Rail monopoly news – Dawn Raid by the Commission – first of many? The annual Rail Freight Conference organised by the European Commission in Vienna on 4th December provided an interesting backdrop to the dawn raids by the European Commission as part their investigations into possible violations of ‘EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and…
This is really by way of a postscript to my last blog, where I pointed out that under the British constitution the decision to go to war is customarily taken under the Royal Prerogative, ie by the Prime Minister acting in the name of the Crown. The fallout from last night’s Commons vote adds strength…
I don’t know the answer. I have read as much as I reasonably can, but I don’t believe that I, or most MPs or Lords, really know all there is to be known about the pros and cons of military action in relation to Syria, let alone what might happen in the months and years to come. Having…
My speech on 26 November- Many Members of this House will have been students when there were troubles of one sort or another, depending on the age. Indeed, we may have cut our teeth on some of them. There were protects, sometimes violent, in the past, but never have those protests been so widely or…
Thames Tideway Tunnel was justified by a model which is so flawed that OFWAT fined Thames Water £86m last year. Based on actual readings of Dissolved Oxygen the Thames would comply now, except that TW have recently started pumping more sewage into the Thames to ‘prove’ that the Tideway Tunnel is necessary. So reverting to…
As I have said before, the Olympics 2012 were a waste of money, with no legacy – http://lordsoftheblog.net/2014/12/31/i-told-you-so/ and no increase in young people playing sport – http://lordsoftheblog.net/2014/02/09/the-olympic-outrage/. Now we find the awards were vitiated by drugs. See Lawson in the Sunday Times today: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/dominiclawson/article1632918.ece The revelations are hardly surprising, and the response is pretty…
Media reports might lead us to believe that there isn’t much unanimity in United Nations deliberations at present. Yet, just over two weeks ago the UN General Assembly came together to express a single, yet largely unreported, collective hope. That hope was a resolution A/70/L.3 which set out the terms for the observance of the…
Rail monopoly news. An irregular comment paper from Tony Berkeley, 7 November 2015 France and Germany’s railways are falling apart; other member states may not wish to follow them. France and Germany still lobbied the Transport Council against the changes that could revitalise their railways. Now, with the EC/EP/Council Trilogues already started, I reflect on…
I went to see the new film “Suffragette”, (director Sarah Gavron, daughter of Labour peer Lord Gavron, who sadly died recently) at a special showing in Westminster. It isn’t perfect, but it certainly makes you think. This is what I thought. The struggle is not over. There are equality laws in place, but women are still not…
