AN OUTSIDE VIEW

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...

Richard Murphy, the accountant and policy analyst, has just produced a video on the fallacy of the £20 billion black hole in government finances. It is worth watching, but can you spot the hole in his argument? Murphy is partly correct, but also dangerously misleading. He has forgotten that there is a fixed supply of some things, such as land, which all buildings require—homes, factories, shops and offices. Creating money too freely leads to a land price boom. This was the main long-term effect of Quantitative Easing. It sent house prices sky high.  The notion that unemployment is due to shortage of aggregate demand is the great Keynesian fallacy. If Murphy understood the idea of the NAIRU (the Non Inflationary Rate of Unemployment), which has been around since 1959, he would know that pushing money into the economy cannot get rid of unemployment without causing accelerating inflation. Money has lost 98% of its value since 1945. It is one of the reasons why Britain's industry has...

  This discussion arose from a YouTube comment. “Keep operating super old locomotives is not exactly environment-friendly or even cost-efficient.” This is true as a broad generalisation. However, the energy consumption of rolling stock and infrastructure has to be calculated over its entire life cycle, from mine to scrapyard. I cannot lay my hands on the figures, but I understand that at least a third of the energy consumed by a train occurs in mining and refining the raw materials and construction of the vehicles. Large amounts of energy are used to just to dig out and transport the minerals and convert the ore to aluminium metal, while aluminium welding is also an energy-intensive process. Aluminium mining is not environmentally friendly. Similar considerations apply to electrification infrastructure and battery technologies. As regards cost, around a third of the total is for the capital costs of the rolling stock. This is usually reckoned to be fully amortised after 20 years, ...

The recent large scale shutdowns on French railways have been variously attributed to hostile action, terrorists, leftist agitators and Russians, but similar incidents have occurred by accident. A few years ago a small fire in an equipment cupboard shut down train services over a wide area around Gothenburg, and it took a fortnight to get things back to normal. A couple of weeks ago there was the worldwide dislocation caused by an upgrade of Windows computer systems which went wrong. Similar large scale disruption to electronic systems can also be due to natural events such as solar storms. Total shutdown of tills in shops throughout Sweden are common, apparently because of a failures of the VAT central computer system. Critical infrastructure such as transport, water supply, mains drainage, electricity and gas are all vulnerable.  Until a few decades ago, the signals and points at Brighton were controlled from a signal box at the end of the platforms. If anything went wrong, the s...

I noticed that there has been a flurry of discussion recently about what is known as Modern Monetary Theory  (MMT)). It strikes me as a bit half-baked but the proponents of MMT may have a point. The usual view is that governments collect tax and spend it to pay for their activities. I believe this is exactly the wrong way round. As I understand it, official money is created when government spends it into circulation to cover its expenses. The money must then be withdrawn from circulation through the tax system, so as to complete the cycle and prevent the undue increase in the quantity of money which leads to a general increase in prices as the value of money falls. Now, it is essential to remember that one of the core functions of governments is to protect land rights and provide what is needed to make land habitable and productive, thereby creating sustaining its value. The government‛s primary duties are to defend the realm, protect land titles, make justice available to the...

A handful of overdue policy reforms would alleviate many of the long standing problems that afflict the British economy. This are Rationalisation of property taxation including Reform of the Council Tax Abolition of Stamp Duty Abolition of Capital Gains Business Rates to annual assessments and will with fixed equipment, buildings and plant being ignored in the valuation.  Phasing out of VAT Significant raising of thresholds for income tax and NI contributions. Scrapping of VAT over a couple of years; it is damaging, inefficient and a solid obstacle to growth.  Even if these changes were revenue-neutral, great benefits would follow. Of course, even though Labour has a huge majority in parliament, little or none of this will happen.