Salopian

primate | father | politically frustrated | member of @SpeechUnion

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

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.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@crawfax @Footballtweet

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@koshercockney It’s evil, the brainwashing of useful idiots to eradicate an entire people’s culture and history in the name of “progress”. Evil.

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@bphillipsonMP “Free” breakfasts.

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@LBC @lewis_goodall This is where we’ve got to, a government that has messed up at every turn and disliked by the vast majority of the public.
So the playbook they turn to, smearing the opposition.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@justdavenow89 The Deputy Prime Minister is friends with him so you are quite wrong.

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@CSgtBourne

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@zarahussain999 All religions are superstitious cults.

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@TheGriftReport I don’t care what a bunch of woke morons think. These photos are awesome.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@campbellclaret Not k!lled a million Iraqis though has he?

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@YossiBenYakar Why would he feel the need to say such a thing?

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@donmcgowan Yet again…

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@For_Film_Fans Man in a dress has small tantrum because someone’s made up story borrows from another made up story.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@MasterMaliq Neither are prophets, there is no such thing as a prophet. Made up mumbo-jumbo supernatural nonsense.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@LBC A low point in a career spent entirely below ground level.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@UKLabour Your leader hosted a party in Downing Street after visiting Southport for less than a minute.
That is exactly who Kier Starmer is.

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@ChrisWickNews Just like under Blair and Brown where power was transferred from parliament to independent (unaccountable) bodies. It was all seen as sensible, pragmatic governance at the time.
We didn’t realise the consequences until too late.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@_wearepossible A few points:
1. The only thing SUVs assault are Christmas markets
2. Who are you to say they are oversize?
3. They cannot choke anything they are cars
4. There is no climate “crisis”
5. Most of them are really nice, comfortable cars
6. Piss off

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@MrHreviews Intellectually incoherent.

[Salopian @ThatSalopian]

@ZackPolanski Well done, yet another Green Party lunatic with a personality disorder.