Mate, the UK isn’t the US: Starmer has a Parliamentary Majority in a country that doesn’t even have a written constitution and which is not a Presidential System, so nothing stops him from changing this.
It’s just that New Labour isn’t left of center (probably not even center anymore) and so they couldn’t care less about the “plebes”.
Starmer has a Parliamentary Majority.
They could have changed this anytime they wanted.
So they’re either malicious, incompetent or both.
I lived in the UK for over a decade until Brexit, and frankly I think that by the time I left they were one of the most far-right countries in Europe, just in this English-upper-class style of posh words and the oppression done “elegantly” via extreme “rules” rather than the direct violence of the (not posh) populist far-right, - people are still made to hurt for the crime of being poor, and the system is designed to hurt anybody who would defy the local elites (just notice the conviction to years in jail of of Environmentalist demonstrators for blocking a road) but all the Ts are traced and Is are dotted, all prim and propper - so people from the outside don’t really notice how so very close to Fascist Britain already is.
(“It’s the Law”, say the far-right muppets over there, same as Nazi enablers would say in Nazi Germany.)
Rules on social security explicitly designed to make it likely that people make mistakes (this allowance apparently changes depending on a person’s weekly income, which floats if you’re in insecure employment, which is exactly the problem of the working poor, and it’s down to the recipient to figure it out precisely, down to the pence, with no help) and then punishing them disproportionatelly hard for the error is exactly the style of “by the rules” hurting of people for being poor (and human, hence making mistakes) beloved by the Posh Fascists and their followers (of which there are many, as proven by Brexit which was the product of a campaign of Racism and Nationalistic Exceptionalism).
From what I’ve heard on TV around here (Portugal), France still refuses to allow electrical lines passing through French territory from Spain and Portugal to sell power directly to the rest of the EU.
France is fine with buying themselves power from Portugal and Spain on the cheap to resell for more money to the rest of the EU or with selling power themselves to Spain and Portugal. Spain and Portugal have very good conditions for renewables, especially solar (for example, Portugal has twice the amount of peak sun exposure hours per year than Germany), so it makes sense to produce that kind of renewables here (on the other hand, things like hydro - which is still most of Portugal’s renewable energy generation - make a lot less sense since both countries are predicted to become much drier with global warming)
There are some crazy ideas to bypass France with a submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea, but those are quite complex and costly.
I’ve also heard about the gas thing and the plan was to import gas from Northern Africa via Spain and sell it to the rest of Europe, as neither Spain nor Portugal produce gas. This would serve to reduce the dependency of, earlier, Russia gas and nowadays LPG from places like the US. That said I agree that we (Europe) need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels.
Both Portugal and Spain want to have power lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe.
The problem is that France refuses to allow the construction of lines to export energy from Portugal and Spain to the rest of Europe because that would threaten France’s very own business of exporting the power generated by its nuclear power plants to the rest of Europe.
In this latest power outage it would’ve been especially beneficiary to Portugal to be connected to nations other than just Spain, since Spain’s problems dragged down the Portuguese grid, and if there was a different place from where Portugal could have sourced enough power to make up for the sudden crash of the power coming from Spain, the country might have avoided the total collapse of power.
Solar is generated as a DC current which has to be converted to AC and the grid voltage (so, 220V in Spain) in order to supply it to the energy grid, so all that it takes to control the flow of energy from solar generation into the grid is to be able to remotely tell the DC-AC converters of the solar farms to stop sending power to the AC side. When the converters are in that state, energy is not flowing down to the energy grid and all that happens on the other side is that the solar cells get a bit more warm.
Of course that means it has to mandatory for any solar supplier to the mains network to have a converter which can be switched off remotely by the grid management company.
Similarly, wind generation can be reduced and even stopped by changing the pitch of the blades and similarly it must be possible for the grid management company to do so remotely.
Switching on and off power sources (for example, switching on or off power turbines in dams or gas power stations) has long been how the grid management company balances production with consumption in order to avoid blackouts.
The problem is not an inherent inability of the new forms of renewable generation to be reduced or stopped when needed, it’s that if not forced the businesses generating that energy won’t pay the extra money to have systems in placed to do so which can be remotely activated by the electric grid management company: the flow of renewable energy is not controllable because the power supply operators won’t spend the money into making it controllable unless forced and at least until now there was no political will to force them to do so.
It’s a political (and Capitalism) problem, not a technical problem.
Those eagerly cultivating at home a Fascist way of thinking (from the Racism of “unwaveringly support for the self-proclaimed representatives of a race whilst they mass murder children” to the Authoritarianism and total contempt for the Rule Of Law of “expelling foreigners without Trial for attending demonstrations”), will never get rid of the Fascists because it is they themselves who are feeding Fascism.
Either the German authorities and politicians are dumb as doorknobs and they’re unable to understand that endorsing Fascist Thinking creates Fascists, or all their “dealing with the fascists at home” is either performative or just infighting between the different pro-Fascism powers in Germany to decide who ends up at the top of the Fascist hierarchy.
“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the BfV said on Friday.
Pretty much the entirety of the German political mainstream is right now “unwaveringly supporting” a fascist regime commiting an extreme Genocide in Gaza, and that support has been very openly because of the ethnicity the murderers claim to represent, or in other words, due to “ethnicity-and ancestry-based conceptions”.
Normalize race as an excuse to support no matter what those commiting the most atrocious of actions and all that it takes is to add “if it applies to them, then surely it applies to us” to that normalized racism to get something like the ideology of the AfD.
German politicians have long been plowing and fertilizing the field from which the AfD sprouted with great vigour.
This right now is just hypocrisy: the AfD is but the tip of the iceberg which is the view in Germany that the way people are treated should depend on their race and even the most horrible of deeds are excusable if one’s race is the right one.
Actually it that was meant as point about “it’s the Law” being a traditional excuse of Fascists.
Guess it felt too close to home for you.