Ariane is European. According to Wikipedia "it was officially agreed upon at the end of 1973 after discussions between France, Germany and the UK" [1]
Plus the British approach has just built the biggest offshore wind farm. Why is that inferior to Frances nuclear power?
Plus France also signed up to the Channel Tunnel treaties, so its also illegal for them to fund it, but yet it still got built...
And which approach gets to claim credit for Concorde?
I'm not even sure what the French approach is. They still have to follow EU red tape, I could just as easily roll out a stereotype about long lunches, etc, etc.
The post-war British approach, late 60s, early 70s on has been much more piecemeal eschewing big national projects we used to do well. The French retained the ability to use the state for good much longer than us. Or push vanity projects through, come what may, if you prefer... We did joined up thinking much better until the 1950s.
The French were the driving force behind Ariane. Britain would most likely have walked away after the failure of Europa (Blue Streak). We did after all walk away from our space programme right after achieving orbit. Still we became a much smaller participant in ESA than we had been in ELDO. Germany took our place as the other key player with the French.
The point about the Tunnel was the British Tunnel Act specifically ruled out state aid - Thatcher's government expected the private sector to stump up the whole cost. Which it pointedly failed to do. France happily took the SNCF proposal and built a national network from it using the power and purse of the state. Britain took the BR APT prototype, pushed for far too early demo, cancelled it, sold it to Fiat then bought them later as Pendelinos. We chugged along with HST.
Concorde is a brilliant pick, thanks for the perfect example! I'm going to say 95% "The French" (politically. We contributed much more fairly technically): The British really, really wanted to partner with the US who weren't interested feeling they would be giving "their" lead to the UK. We were most surprised to find the French were the most serious about SST too, and Thorneycroft (destroyer of Supersonic Harrier) found himself with only France as realistic option. The treaty was written with very heavy cancellation penalties. Roy Jenkins tried to cancel it with TSR2 in 64. He went to France to tell them. The French responded by breaking diplomatic contact[1]. :)
Actually, scrub that, it wouldn't have progressed nearly as far as British project. Treasury were against, cabinet was against, but, we were trying our first attempt to get in the EU and de Gaulle wasn't keen (he felt we were too close to the Americans to be good Europeans. 2019 hindsight thinks he may have had a damn good point). Concorde was an EU/EEC bargaining chip. Yet still we tried to cancel it.
> The TGV was the world's fourth commercial and third standard gauge high-speed train service,[15] after Japan's Shinkansen, which connected Tokyo and Osaka from 1 October 1964, the Russian ER200 around 1974 (full service in 1984), and Britain's InterCity 125 on main lines such as the East Coast Main Line, which entered service in 1976.
Plus the British approach has just built the biggest offshore wind farm. Why is that inferior to Frances nuclear power?
Plus France also signed up to the Channel Tunnel treaties, so its also illegal for them to fund it, but yet it still got built...
And which approach gets to claim credit for Concorde?
I'm not even sure what the French approach is. They still have to follow EU red tape, I could just as easily roll out a stereotype about long lunches, etc, etc.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family)