Welcome to Britain Watch

All the signs are that the governance of Britain is spiralling out of control: record trade and budget deficits; a swollen bureaucracy; an inadequate but costly education system; a government incapable of providing for our future energy needs; record emigration of native Britons, unprecedented levels of immigration; a mind-set putting the non-citizen ahead of the British citizen.

Britain Watch has been set up to highlight key examples of these trends and to promote practical reforms to reverse the incompetence and loss of national self belief they engender. All readers are invited to participate.

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Short News

Don't miss stephenbush.net
Stephen Bush’s personal website, stephenbush.net is now on-line. It contains four main sections, Science and Engineering, Industry and Economics, Politics and Education, People and Places. These contain published letters and papers and show the scope and development of his career and philosophy. Some of the introductory prefaces to subsections are still to be written or completed, but the archive is assembled and accessible. In the People and Places section Stephen is looking forward to receiving news and articles from past colleagues and friends.

Cecil Rhodes

Letter to the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, 20th June 2020

Your admonishment of the Oxford dons agitating against our country’s imperial past and Cecil Rhodes in particular is well deserved. One should ask what specifically is it that  they and the street mobs they are aligned with object to in Rhodes’s life. He was Prime Minister of Cape Colony in the 1890’s and brought in the common electoral roll  well before the Boer War started  in 1899,  declaring that the only criteria for admission to the roll  was income and education. Not many black Africans qualified  at the time it is true, but some did. It was the principle which mattered and the common roll provision was carried into the South Africa Constitution Act of 1909  long after Rhodes had died in 1902 as the Boer War ended. [more »]

Don't miss speech to 2018 UKIP Conference
This speech by Prof Bush was delivered on the 22nd September at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. It is an extract from a forthcoming paper “New Forms of Industrial Organisation: the Leopard Concept”.

Don't Miss Solving the EU-UK Customs Problem
This was a letter from Prof Bush published in the Daily Telegraph on 17th May 2018 called “Solving the EU-UK Customs Problem: Pay Where You Enter”.

EU Effects on the Tory Party
In his respected Times column (Thursday 19th July), Iain Martin suggested that Tory divisions over a so-called hard Brexit – which go back to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 – will lead to the break up of the Tory party. In fact a proper Brexit, i.e. a free trade agreement like EU-Canada and EU-Korea having the present EU-UK zero tariffs and standards, maintained for say 5-8 years, after which there could be mutually agreed modifications in the light of experience – is the path of sanity and would take the EU issue right out of British politics for ever. Presumably not even the Scot Nats would support EU efforts to exclude British-registered aircraft landing at EU airports. [more »]

Top

Solar farm capacity

| December 18th, 2024

Letter to the Daily Telegraph from Prof Stephen Bush which was not published.

Your report (22nd November) about the plans for a giant solar farm in Lincolnshire quotes the claimed “capacity” as being

“800 Megawatts – similar to that of one of the UK’s current nuclear power stations” .

This is a totally misleading comparison.

For a start the geographically nearest operating nuclear station, Sizewell B in Suffolk, has a rated capacity of 1188 MW not at all similar to 800 MW.

In any case, the only useful comparison is the annual generation of electricity. This is calculated from the capacity multiplied by the number of hours in the year (8760) multiplied by the so-called “load factor” representing the fraction of the year in which the plant is effectively working at full capacity. In the latest data release on 30th July by the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero the load factor for the nuclear reactors is given as 0.78 (i.e. 78 percent); for solar panels it is given as 0.10 (i.e. 10 percent).

This means that while Sizewell steadily produces around 8100 gigawatt hours per year, the planned solar farm at Blankney would produce only 700 gigawatt hours per year, mostly in the summer and only in daylight.