Written 24 June 2022 It’s now six years since the UK voted to leave the EU. I voted to leave, despite not because of the Leave and Remain campaigns, and I have absolutely no regrets in voting the way I did. I was a bit floaty on the day, the campaign was really boring but also hysterical but in the event I put my cross in the leave box because I could do no other. I was a member of the Labour Party and delivered leaflets for it in Slough in the 1983 general election, when leaving the (then) EEC...
Written 24 June 2022 I heard about this book recently and thought it had a catchy title so read it this week. The book is written by a nanotechnologist and is really a stock take of how human progress and development appear in many ways to have substantially halted over the last half a century and to put forward reasons for why that’s happened. It does this through the story of the flying car. Or rather, it uses the stalling of the development of flying cars to illustrate why we haven’t got the “future we were promised”. It’s a pretty...
Written 15 June 2022 Dominic Frisby wrote a really good and thought provoking piece here on water as real estate, the housing crisis and tax. Like him I am a bit of a Georgist in these matters and I thought he outlined a really positive vision for how we can use our available resources to make our towns and cities nicer as well as build housing. Alright, the houses are floating, but they’re still houses in my book! It’s well worth a read. I worked for about five years for Sutton Harbour Holdings in Plymouth, which owns Sutton Harbour (including...
Written 05 June 2022 It’s become increasingly clear to me over the years that abundant, reliable and cheap energy is the cornerstone of progress we have enjoyed in the developed world for many years now. It also lies at the heart of environmental questions that are set to be at the centre of our political life for the rest of my life and so I’ve been looking to read more on Energy this year. I started with The Prize by Daniel Yergin which deals with the history of the oil industry (reviewed here), then Helen Thompson’s Disorder (which touches on...
