Martin Meenagh blog

The British Coal Industry is Coming Back Britain is an island more or less built on coal. Because of a combination of cheap oil, our own, now well past-peak domestic oil, green resistance to nuclear power and conservative party hatred for miners, we now have almost no coal mines. What was the last coal mine in Wales, a spectacularly successful co-operative, closed recently . Cumbria's last deep mine has been a museum for years . However, it will take at least a decade to bring new nuclear power on stream. Oil and gas, which are falling from recent highs, are still expensive historically, and as time goes on we can expect them to trend upwards because obtaining oil and gas at cheap prices, without a global depression, is something of a pipe dream. I do note that, adjusted for inflation, oil is below 1980 prices, but I stand by my point. Renewables will just not provide enough energy. So we need coal, and the technology exists to produce clean coal , whatever the likes of George Monb...

Turning Into The Skid Is it possible to chart a way through the interesting but wholly predictable debate over policy prescriptions to deal with our present crisis? I noted some similarities of the recent panic on the stock markets to the panic of 1819 a few days ago. Panics, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, are different in their upbringing and circumstances but identical in their progress. That of 1819 was caused basically by speculation in Indian land, but also by inflated credit and the rise of domestic trade. When cut short, it turned into a crisis that had profound political effects, not least the Missouri Compromise. (The link attached, by the way, is to a downloadable book). The comparison did not just occur to me alone. Much as I would like to pretend to some Marvel Comics 'Watcher Savant' status, most of my observations run on tramlines. Other trains have been on that track, particularly those of the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute . Their thoughts are as...

  The short answer to the question is that Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon allowed a state to leave. Such an answer raises the question of why the United Kingdom has, so far, been the only state to invoke and execute the right to leave under the article. The reasons why some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the United Kingdom led it out of the EU on June 23, 2016, are complicated and do not fit into an easy chronological or legal order. From the very broadest point of view, membership of the Union, and the Community before it, was a limitation on the freedom of the House of Commons to legislate and represented a second sovereignty in the UK. It is very tempting to take a ‘grand sweep of history’ approach and to note that the Westminster regime has never dealt well with alternative sovereignties. The claims of the Catholic church were expunged in 1533, for instance, as were those of Wales to separate treatment; the Irish parliament was subordinated to Poyning’s law, ...