AN OUTSIDE VIEW

People often say that Israel is the cause of all the trouble in the Islamic world. Such as yesterday's bomb outrages in India? What could Israel possibly have to do with events in India? Or China or Thailand or the Philippines, or all the other countries which are affected by Islamic terrorism. I am sure that most Moslems are perfectly charming and good people but there does seem to be a link between Islam and violence, and it seems to go back to the Prophet himself. Which is a problem for all of us.

Dungeness Originally uploaded by seadipper The Scottish National win at Glasgow East piles on the pressure for a referendum which could leave to the break up of the UK. The underlying reasons are economic and cultural. Where would that leave England? I never feel comfortable when I see this flag flying. I am not English. I am British. Though not every one who flies it is a racist or anything like that, the English flag carries a set of values some of which are very ugly. I don't mind the Union Jack but that carries a mixture of connotations including that of fairness and inclusiveness, precisely because it is not the flag of a single country. I am not really keen on flags, but if I have to pick one, it is faded blue with an off-centre yellow cross. That carries values I am more in tune with. It is the closest thing to an anti-flag. For a discussion of the economics of the Scottish business, I have written something here

The UK government has got into trouble over its new proposals. Again. I have written up my comments here What is the matter with the government? They don't seem to be able to put a foot right. And the Conservatives do not promise any plausible solutions so one cannot expect any cures from that direction.

push and stand - a daily ritual for commuters on the thameslink Originally uploaded by robinhamman I wish the Department of Transport would decide what Thameslink is for. The train service goes from Brighton to Bedford and takes about 2 1/2 hours from end to end. The busiest section is between Croydon and St Albans, where it runs through the centre of London. There, it is a suburban service much like the underground. The smaller number of passengers travelling longer distances have to put up with underground standards of comfort for journeys of inter-city duration, whilst the stock tends to have insufficient circulation and standing space for urban services. This leads to problems like the one in the picture. The service also tends to transfer delays from the Brighton line to the Midland and vice versa. It woud surely be better to cut the service back so that it ran just within, roughly, the M25 at the most. South of London, services should commence at one of the southern terminals, ...

She,ll being coming round the. . . . . Originally uploaded by Elsie esq. The Japanese firm Hitachi is a possible contender for new rolling stock for the Thameslink train franchise . This illustrates one of the deficiencies of the present rolling stock procurement programme. Over the southern section of the route between London and the South Coast, the stock will be sharing the line with the Southern franchise, which operates a fleet of Electrostar trains built by Bombardier, like the one in the picture. If the new trains are fully compatible with the present ones, then units can be coupled together and run normally. This is particularly useful in unexpected situations - for instance, if a train breaks down or needs to be lengthened due to extra traffic. It is also essential if fleets are to be transferred from one route to another in response to changing circumstances. Compatibility gives flexibility. Most trains constructed between about 1950 and 1975 had such compatibility, but sinc...

I am in Uppsala again, trying to learn Swedish. I am not quite sure why I want to do that, so if anyone asks me I say, "just for fun - bara för roligt". Anyhow, it is interesting and Uppsala is a very pleasant place to spend the summer in. Probably the winter too, though apparently it gets very cold and the days are short and often dark, which makes people depressed. The course is run by an organisation called Uppsala International Summer Sesssions (UISS). You can find out more about it on their web site in the unlikely event of your wanting to learn Swedish. Frankly, the language is not a lot of use, with only about 10 million people speaking it in Sweden and Finland. It is sufficiently similar to Danish and Norwegian to allow you to read the free newspapers like Metro and the magazines they give out on the trains, in those languages also. But if you want to be able to speak to as many people as possible, learn Spanish or Chinese instead, or even Portuguese. But for me, this...

The economic crisis that the US and Britain are now going through grows worse by the day. It is not a crisis of Capitalism but it is a crisis of the present system of economic organisation. It will take several years to recover - probably around 2015 - and many people are going to get hurt. But unless there is effective reform, the same problems will come round again in a score of years.

This is taken from the website of Freddie Mac, one of the two big government-backed companies involved in US mortages. "Freddie Mac operates in a single, safe business: residential mortgages backed by the equity of millions of American homes across the nation. Freddie Mac is subject to rigorous governmental oversight and substantial capital requirements, and our financial disclosures surpass those of other large institutions. These practices ensure that our business is financially transparent and accountable to our shareholders, regulators and the American public." The trouble is that, as I was taught when I studied economics, land is not wealth, and house prices include a substantial chunk of land value in the total. So this equity in land, concealed as "American homes", was never quite as sound as most people, including the recognised experts, imagined. Worse till, the value was pumped up to a bubble value by financial organisation's willingness to l...

The rooms in the tower at Skokloster Slott are octagonal. In the one at the top is a collection of curiosities, including a couple of unicorns horns. Only they are actually the bones from whales' penises. Which raises the question of email spam, which mostly try to sell methods of extending one's penis. If anyone bought them all, and they were effective, their penis would be absolutely gigantic and in need of similar reinforcement.

019 Canterbury Cathedral Nave facing west Originally uploaded by Eric Rochester The Church of England is going through one its periods of agonisation. It would never have existed were it not for Henry_VIIIs divorce, though the Reformation would probably have affected the church in England in some way, even if it were not for the Tudor king. It has always been a three-way compromise between those who would like to have remained Roman Catholic, the genuine Protestants - the so-called evangelicals - who adhere closely to scriptural texts, and the ones in-between, probably the largest number, who just want to live-and-let-live. It has held together because nobody has generally pushed principle too hard. A few, like John Wesley, went off to found the Methodists, and from Newman's time there was a trickle into the Roman Catholic church, but the C of E has remained the dominant Christian grouping in England until recent years. The points at issue this time are the appointment of openly g...

The starting blocks... Originally uploaded by Thrash Merchant The replacement programme for Britain's high speed trains runs from crisis to crisis. The project, to replace Britain's high speed electric trains (left) and its high speed diesel trains (right) is being managed by the Department of Transport, who have specified a light weight train capable of running at 140 mph, under electric power where the lines are electrified and under diesel power where they are not. Alstom (builders of the TGV and Eurostar) has already pulled out of the bidding process. A consortium of the Canadian based giant, Bombardier, and German arch-competitor Siemens (builder of the German ICE train), has refused, in its bid, to comply with all the DfT conditions. Which leaves the Japanese firm Hitachi, which has just added new members to its consortium. This has been a troubled project from its inception. The concept sounds plain wrong. It is untried, inherently complex and liable to run into prolong...

European Union finance ministers have voted to condemn Britain for flagrant breach of the Maastricht spending rules, irked that the UK government has not even tried to keep its budget deficit below the treaty limit of 3pc of national income. By its own admission, Labour will need to borrow at least 3.2pc of GDP this year, even if the economy holds up well. Brussels described this as "prima facie evidence of a planned excessive deficit". It warned that UK public finances were no longer on a sustainable course after the spending blitz of recent years. Yesterday's vote is the first time the EU has launched disciplinary action against a big Western state under the revamped Growth and Stability Pact. The UK now has the worst fiscal profile of any developed country in the North Atlantic sphere. The European Commission expects the UK's public debt to rise from 43.2pc of GDP last year to 47.5pc by the end of next year. The ritual of naming and shaming at EU meetings is likely...

Hur kan mjukvara var miljöhotande? En dator är bara en liten sak. Men det finns miljontals av datorer. En otrolig massa energi används när datorer tillverkas. Många olika mineraler måste grävas upp från jorden. Sedan måste mineraler omvändes till särskilt ämnen för att göra dem lämpliga för att tillverkas till datorer. Alla processer använder mycket energi. Och eftersom datorer brukar tillverkas i Kina, används energi också för att transportera dem nästan halvvägs runt jorden. Datorer själv förbrukar mycket el. En bärbar dator kan användas som en bra självvärmeelement när vädret är kallt. Datorer slår ut värme. När det finns många datorer, till exempel i en stor datacentral blir värmen ett stort problem. En datacentral använder inte bara el för datorer men också för kylsystemet. Londons elföretag EDF har förbjudit nya datacentraler eftersom kablarna inte räcker och nya större kablar måste installeras. De flesta hemdatorer används bara för att göra enkla saker, till exempel, titta på in...

The Swedish tax authorities have had a crack-down on restaurants who fiddle their takings to avoid tax. A popular method has been by manipulating their cash registers. So far, over 100 restaurateurs have been convicted and 45 sent to prison. Sweden enjoys high standards of public services, so much so that they can be taken as a benchmark for how such things ought to be. And though Sweden, unlike some other countries, no longer harbours the delusion of being a world power with the associated need to spend a fortune on military activities, it still costs a lot of money. Around 55% of the Swedish economy is in the public sector, which suggests that in the UK, with its much greater concentration of population, the figure needs to be much higher than the present 45% or so to bring the public realm up to the standard that people aspire to. However, there are good and bad ways of collecting tax. Levying charges on products, goods and services is inevitably troublesome and the authorities are ...

By mistake and due to bad planning I attended the English language Mass in Uppsala today. The music came from a book called "Gathering". It was jaded 1970s material which I had never heard before, and there was only one singer. I could not understand the readings as they were read by an American with a drawly accent. The priest, a Jesuit, I think, had a slight German accent but was perfectly fluent and understandable. After the service, which was attended by about 30 people as an outside guess, I spoke to some of the congregation and it seems I was the only UK English-speaking person in the congregation. There were a couple of people from Poland, a couple more from Italy, one from Spain and a few Africans. There is some point in having the Mass in the vernacular of the country it is being said in, but what is the point of having it in English in circumstances such as those just described? And I have come across the same thing in Estonia, only in that case the priest's Eng...

I was listening to the BBC Sunday programme this morning. There were a couple of pieces I found of interest, an interview by Hans Kung and a feature on the Anglican's troubles. Hans Kung's concern was Papal Infallibility. Why this should be I do not know. In short, the dogma, was defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870, and applies when the Pope makes an ex-cathedra statement on a matter of Dogma. There has only ever been one such statement, made by Pope Pius XII in 1950, which defined the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an article of faith. There was never any possibility that Humanae Vitae, which Kung referred to, could have been an article of faith. This is of course not to say that anything said by the Pope is not to be regarded as important. The long term consequences of easy contraception still have to be evaluated as they have had dramatic consequences for society. It will take at least another 50 years before the full effects can be judged. Certainly in Sw...

The UK is to purchase two new aircraft carriers at a cost of £4 billion. Another £12 billion is to be spent on aircraft for the ships. Meanwhile, the Army is hoping to spend £14 billion on a new generation of armoured vehicles. That is enough to pay for hundreds of miles of much-needed new and upgraded railway. Asked about the cost and whether it was justified, Admiral Band said that although the present focus was on two land campaigns - Iraq and Afghanistan - it was vital to invest in the future, 15 or 20 years ahead, and he envisaged carriers playing a crucial role in projecting power and protecting Britain’s global interests. Reading all this, nobody would think that Britain was a country that was grossly overcrowded into about one-third of its land area, with an economy that is chronically sick but currently running into one of its periodic crises, where young people could not afford a place to start a family, with a creaking infrastructure, a rotten school system and a democratic ...

The news on the UK economy gives no indication of any silver lining to the cloud. All is talk of recession, a house price crash, a falling exchange rate and inflation. The falling exchange rate is particularly serious. A year ago, a Euro cost 71 pence, whereas now it is nearly 80p. But the Euro itself has also been losing purchasing power, and all these changes will feed through into higher prices for all imported goods. The only people to benefit are companies who provide services with small inputs of imported products. Precisely what will happen is impossible to predict as much depends on how the government and the Bank of England deals with the situation. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that the response will be coherent; when the Governor of the Bank of England blames external causes, one can have no confidence that there is any intention even of bringing the situation under control. In any case, most of the inflation for the next two years is probably already in the pipeli...

The Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Willin has prepared a series of photographs, one of them depicting a Last Supper with Jesus and a group of what appear to be transvestites. The figures are arranged in a reconstruction of the Leonardo mural. The exhibition has been controversial. Pope John Paul cancelled an audience with the Protestant Archbishop Hammar of Uppsala for supporting the exhibit – which has been touring for ten years – and allowing it to be shown in churches across Sweden. Speaking as a gay man who is also a Catholic, I find the pictures in bad taste rather than offensive but I would not bother to go and look at them. I can understand, however, why some Christians would definitely be offended. They do not conform to the imagery that people are familiar with. But what is the artist actually trying to say? If the message is that Jesus came to save sinners, that is not unorthodox - on the contrary. My own parish, being where it is in the centre of Brighton, has more than its...