh a few times a year, whereas Dinorwig gets to shift energy from night to day every day.
As we add more wind capacity these events will become more frequent, and so it will become possible to make money by storing the electricity produced that would otherwise be wasted. It will come but we're not there yet.
Even in the 1970s, was there a single year when at least one East German was not shot for the heinous crime of trying to escape to the West ?
Culturally, what were film makers like Poland's Andrzej Wajda doing if the Cold War was over ?
Or THE cold war, looks like it might be petering out, takes off again. 47 to 91 all told.
Is there a substantial difference here?