This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.
Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.
Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.
We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.
As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.
That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.
Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.
We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.
We're still seeking help to find missing Callum, 15, last seen at Newport Train Station at around 11.55pm on Sat 23 May.
He is from South Bristol and has links to North Wales & South Wales, particularly Newport.
Pls call 999 & give the updated ref 5226146008.
Everything roopy is doing is to save the Tory’s from political annihilation!
To put the power back into the hands of the two establishment parties!
This is the first time in history we get the chance to break the two party system that has denied us everything we ever asked for!
It is Reform against the establishment, And it’s clear which side Roop and Ben are on! People need to wake up and fast, Or face a lifetime of control and manipulation!
@benhabib6@RestoreBritain You state: “it is a political party and exists to fight elections” So tell me why Restore havent no candidates in the 32 elections this month? You are only standing in Makersfield to stop Reform winning its clear as day! Otherwise you’ve wasted 32 chances?
Read Ben’s post.
Then read it again…
but this time slower.
It’s an admission of guilt and a demonstration of the type of
mental gymnastics that
Sultana would nod at.
Ben says Restore can’t win.
(On that we agree)
But then the Alzheimer’s
makes a comeback and
Ben ends the post with…
‘Win this for the country’ 🤦♂️
He claims Burnham makes
no difference to Labour
or to the country…
But that’s a huge lie.
And if you’re not sure then
Ask yourself why does
the left of Labour
want Burnham?
Because Starmer is too
‘Far right’ for the PLP.
Let that sink in.
My own position?
I don’t care who wins
so long as Burnham loses
because for me it’s country first.
For Ben and Rupert?
It’s ego.
It’s vanity.
It’s avarice.
It’s traitorous.
They have and will put their
own personalities before
Great Britain every time.
Don’t be fooled again⬇️