MikeHig,
FWIW, your speculations sound very plausible to me. I like your thought experiment of their practice dog-fights against equally limited planes serving to make the problem seem less dire (until they're up against the real enemy). As for the "not invented here" aspect, that might also reflect British reluctance to accept that the industrial centre of the world had shifted (and would spell centre differently too).

In any case, I don't see "not invented here" as a compelling criticism. If nobody had reinvented the wheel, we'd all be using rolling logs. It was good that Shilling was working on a new carburettor design; the problem seems to have been much more to do with bureaucrats not understanding its importance.

Mailman,
I've mentioned it here before (I think in a COVID context), but the way they're pushing EVs on us is like the Goodies advert for Woofo dog food (or whatever it was), where the dog was offered a bowl of Woofo alongside bowls of barbed wire and broken glass. Even then, the dog needed to be pushed away from the broken glass before it settled for the Woofo.

On EVs, I thought this chat with James May covered it pretty well: that electric makes a lot of sense, but batteries not so much (but will depend on individual circumstances). I did like his pointing out that the worry is *not* range anxiety, it's recharging anxiety. Even if you only had 100 miles max range, you'd be comfortable enough *if* recharging was as widely available and quick as refuelling.

That is a big "if" though.

tomo,
The thing is that it isn't *only* the UK Labour Party that embraces this nonsense. Australian Labor does too but, worse than that, the other sides of both our parliaments aren't anything like far enough away from the same policies. The joys of consensus.

Good to laugh at the pollies doing dress-ups, but then hi-vis itself is largely theatre too. For many people wearing it, it doesn't affect safety, but might serve as a class marker.

I was chatting with a fellow last week who said it was funny doing some work at an army base, working with a team of army technicians. They insisted he wear hi-vis, but all the people he was working with were wearing camo.

Smart meters are a bit of a paradox. In order to do away with (say) quarterly visits by unskilled meter readers, you end up with (seemingly) biennial visits by licensed electricians to install equipment upgrades. Cheaper?

As for Oxford, you'd think a few people in the vicinity would realise that travelling three sides of a rectangle clocks up more miles than following just one. It is apt that "green" is a synonym for "immature", and also for "naive".

Robbo said "The farm hands of a century ago were replaced by the tractor which freed their descendants to attend uni."

Its like back in the day when everyone changed from horsies to vehicles BECAUSE vehicles were just better, easier, more efficient etc. No one went around shooting all the horsies to force everyone to move to automotive power!

However we have the exact opposite of that happening today. Everyone is going around shooting the horsies to force everyone to move to something that is just sh1t and will leave everyone worse off than before!

Robert/tomo; yes, that talk was very enjoyable and informative. It's a shame he didn't take a couple of minutes to incorporate a bit more of her background as she was clearly a "character".
I'm a member at Brooklands and was interested to learn that she was the second of only 3 women to lap the track at over 100 mph, in 1934 (wiki). The track was notoriously rough, as witnessed by the famous picture of John Cobb at speed in the massive Napier Railton with all 4 wheels off the ground! It must have taken some bravery and not a little strength to ride a 1930s bike around there at high speed.
Wrt to the Merlin carburettor, clearly there was a degree of "not invented here" at play. However I would also speculate that the negative g issue was seen as a mere irritant by the RAF until they encountered injection engines. Prior to that, any practice dog-fighting would have been against similar aircraft so there may have been an in-built assumption that all planes behaved in the same way.
The Bendix carburettor was - speculation again - probably developed for the very high altitude performance required for the American bombers and, later on, the accompanying fighters. Despite extensive reading about WWII aviation over many decades, I've never seen mention of the difference between Packard-engined aircraft and those with RR Merlins yet it must have been very noticeable to pilots who flew both. Packard Merlins were fitted to some marks of Spitfire so it must have been noticed.
Thanks again to tomo for putting me on to Douglas' book (the Secret Horsepower race) which is quite the best book on WWII aviation that I have read. We will always wonder what difference a fuel-injected Merlin would have made.....the technology had been developed in Britain well before the war, mainly by Ricardos.

tomo,
Beatrice Shilling talk was very enjoyable. I suppose we can take some comfort from the all too familiar bureaucratic blob behaviour. They got by, so maybe we can too.

One of the questions put a bit of a damper on the engineering brilliance when it turned out that the Americans just popped an off-the-shelf Bendix carburettor into their Merlins, which apparently did the trick.

Starmer thing was something to behold. Can someone please wake up all the political class to the fact that wealth is in the *consumption* of energy, not its production. The farm hands of a century ago were replaced by the tractor which freed their descendants to attend uni. Now those educated halfwits (can leave off the first three letters if you like) are pushing "abolish the tractor for green new jobs".

Jo Nova is covering more "green new jobs" today as a hailstorm takes it toll on a large solar farm in Texas. Lots of work to clean it up. Economists talk about creative destruction, but sometimes it's just destructive destruction.

tomo; thanks for the Schilling link.
It'll be a good watch if it's anywhere near the standard of his book.

A state-owned, taxpayer-funded company "investing" in tax-payer subsidised infrastructure. What could possibly go wrong.

One of the few things more stupid than a vote for the 'Conservatives' is a vote for Labour. We're stuffed.