UK Politics VI - Will Britain Steir to Karmer Waters?

Full recount in Runcorn and Helsby

There’s going to be a full recount in the Runcorn and Helsby byelection as Reform UK were ahead by just four votes.

The mood in the count centre is one of utter disbelief. If the recount returns the same result, Reform UK will have overturned one of Labour’s safest seats by just four votes.
 
I wonder if the recent problems in Iberia have woken up the net-zero zealots to the dangers of blackouts?
If it happened here, we would be in even more doodoos than Spain and Portugal were.

We all need to make sure we have sufficient food, water, cash etc. to get by for several days in our NetZero future. If you can have a wood burning stove installed (as we did last year) then you really should do so.

Quite a scary, dark future awaits. If the green zealots continue the way they are going now that is.

Here is a very informative piece on the subject of the national Grid. And it shows how we will be reliant on nuclear and gas for a long time to come.

I’m a power engineer. The Iberian grid collapse makes me very afraid for Britain
We will soon lose most of our remaining grid inertia, increasing the risk of outages


From: Dr Capell Aris PhD spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology

Last Monday, the Iberian grid suffered a disturbance in the south-west at 12:33. In 3.5 seconds this worsened and the interconnection to France disconnected. All renewable generation then went off-line, followed by disconnection of all rotating generation plant. The Iberian blackout was complete within a few seconds.

At the time the grid was producing 28.4 GW of power, of which 79 per cent was solar and wind. This was a problematic situation as solar and wind plants have another, not widely known, downside – one quite apart from their intermittency and expense.

This is the fact that they do not supply any inertia to the grid. Thermal powerplants – coal, gas, nuclear, for example – drive large spinning generators which are directly, synchronously connected to the grid. If there are changes which cause a difference between demand and supply, the generators will start to spin faster or slower: but their inertia resists this process, meaning that the frequency of the alternating current in the grid changes only slowly. There is time for the grid managers to act, matching supply to demand and keeping the grid frequency within limits.
This is vital because all grids must supply power at a steady frequency so that electrical appliances work properly and safely. Deviations from the standard grid frequency can cause damage to equipment and other problems: in practice what happens quite rapidly when frequency changes significantly is that grid machinery trips out to prevent these issues and grids go down.

When a grid has very little inertia in it – as with the Iberian one on Monday – a problem which a high-inertia grid would easily resist can cause a blackout within seconds. Lack of inertia was almost certainly the primary cause of the Iberian blackout, as Matt Oliver has opined in these pages. A grid with more inertia would not have collapsed as quickly, and its operators would have had time to keep it up and running.

Restoration of supplies was completed by early Tuesday morning, based on reconnection to France, which facilitated progressive area reconnections across Spain and Portugal.

Iberia is part of the Continental Europe Synchronous Area which stretches to 32 countries. It is interconnected as a phase-locked, 50 Hz grid with a generation capacity of 700 GW. To improve the stability of this grid, the EU aim is that all partners will extract 10 per cent of their power consumption from synchronous interconnectors – ones which transmit grid inertia – helping to make the whole system more resilient. France is at 10 per cent, but peninsula grids and those at the geographical fringe are the least interconnected. Spain has just 2 per cent from synchronous interconnectors.
But there are places where things are worse. The UK and Ireland are island grids. They do have undersea power interconnectors to Europe but these are non-synchronous DC links and transmit no grid inertia. There’s little prospect that this will change.

Both the Irish and UK grid system operators had developed an array of grid protection services that can control grid frequency, loss of load or generation protection, grid phase angle and recovering from grid outages. Neither country has, to date, ever experienced a total system failure, even during WWII.

In 1974 construction started on Dinorwig Power Station. It is a pumped storage generation plant designed specifically for the provision of all the UK’s grid protection services. Dinorwig can make huge changes to its output in a matter of seconds, compensating for sudden events. Operation began in 1984. In 1990 all the UK’s generating stations could provide inertia.

Nowadays, 55 per cent of our generation mix (wind, solar, DC imports) cannot supply inertia to the grid. Are we approaching a system that compares with Spain and Portugal on Monday?
It certainly looks that way. In 2012 the National Grid produced a solar briefing note for the government which is still available online. In that note they imagine a system that has 22 GW of solar power attached to the grid. They demonstrate their concerns based on a sunny summer day when demand is low. The sun rises at 5 o’clock when little or no synchronous plant other than nuclear generation will be on line and at midday, solar is 60 per cent of all generation. The Grid’s engineers then considered that situation “difficult to manage” and concluded that wind+solar power must never exceed 60 per cent of generation.

We now have 17.7 GW of grid-connected solar farms to which we must add all rooftop solar installations. At midday on Tuesday according to Gridwatch the UK’s asynchronous, no-inertia generation was at 66 per cent of total generation.

In 2014 National Grid produced a System Operability Framework document. Their objective was to outline how future scenarios of generation mixes would impact upon protection services for the grid. As more and more renewable generators are brought on-line, the difficulties of managing the grid have become more and more onerous. For example, one service titled “primary response” in 1990 called for selected generation plants to increase generation within 10 seconds after a fault is detected: by 1,200 MW in winter and 1,500 MW in summer. In 2024 these increases are required in 1.2 seconds!

After nearly 50 years of operation, Dinorwig Power Station is currently shut down for major repairs and there has been no information on when it will re-open. Over the next five years all of our nuclear stations, bar Sizewell, will be closed. Over the same period our combined cycle gas generator fleet will halve from 30 GW to 15 GW. (It takes 5 years to build a new CCGT even using an existing site. The new ones are 66 per cent efficient and cost less than £1 billion to build a 1 GW plant – one third the cost of an offshore windmill.)
We will lose huge amounts of grid inertia. Low-inertia operation will become routine. It is hard to imagine that we won’t start to suffer complete national blackouts like the Iberian one.

One last piece of doom: the recovery of Spain’s grid in just one day is impressive. This speed is certainly due to the assistance of a large, stable grid reconnecting into the Iberian system thus allowing recovery in a series of stable steps as each grid area is recovered. We will not have that facility in the UK with our asynchronous interconnectors.

 
The green zealots? Net Zero nuts? What is it with all this ridiculous lingo? Has the Telegraph got bored of not reporting on how badly Brexit went?
 
Wah, opportunists try to take advantage of everything to push their agendas. You can see them coming from a mile away. There have been many blackouts involving nuclear and fossil fuels when renewables weren't even relevant, and these clowns didn't say anything. Total safety doesn't exist. To have zero risk, we'd have to pay an infinitely expensive electricity bill. If this were to happen again in Spain, I'd throw my hands up in horror, but not yet.

Renewables are undoubtedly the best option at least till we have fussion or something. But things have to be done right.
 
The green zealots? Net Zero nuts? What is it with all this ridiculous lingo? Has the Telegraph got bored of not reporting on how badly Brexit went?
Consider it a minor blessing that not even the torygraph was demented enough to wonder if the blackout was caused by foreign hackers/saboteurs ^^
 
I’m a power engineer. The Iberian grid collapse makes me very afraid for Britain
We will soon lose most of our remaining grid inertia, increasing the risk of outages
I am sure their is a very good reason, but in this day and age with the peformance of computers and solid state electronics I do not understand why a rectifier cannot provide some sort of artifical inertia.
 
I am struggling to find the word ‘nut’ is my post at all.

And it was me that used the zealot word and not the Telegraph.

My mistake. It was your use of "Nut Zero" that I was thinking of. It's still the same old scare tactic of using dismissive nicknames in an attempt to delegitimise entire political movements.
 
I am sure their is a very good reason, but in this day and age with the peformance of computers and solid state electronics I do not understand why a rectifier cannot provide some sort of artifical inertia.
According to an expert i was listening the other day wind generators have this kind of things for law, the same is not compulsory for solar plants, nobody knows why.
 
I am sure there is a very good reason, but in this day and age with the peformance of computers and solid state electronics I do not understand why a rectifier cannot provide some sort of artifical inertia.
It is possible, but as with most things, there is a cost to it.

As well as the wholesale markets that most people are familiar with, there are also ‘frequency response’ markets that are designed to keep the grid frequency stable.

If frequency dips (or rises) too much, assets will be called to give or take power from the grid. The grid operators procure a certain amount of frequency response that they think is necessary. You have to pay people twice - once to be available and then again if / when used. So this is expensive, and typically grid operators don’t need much of this (in the grand scheme of things).

Batteries are a very good asset at providing frequency response, due to their fast reaction times (you need to react within seconds, tops).
 
Britain heading down the fascist route because yet again a center right party incumbent in the form of labour offers nothing but the status quo

Apparently only 30% of UK is center left/progressive.

Centrists are biggest faction.

70% probably like status quo or the right.
 
Like your use of the words Torygrah and Daily Fail?:mischief:

Fascists (and fascist-enablers) are deserving of mockery, though if you think the name Torygraph is demeaning, rather than a punny description of its reader base, maybe you should consider why you apparently don't like being described as a Tory.
 
Apparently only 30% of UK is center left/progressive.

Centrists are biggest faction.

70% probably like status quo or the right.

And the proportions were probably similar in Nazi Germany!

Maybe a disconnect between the citizens and governing parties is a problem anywhere, but one that especially undermines democracies. If you meant your post as countering evidence, then maybe think about if it really achieves that.
 

Morgan McSweeney’s ‘plot without precedent in Labour history’​

A new book chronicles how Labour strategist Morgan McSweeney used ‘any means necessary’ to destroy Corbyn as leader and install Starmer.

In Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer, like its predecessor Left Out, which chronicled Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have grasped the core reality of Labour’s history over the past decade.

For all their portrayal as ruthless Stalinists, the left were hopelessly ill equipped for the life and death struggle Corbyn’s unexpected 2015 victory plunged them into.

They lacked organisation, coherence and, above all, the cold bloodedness that the battle ahead required.

It is the right who have behaved like a ruthless Trotskyist sect.

The first sentence of the first chapter states Jeremy Corbyn was destroyed by a “conspiracy.” Thereafter the book is an exposé of what the authors (who work for the Times and Sunday Times) call “the great deception …. a plot without precedent in Labour history.”

The astonishing story Get In tells would probably lead to a left wing member of the party being suspended for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories if they articulated the bare outlines in a speech.

It revolves almost entirely around one man, Morgan McSweeney, the founder of Labour Together, the organisation that propelled Starmer to power, and now his Chief of Staff.

Labour Together

The bald facts, in Pogrund and Maguire’s telling, are these.

Established in 2015, Labour Together claimed it existed to bring different parts of the party together.

In fact it was a ruthless, factional grouping which aimed, the authors say, “to use any means necessary to delegitimise and destroy” Jeremy Corbyn, “to ensure he lost badly” and restore the right to power.

“The imperative: don’t get caught.”

The key weapon they alighted on was allegations of antisemitism.

Labour Together aimed, McSweeney wrote in an early confidential strategy paper, to cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative and challenge fake news and political extremism.”

One of these was the campaign group Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), which later morphed into the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.

One of its first targets was The Canary, a pro-Corbyn website that was achieving 8.5 million hits a month.

Working closely with the anti-Corbyn Jewish Labour Movement, the book says McSweeney secretly recruited Countdown co-presenter Rachel Riley to front a campaign targeting The Canary’s advertisers with claims the outlet was antisemitic.

The Canary was later cleared by the independent regulator Impress (a fact Pogrund and Maguire don’t mention), but the damage was done. The Canary “went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,” SFFN crowed.

“Bye bye Birdie!!!” tweeted Rachel Riley.

‘Destroy Corbynism’

Simultaneously, McSweeney and SFFN devoted enormous resources to scouring huge pro-Corbyn Facebook groups for incriminating posts.

“McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times” where they were published on 1 April 2018 under the headline: “Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory.”

“McSweeney revelled in Corbyn’s misery and did everything he could to exacerbate it”, all the while posing as “smilingly compliant with Corbynism,” the authors say he secretly organised hecklers to hound the Labour leader as he travelled the country.

The money to finance Labour Together came from hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and from Trevor Chinn, “a multi-millionaire Jewish philanthropist” who “had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader.”

This money was not declared, as required by law, to the Electoral Commission – an “oversight” that served Labour Together’s “strategic interests”.

“It kept the secret … The result was that nobody caught [McSweeney] amassing the data he used to understand and destroy Corbynism.”

Morgan McSweeney​

McSweeney spent hundreds of thousands of pounds commissioning polling which provided vital insights into how the Labour Party membership, post-Corbyn, could be persuaded to vote for a candidate who would advance the interests of the right.

The answer, of course, was to lie.

The candidate McSweeney eventually alighted upon was Keir Starmer, whose great virtue was that he had served loyally under Corbyn.

Indeed, for the membership he had the additional virtue that, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, he had been the chief proponent of a second referendum.

Corbyn knew the policy was far less popular with Labour voters than Labour members and Starmer’s position undermined him as he sought desperately to cobble together a compromise that would keep both on board.

In Pogrund and Maguire’s telling Starmer was acutely aware of this. Starmer “had succeeded not only in securing his own future, but in binding Corbyn’s hands behind his back.”

At the December 2019 election the pro-Brexit Red Wall was duly lost — the blame for which Starmer, with the help of a compliant media, succeeded in foisting on Corbyn.

Antisemitism

The story of how Starmer stood on a continuity ticket and then subsequently broke every pledge he had made to the membership has already been told many times.

What emerges here is how central Israel/Palestine and antisemitism was in propelling the leadership rightwards, and how on this issue it was Starmer rather than McSweeney that was the driving force.

It was he who insisted on dismissing Rebecca Long-Bailey as Shadow Education Secretary after she re-tweeted a post claiming the American police who killed George Floyd, sparking the Black Rights Matter movement, had learned their techniques from the Israeli secret services.

And it was he who insisted on including in his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party the words: “Those that deny this is a problem are part of the problem.”

“We essentially set a trap that [Corbyn] leapt into,” says a shadow cabinet minister.

Responding to the report, Corbyn stated: “One antisemite is too many but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons.”

It was “little more than a statement of the obvious”, the authors write, but set in motion a train of events that would lead to Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour Party.

Instinctive vassal

A deep commitment to Israel meant Starmer resisted mounting calls for a ceasefire in Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into Israel, calls that came from allies as well as political opponents.

McSweeney, for whom a three-month stint on an Israeli kibbutz at the age of 17 was a formative life experience, was firmly behind him, genuinely bewildered by why solidarity with Israel should be viewed any differently from solidarity with an ally like France.

“They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the hard left,” says one shadow cabinet minister.

The book reveals that the apparent indifference of the leadership both to the suffering of Palestinians and the anger of British Muslims reduced the justice minister, Shabana Mahmood, the only Muslim in the shadow cabinet, to tears.

Starmer also saw Gaza as “nothing less than his audition for statesmanship.”

Like Blair before him he had concluded “that Britain’s interests, and his own, were best served by hewing close to whatever line was set by the Americans.”

An instinctive vassal, like Blair he quickly discovered his influence in Washington was, in fact, almost zero precisely because the imperial power knew his support could be taken for granted.

While still in opposition Starmer’s team pleaded for a meeting with President Biden but were ignored.

Fobbed off with secretary of state Antony Blinken they were dismayed to discover he was entirely uninterested in their views on Gaza.

Starmer’s energy over Israel is striking precisely because elsewhere in the book he is an absence – “an HR manager, not a leader,” as McSweeney himself is quoted as saying.

His portrayal as a hapless pawn in McSweeney’s hands is positively humiliating.

Smash Labour

McSweeney himself appears to be driven above all by a visceral loathing of the left. He is “seized by an almost millenarian zeal for destruction” and a desire to “pick the Labour Party up and smash its head open,” the authors say.

“His world view” is marked by “a certain fanaticism, paranoia and moral certitude.” McSweeney’s supporters would point to the 2024 election result as vindication.

But the most serious failing of Get In is that it fails to probe the fundamental question of whether McSweeneyism really has succeeded in repairing Labour’s relationship with the electorate.

In 2019 Jeremy Corbyn, hamstrung by Brexit, confronted by a united opposition and facing ferocious hostility from the entirety of the press and most of his own parliamentary party, obtained 10,269,051 votes.

In 2024 Keir Starmer had a united party, faced a disgraced and discredited government undermined by a resurgent Reform Party, and enjoyed a largely compliant press. He obtained 9,708,716 votes.

In his own constituency Starmer’s vote halved to 18,884. You would have no idea this was the case from reading Get In.

Operating in the shadows

McSweeney’s achievement was to distribute the Labour vote with hyper-efficiency, pulling off a conjuring trick that enabled the party to obtain two thirds of the parliamentary seats with one third of the votes – a distortion without precedent in British parliamentary history.

Since then Labour’s support has plummeted. Reform now leads in the polls.

And McSweeney’s performative cruelty to the remnants of Corbynism has achieved the remarkable feat of opening up a meaningful political space to the left of the Labour Party.

It may be that McSweeney himself has already decided Starmer is a busted flush. Why else collaborate – as he clearly has – with a book so damaging to his boss?

McSweeney is frequently compared to Dominic Cummings, the man who foisted Boris Johnson on the country and within months decided he was an idiot, began referring to him as the “trolley” and worked behind the scenes to destroy his premiership.

If history is repeating itself then serious questions need to be asked about how it is our destinies came to be governed by unelected middle-aged men, operating in the shadows, whose only virtue seems to be an unshakeable faith that their own absurdly reductive understanding of the world constitutes a wisdom so profound that it frees them from the constraints of democracy and common decency that bind lesser mortals.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/morgan-mcsweeney-plot-without-precedent-in-labour-history/
 
Fascists (and fascist-enablers) are deserving of mockery, though if you think the name Torygraph is demeaning, rather than a punny description of its reader base, maybe you should consider why you apparently don't like being described as a Tory.

You have not quite worked it out.

It was the over the top SJWs that enabled the re-election of Donald Trump
and the net zero ideologists who are currently enabling Reform UK.
 
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