AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Jag har köpt en ny mobil telefon. En Motorola. Den ser vacker ut. Men jag kan inte skriva alla bokstävar. ”Å” och ”Ö” och ”Ä” saknas. Exempelvis kan jag inte skriva Håkan. Det är dumt eller hur? Mina gamla adresser kan jag inte överfors från min gamla mobil och jag kan inte ändra språket. När jag anslöt telefonen till datorn, fick jag meddelande som sade att telefonen inte passar med datorns mjukvara. Jag sökte på internet men hittade ingenting. Nästa dagen ringde jag telefonföretagets så kallade kundtjänst. Naturligtvis svarade en automat. ”Tryck knapp ett... Tryck knapp tre... Tryck knapp ett igen... Tryck knapp fyra... ” Sedan började tråkig musik som heter "When the revolution comes." Den hemska musiken fortsatte många minuter. Sedan sade en röst, ”Var snäll och vänta! Våra kunder är viktiga för oss.” Sedan fortsatte musiken och sedan sade rösten igen, ”var snäll”. Och igen. Meddelandet repeterades några gånger. Kallas den här kundtjänst! Vilket slags kundtjänst?, tänkte ...

Overhead Electrification Contractors 1 , originally uploaded by jovike . In 1981 British Rail and the Department of Transport produced a report (Review of Mainline Electrification) which concluded that even on purely commercial grounds not only was 'a substantial programme of railway electrification financially worthwhile' but that the more extensive and faster options would be better propositions than the more modest ones. It also suggested that the most cost effective way to electrify railways would be by a rolling programme - a specialist team of experts would electrify one line and move on to the next. Since then, the East Coast Main Line was wired to Edinburgh, and a short section of the Great Western main line has been electrified to Heathrow, but that is about it, and so the expertise has been dispersed. Nowhere else in Europe are there to be found busy lines such as the routes through Reading, operating entirely with diesel traction. Last year there was a petiti...

Plastic Pig at Brighton , originally uploaded by seadipper . The train services on the Brighton line have gone on getting better under Southern, the Govia group company that holds the franchise. It took over a mess from Connex, the company that was thrown out. New trains being delivered from Bombardier had a host of teething troubles and were - and remain - essentially unsuitable for this service, being a suburban design of train on a long-distance route. But the teething troubles seem to have been sorted out and with a few interior changes in specification from the originals, it is nearly always possible to find a comfortable seat outside the rush hour. The trains are always cleaned to a high standard, and the windows are not scratched. Punctuality is generally good as well. And the stations are clean and tidy too. Problems with the ticket machines have also been addressed. This are primarily due to a poor interface and software, but apparently it is in compliance with some nati...

private land keep out , originally uploaded by Vertigogen . Some time after, those with the muscle grabbed most bits of the earth that were worth having, fenced them off, and then allowed their fellow humans onto "their land" only when they had paid the rent they could wring out of them. The same people then took control of the political system, entrenched their position (literally so) and fixed the laws so the robbery was concealed in a cloak of respectable legality. In reality, it was nothing more than a polite form of chattel slavery. Over the centuries, this theft led to accumulations of money in the pockets of landowners, who, when the industrial revolution came, were the only ones able to take on the role of suppliers of capital, thereby enriching themselves still further. And it still goes on under a veneer of civilisation, with sufficient being conceded in welfare handouts - state charity - to stave off revolution. In the 107 years of Catholic Social Teaching, this f...

When I worked for a London borough in the late 1970s, the union branch, NALGO, had been taken over by a Trotskyite group, the Socialist Workers' Party. Amongst the items on their agenda was the promotion of abortion rights, which they termed "Women's Right to Choose'. Since the union's purpose was to deal with terms and conditions of employment, such a campaign was well outside its remit, and I worked with others, without success, to get the policy overturned. Ultimately, the union branch destroyed itself in a futile and unnecessary strike engineered by the same group of militants, but that is another matter. How abortion has come to be seen as a progressive cause is incomprehensible except in a world of newspeak where words mean the opposite of what they seem to mean. The photograph, taken just seven weeks after conception, shows that bones are clearly starting to develop. This is not surprising, as anyone who has kept tadpoles will know the speed at which they ma...

Looking away , originally uploaded by nicasaurusrex . Every street busker and Big Issue seller knows something about the economy that most politicians and their advisers do not. Location counts. Experts ignore this elementary fact. Karl Marx ignored it in most of his writings and so Marxist economies were run on the principle that location does not matter. Assuming the busker is adequately competent and picks a good spot, the amount they will earn depends on where they set up their pitch. They will do well at busy stations like Oxford Circus and Victoria. They will do quite nicely at places such as Ladbroke Grove or Hammersmith. They will just about get by at somewhere like Highbury and Islington if they pick their time. It isn't worth bothering at quiet suburban stations like West Finchley. These are exactly the sort of observations that led David Ricardo to formulate the Law of Rent at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The marginal location - somewhere like Highbury...

All Change at King's Cross , originally uploaded by Richard and Gill . The replacement programme for the Inter City 125, under the mismanagement of civil servants at the Department of Transport, continues to consume resources to no effect- several millions have already disappeared in consultancy. The specification is calling for a train that can be both diesel and electrically powered, run at 140mph, comply with present safety requirements and weigh less than an HST. Alstom has already dropped out of the procurement programme and Bombardier looks likely to follow suit, which will still leave them with a juicy order for the Thameslink and London Underground replacement, so why should they bother. That leaves Siemens and possibly Hitachi in the running. Hitachi would probably offer a run-on of the train they have supplied for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link commuter services to Kent. But the whole concept is looking increasingly un-feasible. What is actually needed? It depends on...

A lot, yet very little, I would suggest. The Conservatives did not win the Crewe by-election. Labour lost it. Gordon Brown should never have become Prime Minister, and the fact that he wanted the job so much and has performed so badly since he got it is an good illustration of the point made by Plato, that an essential qualification for the leaders of a country is not wanting to do the job. It is also the case the Labour has got its tax policies in a mess, but nobody else's are any better. All the Conservatives seem to be proposing is to make cuts and savings. Whilst the idea of savings is good in principle, in practice it has tended to lead to more spending as extra staff are taken on to oversee the cuts. In any case, the scope for cuts is limited when the government has so many domestic and overseas committments. An important one of which is to attempt to put right the collateral damage caused by the tax system itself. The really worrying aspect of the result is that nobody appea...

Addressing the CBI annual dinner last night, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling said: "A few years ago, one of our airlines used to say, 'We never forget you have a choice'. Today, governments should remember that. Business does have a choice. Business is increasingly mobile. "Tax rates have to be globally competitive. I am determined that British business will not be the fiscal fall guy. Business is the linchpin of the British economy. We need to ensure that the tax system is competitive and predictable, as well as ensuring that the business environment is attractive to increasingly mobile businesses." Good. So what is he going to do about it? There is no need to tax businesses at all. The tax can be shifted on to land instead - an ad valorem tax on the assessed rental value of land. Taking the tax off business is the most competitive thing any Chancellor could do. The ultimate in competitiveness, in fact. And the act would in itself raise land va...

I do not like the way this is going. The "safeguards" on research, for example, on hybrid embryos will be breached sooner or later, if only out of some scientist's curiosity. I do not like the provision for artificial insemination of fatherless families. To lose a father from death is a misfortune. To lose a father from divorce is also unfortunate and generally has an adverse impact on the children. But people do not normally get married and have children with the intention of having a family split-up. And some conceptions are accidental. But to deliberately create a child in a situation where that child will definitely not have a father is plain wicked. Then there is the matter of the abortion laws. I once met a doctor who had worked on a gynaecological ward in a hospital in the 1940s. He told me that the majority of cases were in hospital as a result of botched abortions. There is an understandable reluctance to return to that state of affairs. But killing a person is w...

I am not keen on flags but this one carries values about which I could have no reason to feel embarrassed for or in need to apologise about - in fact, precisely the opposite. There is an amusing story about the curious and characteristic faded colours. Originally the blue was a deeper colour, more of a Royal Blue and a sample of the fabric was deposited for reference. But over the years the sample faded and the flag got paler and paler, until the present colours settled on in 1906 and eventually defined and fixed by spectral formula in 1983. See history of the Swedish flag This freshly ironed one on the Södra Skärgård ferry looks as if it was on its very first day of use. Anyhow, I am always pleased to see it. It means a lot to me for a reason which I do not want to talk about.

Motorola has brought out a smart new mobile phone, the V8, as a replacement for the stylish Razr3. It is solidly made and runs on Linux. But it will not sync with the Mac and the manfacturer's policy is not to support Mac, unlike their earlier models some of which ran iTunes and which synced with not problems. It gets worse. You cannot sync it with Windows XP without buying extra software from Motorola so you would have to type in all your contacts by hand, which is also no good as the phone does not do the character Å which I have quite a few of in my names list. It has no backwards compatibility and will not work with the older version of phone tools, a new version is not supplied nor can one be downloaded from the Motorola web site. Oddly, the phone is recognised as a camera by both XP and Linux, but the "detect phone" process refuses to register the thing. They seem to have gone to considerable effort to ensure incompatibility. They have even replaced the standard min...

NHS reform is a hardy perennial and here it is back again. There seems to be new legislation every couple of years. Hospital funding to depend on performance, it promises. But how is performance to be measured? By some kind of performance indicator. But then the indicators become targets, and once that happens, actions are distorted so that the targets are met, with all sorts of bizarre consequences.

The government is proposing to introduce a new form of savings account for poor people, with money to be matched by government. Here is more soft-headed and badly thought-out legislation. Poor people are poor primarily because of the tax system. It is the poor who are hardest hit by the "ability to pay" principle, because as soon as they are not quite poor, the system hits them hard and knocks them back down again, so in the end a lot of them not unreasonably give up and make the best of things by surviving on benefit. This is another example of dealing with the symptoms and not causes. And whose money is the government giving away and what will the "poor" do with it, and when?

Reduced welfare dependency is another plank in the government's legislative programme, but how is it going to achieve that? The entire shape of the tax and benefits system positively encourages people to do nothing rather than something. And the same applies to the property tax system as well, with proposals of levying rates on empty commercial buildings being met by threats of de-roofing which would relieve the owners of the tax. Another case of things not being thought through properly.

Another item on the agenda is the proposal to allow councils to levy a supplement to the business rate. The problem is that, first, this is taxation without representation and second, owners of vacant and underdeveloped sites do not make their proper contribution to the business rate in relation to the potential or actual benefits enjoyed by those sites, which are held speculatively or negligently out of use. The solution to this one is land value taxation, in which sites are valued on the assumption that they are at the optimum permitted use, and subject to the same RATE OF TAX regardless of use - in other words, differences of use are taken into account at the valuation, which is based on current market evidence. With this tax, it would be possible to have both national and locally determined elements so that people are not making decisions at other people's expense.

Changes in banking regulation are another item in the government's programme. All sorts of measures are proposed such as depositor protection. But they key problem is lending for land purchase, which stoked up land values way beyond what was reasonable in the light of their actual values, which are the current annual streams of rental income that properties can yield. If those streams of rental income were subject to a substantial ad valorem tax, banks would stop lending money for property (land) purchase and land would be useless as collateral for loans. So banks would have to change their mode of operation to cope with the different conditions and the whole land price bubble phenomenon could not happen. And so, by dealing with the cause of the problem most of this proposed regulation would be unnecessary.

The government is proposing to introduce a mass of new legislation in the next session. On item is improved employment rights, especially for temporary workers. On the face of things, this is a good idea. What could be better than giving employees more rights? Indeed, what could possibly be wrong with such legislation? First, employers cannot be forced to employ anyone. If they find the terms of employment onerous, they will just not take anyone on at all. And since, due to the tax system, an employer must pay about 80 pence to the government in tax, for every £1 that the employee receives in take-home pay, which is all that an employee is ultimately concerned about, government already imposes a heavy burden on employees, to the point that labour is mistakenly seen as a COST of production and not a CAUSE of production, which it obviously is. Wages, properly speaking are the share of production that goes to labour, and labour-related taxes are nothing more than an impost on employers; e...

Since the beginning of the year, problems with the tax system have been continually in the news.There have been the row over non-domiciles - still not finally resolved; the Lichtenstein tax avoidance affair; the Capital Gains Tax changes and partial retreat; proposed changes in the taxation of profits earned by UK business overseas; relocation of companies to countries with more favourable tax regimes; the threat and partial abandonment of a bin tax; the now widespread realisation of the extent to which fuel prices are inflated by taxation as prices of crude oil go up; and the expectation of significant general inflation, which is effectively a tax on people with sterling balances since it reduces government debt in real terms. At the same time, there seems to be no limit in the growth of expectations of what government should provide: pensions and care of the elderly; food security; fuel affordability as prices rise; and the continuation, in changing circumstances, of public services ...

I was looking at the back numbers of a magazine yesterday, dating from the late 1940s. What struck me was, first, their dull appearance - a mass of grey text with no illustrations, photographs or diagrams; and second, the high quality of the content, well written and with the points carefully made with closely supporting arguments. Today, such a presentation would just be cast aside. By contrast, I was discussing the content of an email to be sent to Any Answers, the response to the discussion programme Any Questions. I once attended the latter programme live, and it was apparent how closely controlled the questions were. An informal but effective censorship is at work here. It is clear that some subjects would have been absolutely off-limits and for a email to stand chance of being read out, it would have to be reduced to a bare minimum. There is no real opportunity for developing an argument in this kind of forum; discussion can only take place within the boundaries of an accepted ag...

There is no shame in making a U-turn if one is going in the wrong direction. The government is to be congratulated on amending its proposals for abolishing the 10p tax rate by raising thresholds. The cost of this, said to be £2.7 billion, is about 0.6% of annual government expenditure of £589 billion. This must be well within the margin of error for budgets. In that taxation of wages is ultimately paid by employers and forms part of labour costs, the longer term effect of this change will be to cut unemployment and the total amount of benefit that has to be paid out. It will also result eventually, though again not in the short term, in a cut in government expenditure insofar as it cuts the cost of employing people in the public sector. Tax thresholds should be linked to the minimum wage. Minimum wage legislation should not be necessary; the fact that it is needed indicates that something else is wrong that ought to be dealt with properly instead of being merely tinkered with. Howeve...

Ideally, one carries on as normal until one's very last day, then wakes up one morning feeling a bit dozy, manages to say goodbye to everyone and breathes one's last in the afternoon. For most of us, it does not work like that. Typically, one is liable to spend two years in some kind of care home. That means at any one time, around 2.5% of people are in care - about 1.5 million at any one time if the population is taken at 60 million. With care costs of around £40,000 a year, that works out at an annual cost of £60 billion. Bearing in mind that over one-third of this is tax, if all the cost was to be paid by the government the net annual cost would be just under £40 billion, which is just under 10% of annual government expenditure. If payment for care is means-tested, people have an incentive to spend their last penny. But within the lifetime of those who have just retired, inflation has reduced the value of money by a factor of 30 since they began work. Inflation is in effect...

Great Central Railway Loughborough 10th May 2008 , originally uploaded by loose_grip_99 . Just 40 years ago the last locomotive to be overhauled in Britain left Crewe Works. A photograph was released with all the works staff posed in front of that locomotive, seen above last week newly overhauled. And that should have been the end of the story. Such is the appeal of these machines that the locomotive, now 57 years old, most of them in preservation, has once more just received it latest overhaul. Who would have expected it in 1968? But construction of steam locomotives has never quite stopped. It continued on a large scale in China until the 1980s, and there was a handful of new locomotives built by DLM in Switzerland for mountain railways in Switzerland and Austria in 1993, as well as individual machines built for miniature and narrow gauge lines, and of course the replica Tornado. Shall we ever see large scale construction resume? Bearing in mind that developments since the 197...

An economics journalist, Samuel Brittain, once attempted to explain the curious fact that some of the best developed countries in the world, such as Japan, were poorly endowed with natural resources, whereas many richly endowed countries were characterised by large numbers of extremely poor people. In his view, the reason was that natural resources create rent and the powerful try to get their hands on it, hold on to it and use it for their own benefit. I think the term is kleptocracy. This seems to be the case in Burma. It is rich in natural resources. On the other hand, the Burmese government cannot be altogether blamed for not wanting to let the west in. No doubt there are all sorts of factions in corporate America who would like to get their hands on the goodies, so say nothing of outfits like Bechtel and Halliburton, and well-funded evangelical Christians who must be itching to try to convert the poor benighted Buddhists to their scripture-based religion. "Burma is a resource...

I find the following story disturbing. A Filipino man whose wife died after being given an epidural in the arm rather than the spine during childbirth has lost his fight to stay in the UK. Before Mayra Cabrera's death, Arnel Cabrera, 38, was permitted to stay in Swindon because she was a nurse. But Alex Rook, lawyer for Mr Cabrera, confirmed the Home Office had refused his application to stay. An inquest ruled Mrs Cabrera died unlawfully killed as a result of the actions of the hospital. The coroner also said the Swindon and Marlborough NHS Trust and the midwife who administered the injection was guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. Mr Cabrera was said to be "too upset to speak" and was "devastated and shocked at this decision." Speaking of the Home Office ruling Mr Rook said: "This is an absolutely dreadful decision. If Mayra hadn't been killed, the family would still be living here. I will be writing to the relevant Home Office ministers asking th...

, originally uploaded by Tommunism . The Guardian is threatened with legal action from Tesco's for writing about its exploits in avoiding Stamp Duty Land Tax. It is indeed deplorable that a large company should threaten journalists with libel action for questioning its activities - in this case, its exploitation of loopholes in Stamp Duty Land Tax. But to argue, as the Guardian does, that democratically ordained tax laws should be obeyed in the spirit intended by parliament is to defend legislation that is flawed in its conception and sloppy in its implementation. Such criticism is certainly true of SDLT. This tax was the subject of a consultation exercise in 2002. The Land Value Taxation Campaign was one of the respondents. It argued that Stamp Duty should be abolished, on the grounds that it was already a significant barrier to the transfer of land and, as such, must act against the efficient workings of the economy. The Campaign pointed out that Stamp Duty achieved no soc...

A news item this morning explained that local authorities had been introducing lie detectors in an effort to reduce benefit fraud and it had already saved 100,000s of pounds ie 10 to the power of 5 - a figure followed by five naughts. That is the price of a few terrace houses. Benefit fraud it was said, is estimated to cost the government £400,000,000 a year, though this can only be a guesstimate. That is 4 x 10 to the power of 8 ie three orders of magnitude more than the amount saved. In other words the saving is trivial. Not worth a mention in a news programme when tens of thousands have just been killed in a natural disaster. Total government expenditure is just under £500 billion a year, that is 5 x 10 to the power of 11 so is three orders of magnitude more than the fraud. Now although the cost of the fraud would purchase a tram system for a medium sized town, it too becomes trivial in within the overall picture. But now look at some other figures. The cost of running the tax syst...

The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is saying that he would reinstate the 10p tax band. This is worrying. The 10p tax band should never have been introduced in the first place. The solution must be to raise the tax thresholds so that there is no taxation at all on low pay. If the same amount is going to be raised from Income Tax, it will mean higher rates but most people will end up paying just a little more and the low paid will be better off. A further advantage of raising thresholds is that the poverty trap bites less severely, giving an added incentive to work rather stay on benefit, thereby cutting the cost of the government's welfare bill. Sadly it seems as if the Conservative leader is suffering from numerical illiteracy just like most of the other politicians appear to be or he would have seen the point, which really isn't difficult to put across.

The Last Routemaster , originally uploaded by Boxley . So the new Mayor, Boris Johnson, wants to get rid of bendybuses and bring back an up-to-date version of the Routemaster, complete with conductor. Excellent idea but he will have his work cut out. The most difficult task will be the accessibility regulations, originating from the EU, which mean that buses must be wheelchair-accessible. This needs to challenged and derogation sought. It is motivated more by political correctness than a desire to make sure everyone can get about easily and affordably. Apart from anything else, a bus in which people can move about in wheelchairs will be a hazard to other people, for example those who are unsteady on their feet and need plenty of poles and things to hold on to, because grab rails cannot be placed where they are needed. Having had relatives and friends who were confined to wheelchairs, I am aware of the problem but I would certainly not have wanted to take them on any bus. For th...

Cattle truck , originally uploaded by Nicobobinus . In addition to the obvious reasons, like the Labour government's generally poor performance for the past nine months, and the huge cost over-run on the Olympic stadium, I suspect that one of the factors which lost Ken Livingstone the election for Mayor of London is that people resent the fact that the Routemasters were replaced by these bendybuses. These are a daily misery not just for the people who have to use them, but for other road users who now have to take extra care to make sure they do not get in the way. Labour had promised to keep the Routemasters and a substantial amount was spent on giving them a thorough overhaul before they were suddenly withdrawn in 2005. It is still possible to travel on a Routemaster in London but only on sightseeing services. This one is in service in Helsinki.

Bank of England, London , originally uploaded by hanneorla . According to Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, assets are underpriced already. This is interesting. The house next door is up for sale for £389,000. It has been let for about £1200 a month, around £12,000 a year net. That makes the yield just over 3%. You can get 6% by putting your money in a building society. Northern Rock pays 6.15%. So the house next door is not underpriced. So where are these underpriced assets?