This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.

Alongside removing the right to trial by jury, perhaps more alarmingly the government are also planning to remove appeal rights from "minor" cases (from magistrates to the Crown Court). The current statistics are that more than 40% of those appeals are upheld.

The planned changes won't fix any of these things, but it will cause fundamental damage to trust in the system and result in many miscarriages of justice.

On top of that, Amazon and other large online retailers also have a huge distribution and warehouse network domestically in the UK already so for higher value items mostly they import themselves to their warehouses before sale and then sales are purely domestic.

As to why that is - the explanations I've seen generally feature incompetence amongst various parts of the system and a degree of underfunding (or perhaps poorly managed funding) - including the fact that there is a shortage of criminal barristers due to poor pay. Juries themselves don't seem to be cited as a huge problem.

0. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-sta...

If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.

What changed more recently was the allocation of which individual people get to exercise those votes - "business votes" became "workers votes".

The election of the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs is separate though. This is still done at Common Hall (and the franchise is still Liverymen), but that election is very very rarely contested.

It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).

More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.

There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.

In reality I've never been asked for the code when renting cars (outside the UK), the physical card seems to generally be sufficient for the hire companies.

But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.

This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_taxonomy_for_sustainable_ac...

It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.