Energy supply policy

Energy supply policy

I came across this cartoon, on linkedin, which reminded me of a comment made at a recent ORG meeting that the UK cannot be an AI powerhouse because our electricity is too expensive.

It’s also possible that this is one reason why the bitcoin miners are now all located in China.

It set me thinking, and I made this chart.

International Energy Prices 2026: Source google

The UK is expensive, and it would seem that this is true of the EU too.

The linkedin article argues that China’s energy investment has been about energy sovereignty. Perhaps its time the EU and UK governments thought about these issues. …

My micro blogs

I have some feeds which one might consider to be micro blogs, see

  • My diigo feed (www or via feedzy on ths blog)
  • My Blue Sky feed (www) or
  • At mastodon (www)

I also post on Instagram but its hardly a microblog.

 …

Tariffs and other trade barriers

image of the alaskan highway

Last night I watched a video about Canada raising a large toll on lorries travelling from the Lower 48 to Alaska, and it documents and forecast the impact on the fragile Alaskan economy. It reminded me of the trade barriers that the UK has put in place due to Brexit. This is potentially disastrous for Alaska, and is clearly so for the UK where today the FT reports that according to the ONS, the UK economy shrank for the second quarter in a row.

The trade to GDP rate in the UK is 63%, which seems enormous to me, but it seems to be merely above average and yet it illustrates the UK’s dependency on the rest of the world to feed itself and keep itself warm and sheltered. The US rate is 25% which is low by international comparison and may be one of the reasons that Trump can afford to be as foolish as he is with his tariff policies, noting that it’s the US consumers who ultimately pay his tariffs. Source: World Bank.

The EU flag, before castor and pollux,

But for the UK, this is another piece of evidence that the UK needs to rejoin the EU’s single market, but even if this common sense actually strikes this Labour government, I doubt that the Eire/Holland/France traffic will return to the UK. …

Second thoughts on the Euro-summit

Kier Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen in a conference room

It is my view that Starmer wants a Swiss style deal with the European Union. The reason I consider the summit to be a draw, albeit a score draw, is that neither of the end goals of rejoining nor staying out with a Swiss style agreement are closed off. But also, neither is the end result of the EU saying we’re too busy to spend this time “dot & comma-ing” with you.

There is no inexorability in rejoining from that agreement as I believe is implied by John Palmer’s Chartist piece. Perhaps, John  believes that Trump will drive even Starmer away from NATO but I believe they will try very hard not to make the choice. In fact, I believe the proposal for a defence/security agreement is deliberately made to allow trade-offs against the single market acquis and to try to exclude security which includes border control co-operation from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Court of Justice’s jurisdiction.  

I also believe much of Labour’s defence positioning is designed for internal party combat and learnt from simplistic board games.

However, ihis article, entitled “EU officially retires its ‘no cherry-picking’ Brexit line” may show that the new Commission (and maybe even the Council), are happier with a deal with opt-outs; even then, I am not sure I’d want to start from the withdrawal agreement.

I believe that those of us who believe that it’s a better world with a democratic EU still need to seek to influence the Labour Party and Government.

Image Credit: from flickr, Keir Starmer’s feed, CC 2024 BY-NC-ND …

The GMB & LME

The GMB & LME

At the GMB Congress, my Region, London, organised a fringe meeting on the “The rise of the far right and worker’s rights“. This was jointly organised with the Labour Movement for Europe who had planned to put their President, Stella Creasy, up to speak. I had originally planned to use the meeting and Congress as a last attempt to get better policy on trade and relations with the EU but the announcement of the election obviously changed this, and meant that Stella could not make it. My speech to the fringe, spoke of workers rights, sovereignty and its constraints and looked at the European Parliament results which has occurred on the previous weekend. You will find below my speech notes, although I did not use them all as I was unable to time the speech in practice and had too cut the speech short. …

Labour and pandering to racism

Labour and pandering to racism

I was published, last week, at Another Europe’s Brexit Watch site with the subtitle, “Labour is lurching to the right on immigration”. What follows below/overleaf mirrors that article, with the deadlines for the National Policy Forum interventions removed, because by the time I made this mirror, the deadlines had passed. The article looks at the Labour front bench’s reticence to speak up for migrants and the refusal to rejoin the EU’s single market, a topic on which Starmer has long term form;it also looks at the tendency to prioritise public finance and competence, over compassion and decency, studies the electoral impact of the position, and suggests what a decent immigration policy would look like. It was originally designed to encourage Labour members to canvass their NPF representatives. See below/over leaf for more, or go to the Another Europe version of the article. … …

The need for truth

The need for truth

I got a lot of posts about Fox vs Dominion in my feeds last night; I am not sure how well this is being covered in the UK. Dominion make voting machines and are suing Fox for $1.6bn because Fox made and repeated damaging allegations about Dominion’s machines performance during the US Presidential elections. Many allege that this was a deliberate attempt to boost Trump’s line that the election had been stolen!

It is clear from leaks, that Fox knew what they were saying lacked evidence at best and that their lawyers had withheld important evidence from the court’s discovery process. The court was due to start today, but the Judge has postponed it by a day; there are rumours that Fox may be seeking a settlement.

In this article, from NPR, they have two spokespeople arguing that the 1st amendment rights of Fox should trump Dominion’s right to a reputation. Do billionaire funded press organisations have the right to lie under freedom of speech rights?

This is important in Europe and the UK too. From my experience in Tallinn, many in Eastern Europe are rightly suspicious of Government regulation of the press, but in the Anglosphere, and possibly in Germany, we have a biased, ultra-rich owned press and I note that journalists are privileged under law. In the UK, the press dominate politics, and are were complicit in the legally flawed Brexit referendum. Somewhere we need to be able to hold the press, and social media platforms accountable to a duty to tell the truth, because,

A lie ain’t a side of a story. It’s just a lie.

Terry Hanning (The Wire)

We should also note that balance can also be the enemy of truth, giving liars equal time with the truth is still publishing the lie. …