Rolls Royce do indeed make jet engines (and more profitably monitor, manage and maintain them) but more pertinently to the point made in the story they also make the nuclear power plants for the Royal Navy's fleet of nuclear powered submarines.

Indeed. It's a national embarrassment given the UK's pioneering role in nuclear power, that the only new reactors to have gone critical in the last few decades have been the RR reactors in our Astute submarines. And I'd rather have one of those than a super yacht.

The main problem I see with BoJo's resignation is who's going to replace him. But it there's any truth in the rumor that his energy policy had been influenced by his missus, we may back away from the disaster that has been UK energy policy.

If we get someone pro-nuclear, we may finally see an end to neo-Luddite 'renewables' in favour of cheaper and more reliable electricity production. But it would take a brave politician to go against the 'renewables' lobby, even if scrapping 'renewable' subsidies would save consumers and businesses a lot of money. Given they're around £2-3bn+ a year, or £300+ per household, it'd probably be cheaper to deal with legal challenges for ending subsidies than continuing with them. Especially as it should be obvious that 'renewables' scammers haven't delivered on their promises.

>Especially as it should be obvious that 'renewables' scammers haven't delivered on their promises.

[citation needed]

According to Gridwatch, at this very moment 14:50 BST

Wind 6Gw, Solar 7.13Gw, nuclear 4.58Gw, - GAS 13.19Gw & COAL 0.33Gw

The wind does not blow on demand.

Good citation.

IOW renewables ≊ Gas and >> Coal which is not something I'd have expected a couple of decades ago.

I like this view-

https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind

Because it makes the intermittency/unreliability problem more apparent. Solar's obviously doing well at the moment, but it'll get dark in a few hours, and future people may be trying to charge millions of EVs after they're back from work.

Which “ ‘renewables’ scammers” promised that the wind does blow on demand?

Does the oft spouted 'Renewable energy can provide all we need' not imply there's always enough wind & sunshine?

Which “ ‘renewables’ scammers” promised that the wind does blow on demand?

That's just one of the fundamental flaws with using obsolete technology. Our ancestors went from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam because they knew reliable power benefitted the economy.

So the 'renewables' scumbags counter this flaw by demanding we throw billions at grid-scale batteries and grid upgrades to cover up their inadequacies. And thanks to our rigged market and regulatory capture, the massive costs of trying to make an unreliable solution reliable are passed on to consumers.

This is why our energy costs are so high. It's got little to do with Russia, and everything to do with our insane energy policy. Because 'renewables' are unreliable, we need something for when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing. So as we've 'invested' in 'renewables', we've also had to 'invest' in CCGT gas turbines to keep our lights on. So obviously that's meant increased dependency on gas. Which was fine when gas prices were low, and it even would have been cheaper to run the backup CCGTs as primary generators, because the cost of electricity generated by CCGT was much lower than on or offshore wind.

But for those needing citations-

https://www.renewableuk.com/page/WindEnergy

Which is 97% bullshit. For example-

Onshore wind offers the most cost-effective choice for new electricity in the UK, bar none - it is cheaper than gas, nuclear, coal and other renewables. This clean, modern technology is popular with the public, regularly enjoying support levels of up to 74% according to the Government’s own opinion polls...

...The cost of new offshore wind has fallen by 50% since 2015 and it is now one of the lowest cost options for new power in the UK – cheaper than new gas and nuclear power.

Which demonstrates why legal action should be simple. If RUK's bs is accurate, given we've invested in 'renewables', yet our energy costs have massively increased rather than fallen. But if this bullshit is believable, then it obviously demonstrates that wind is a mature technology, and subsidies can be cancelled.

There's also this news-

https://renews.biz/79003/

In all, 10.8GW of new onshore and offshore wind, solar, tidal stream and other renewables will go ahead as a result of today’s announcement by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) of the winning bidders in CfD4...

...The cost of offshore projects remained low in this auction with strike prices of just £37.35 per megawatt hour (MWh), the lowest cost of all renewable technologies.

Woo, and yey! So this means that previous CfD auctions should be re-evaluated and re-priced because-

https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfd-register/

Shows most contracts were priced well above the pre-Ukraine wholesale electricity price, and because they're often indexed, will increase as they add to our inflationary pressure. This particular con is standard low-ball bidding, CfD winners could choose not to take up CfD contracts for (I think) up to 3yrs after award, so a couple of lowballs from the last round aren't selling via their CfD contracts, but on the market. Can't think why given the current wholesale price has been blown sky high thanks to the 'renewables' lobby.

Plus the LCCC data exposes the bullshit about wind being cheaper than nuclear. The register makes that clear, eg Hinkley C's strike price is 113.83£/MWh whereas a large subsidy extractor like the Hornsea off-shore windfarm gets 175.25£/MWh

And CfD's don't benefit consumers at all because if market price exceeds CfD strike price, any 'windfall' goes to the government, not consumers.

So on the one hand, the 'renewables' scammers say they can deliver wind for <£50/MWh, but never actually seem to do this, hence the ever increasing electricity bills. There's also a huge amount of deception because the CfD strike price and marketing bollocks don't include additional costs for providing connectivity, stand-by capacity etc etc,

The wind does not blow on demand.

Like it's always 5 o clock somewhere, the wind is always blowing somewhere.

So a power grid can always have a wind contribution.

"reactor" and "gone critical" shouldn't really appear in the same sentence.

>>>"reactor" and "gone critical" shouldn't really appear in the same sentence.<<<

You might want to talk to nuclear engineer about that.

They can and should, if you know what you're talking about.

If you don't, it's not a big deal; it'd be a dull place if everyone only ever talked about what they knew. However, the misunderstanding is on you, not on the term or on the people using it properly.

" shouldn't really appear in the same sentence "

You've been watching too many lame low budget sci-fi movies where the scriptwriter heard the phrase, thought it sounded cool, and used it with no idea of what it actually means.

Hint, it's to do with "criticality", the state of a sustainable reaction.

I also like 'criticality excursion'. Sounds like a bit of a holiday, especially if the reactor is moving. If so, one should probably take a break from work and a quick road trip.

um

Forgive me.

Will he take the wallpaper with him when he leaves?

Will he she take the wallpaper...

FTFY

Probably not. She'll want something newer. Whether BoJo will now be able to find someone to fix it it a different matter.

How long before she dumps the cheating shite on his arse now he doesn't have the aphrodisiac of power?

The article misses an opportunity to point out that OneWeb acquisition is doomed as well.

Oneweb was doomed long before taxpayer money got pissed away on it. There was/is no hope of anyone - far less a government - rescuing it after the original investors and management couldn't make it work.

Westminster's involvement guarantees an epic fail. These are the geniuses who spent billions on aircraft carriers with no aircraft, Nightingale hospitals with no patients or staff, £53B on a test and trace scheme that never worked, a ferry contract to a company with no ships, a non-existent "world beating" Covid app, etc, etc.

"Then it budgeted £37 billion for a Test and Trace system that failed to achieve its stated ambition of avoiding a second national lockdown."

Is a typo or what ? How can you possibly spend that much for a test and tracking system ? One Frenchman developed one as a volunteer !

Yes, based on other data sources, but still ...

Ms D. Harding....

Manners!

Baroness Harding if you're going to be polite - or wish to point out the ridiculous.

>How can you possibly spend that much for a test and tracking system? One Frenchman developed one as a volunteer!

That's the two-year budget for an organisation that employed tens of thousands of people, operated the largest contact centre Europe has ever seen and - this is where the money went - performed or issued hundreds of millions of free COVID tests.

It still didn't meet its objectives, but the amount of money spent wasn't unreasonable given what it was being spent on. It's how the results of that spend were mismanaged, and how the spend was apportioned amongst the many and varied suppliers that mattered.

performed or issued hundreds of millions of free COVID tests.

This alone should be investigated. These tests were not more reliable than using a fortune-teller.

WTF!?!? It wasn't reasonable to pay Deloittes £1K/day for outsourced and mostly clueless call centre droids who had nothing to do. It wasn't reasonable to pay £6K+/day for senior Deloittes staff who have no medical expertise and knew fuck all about pandemics or public health. It wasn't reasonable to put Dildo Harding, the Queen of Carnage, in charge of that budget either.

BTW those free COVID test kits were nothing of the sort. HM taxpayer - you and me - picked up the bill. But given the state of our out of control national debt, our grandchildren will be paying for them too.

Let's get back to Boris's tech strategy. Did he reach an agreement on UK involvement in the Horizon programme? How many UK academics have had their research grants and projects taken away?

> the amount of money spent wasn't unreasonable

I disagree. There is no way they should have spent £37 billion for a country the size of the UK.

And, meanwhile they destroyed what was left of the NHS. Don't get me started on how their incompetance killed my partner earlier this year of a preventable condition that was not COVID because she couldn't get competant treatment.

" There is no way they should have spent £37 billion for a country the size of the UK. "

To put this into context, 37,000,000,000 divided by 67,000,000 (average UK population) means it cost about £550 for every single person in the country. That's madness.

£37bn was the 2 year budget for Test and Trace, "only" £29.5bn was spent. That includes all money spent on covid tests, testing centres and contact tracing. The best breakdown I can find is for 2020, £13.5bn was spent, £10.4bn on testing, £1.8bn on outbreak management and support, and £0.9bn on contact tracing.

Total costs on the app, including the abandoned in house app, were £76m.

Au contraire, his plans were 'oven-ready'*; Mr Johnson said so himself.

I did travel on the Boris cable car, which was ok, and you do get a good view (when it is not raining), but probably not for those concerned about travel sickness or vertigo.

As for the Garden Bridge (while he was Mayor of London), I recall in a TV program hosted by Evan Davies, Johnson likened the British economy to a Ryvita** with a blob of jam on London. Johnson was adamant that the way to get more 'jam' (money/investment) the rest of the country was not to spread it around, but to pile a whole lot more on London and it would then 'spread out' of its own accord. (A more compelling argument for Scottish independence I have yet to hear.)

*In the same way that Hansel and Gretel were, I presume.

**Other dried flatbreads are available.

Whilst it's very easy to focus on Boris as the centre of the omnishambles, it's worth remembering that many of these failed projects and schemes were championed and overseen by politicians, businessmen and civil servants who will remain in power long after the floppy haired one has gone.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where it's far easier to find a scapegoat than deliver something better. For all the armchair experts who will loudly tell you they knew it would all go wrong, the point here is that it is our failure to stand by and let better ideas be sidelined and ignored. ("No one listened to me" is not a statement of political insight or influence.)

El Reg has been reporting on government IT disasters for as long as it's existed, and yet despite all of this knowledge, we've still not managed to come up with a way to reform service delivery and project selection in government. Hopefully Boris' successor(s) will be more competent, but I doubt this will have much effect on the long list of screw ups our government delivers (regardless of which party is in power).

Andy 73> "we've still not managed to come up with a way to reform service delivery and project selection in government"

There is a large number of posts explaining that getting a well-defined requirement, analysing the requirements and then ensuring that there are no mid-implementation changes results in, usually, an operation system. Payroll systems are the best example. They run every month, they pay people, they get all the taxes, NI, salaries etc. correct almost all of the time. It is when there is scrimping and cost cutting, management inspired changes and poor or changing leadership that systems get messed up. I have personal involvement of several government IT procurements that were delivered on time and worked* (I had no access to budgetary information so can't comment there). These do not get into the news because they are not disasters and therefore not deemed 'attention-worthy'. The Register, sadly, is as guilty of this sort of oversight as the other news media.

The real issue is that most large government ICT procurements are managed not by senior civil servants with great expertise in ICT, but by hired in contractors, who are skilled at consultancy (get as much money form the client as possible) rather than economic delivery. See https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/10/uk_government_legacy_systems/ about half way down the article.

*UK government procurements are covered by the OSA, so I am not at liberty to divulge the names or natures of these successes.

I also have taken part in such projects. I've also seen at least one institutionally incompetent department (and it was incompentent over 50 years ago when I encountered it a s a member of the public). But the critical phrase in what you point out is "well-defined requirements".

You've done the classic thing of telling us how to run a project successfully, not how to get someone else (in this case the government) to run a project successfully.

That's the point - we *know* there are better ways to do it, but no-one seems to know how to make government do it those better ways.

How do you stop them from using idiot consultants to manage projects? (This isn't just limited to government. I know a couple of large companies who have lost tens of millions to projects where they called in a globally recognised consultancy - because that's what you do at that level - and then watched them screw up large transformation projects).

And that leads back to the point I first made - anyone believing that the exit of Boris is going to make a significant change to the way government manages and selects these large projects is going to be sorely disappointed.

Andy 73> "You've done the classic thing of telling us how to run a project successfully, not how to get someone else (in this case the government) to run a project successfully."

Yes, sorry, you are completely correct (have an upvote).

But my point was that some, maybe even a lot of government IT procurements do actually succeed and work, it is only the ones that are abysmal failures that make the news. We need to get the government to put the people who ran the successful procurements in charge of the next lot, but considering the state of HMG at the moment, I shouldn't hold your breath, if I were you.

No fucking chance. It'll take at least 30-50 years to get a more competent administration. That's how long is needed to get clueful people with a STEM background into the top jobs in government and politics. If they eve do. Just look at that today. Almost all the MPs, senior civil servants, and policy wonks come from the B ark of lawyers, PPE students, arts graduates, classics scholars and similar pond life.

Hoping for more government competence is fine. But the signs point in the other direction. The wildly useless and stupid Priti Vacant, Mad Nad and JRM are still in post despite their protector's resignation.

Looking at some of the contenders who've been listed there do seem to be a few with real-world experience there. Whether they survive the Westminster back-stabbing is a differen matter.

But it's going to be difficult to recruit anyone of competence when the reaction of so many is to simply brand them as corrupt without even looking at all closely. Would you or any of the other commentards here step up to that? I wouldn't although I'm a bit long in the tooth for that anyway.

"reaction of so many is to simply brand them as corrupt "

What other description is appropriate for Boris's enablers? They knew he was unfit for public office. They knew he lied. They knew he was incompetent. They knew he couldn't run a cabinet government. They knew he didn't obey the rules and repeatedly broke the law. They knew his cabinet and government was chaotic and dysfunctional. But they said and did nothing about it for years. Shame on them.

“No one listened to me” is most certainly a statement of influence — at an infinitesimal level.

"For all the armchair experts who will loudly tell you they knew it would all go wrong"

Slight problem with the tenses here. All along there have been plenty of people saying it will go wrong. Foresight, not hindsight. If the bystanders could see that why couldn't the participants? Wilful ignorance seems likely.

This man was my boss when he was mayor, and I had the dubious honour of seeing him up close on a number of occasions. On being elected mayor, his team didn't have a clue what the different agencies did, resulting in chaos. Amazingly, we still managed to deliver a successful Olympics, but that was probably because it had already achieved a momentum where even Boris and his chums couldn't f*ck it up. And it was "chums" - he would appoint old school and university acquaintances to unelected posts regardless of their lack of experience.

I saw him fall off a low stage while giving a speech at city hall, despite repeated warnings to watch his step from a long suffering aide. I also saw the same aide panic when Boris visited our office and she lost track of him. On being told he was last seen wobbling towards the kitchen area she was genuinely concerned he might injure himself.

The man is a bullsh*tter and lazy buffoon who has only succeeded due to privilege and some people finding him amusing. Personally I want clowns in a circus, not public office.

I think in all honesty he's also succeeded in part due to who he's up against at the time. Many of the positions he's been in have been "who's maybe least worst" scenarios.

Not saying the electorate always chose correctly but when there's only two bad options it's flip a coin time.

"some people finding him amusing"

And some people - like the ERG - finding him useful.

The ERG, in turn, being useful to disaster capitalists and rich Russians.

"

Financial Times journalist Sebastian Payne has pointed out that government insiders say the Cabinet Office is "preparing for a scenario where there's not a full cabinet" which would include "slimming the government right down" and "people doing a few jobs."

"

So does that mean the civil servants in those departments will just seat around waiting for new ministers or will they be retrenched? Can they even be redeployed temporarily to other positions?

I know from watching the Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister documentaries, the civil service hates to cut manpower.

Ask Jacob Rees-Mogg, he's currently the 'Minister for Administrative Affairs'*.

*AKA The Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency (at time of writing).

True, and I'd rather have Jim Hacker.