AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Svenska Kyrkan is celebrating the 50th anniversary of women priests. As a Catholic, I can only comment from the outside but having women priests has certainly has not helped the church to flourish. As far as I can understand, priests in the Swedish church are comparable to those at the "high" end of the Anglicans - in other words, they regard themselves as priests and not ministers. The status of Anglican orders was clarified in Apostolicae Curae in 1896 by Pope Leo XIII, declaring all Anglican ordinations to be "absolutely null and utterly void" . I can find no reference to the status of Svenska Kyrkan's orders. One issue is that the Catholic Church regards Ordination as a Sacrament, which is not the case with the Anglicans, but the principal point is that of authority and recognition of the authority of the successor of Peter, which is an article of the Apostles' Creed - " I believe in the Holy Catholic Church ". Anyone who really does believe th...

I read today that "Constitutional experts and minority parties yesterday rallied behind proposals to repeal the 300-year bar to Catholics succeeding to the throne and end male precedence in the royal succession." I feel uncomfortable about the present law but it could cause more problems than it solved as the monarch is de facto head of the Church of England. If the law is abolished, the Church of England is downgraded to the position of being just another sect. It would no longer have the right to have its bishops in the House of Lords. and would leave the British state dangerously vulnerable to takeover by some other religious force in the future. In a strange way, the present law enshrines a Christian identity in Britain, though a Protestant one. Things could be a lot worse and there is no knowing what damage this reform could unleash. In any case there are more important matters that have to be dealt with.

The Guardian's old stalwart, Polly Toynbee, is another journalist who gets trashed by the commentators both from positions on the left and right. She was an ardent advocate of New Labour, which in retrospect demonstrates a certain lack of perspicacity. Now that the wheels have come off, she has found herself in a position of having to try to defend the indefensible. Some of the attacks are personal, drawing attention to her privileged background. In the circumstances, and given what she says, such criticism is not unreasonable. Toynbee and her Guardian colleagues are as much a part of the British Establishment as the top level civil servants, the heads of Oxbridge colleges and the editors of the right wing press. Their shared aim is to control what it is permitted to be discussed and what voices must be silenced. With a 99% success rate, by their own standards they are doing very well. But it has got the country enmeshed in a mass of nearly insoluble problems.

Why does the Observer keep on employing Will Hutton? Week after week he writes articles which are pulled to pieces by commentators. His proposals would be disastrous and usually counter-productive. He has been doing it for years. Strange. Why don't they get rid of him and employ one of the better commentators instead. Almost any of them would be better? Read the article here

Why are the Liberal Democrats talking about what they would do if they became the next government? They are not going to be the next UK government. Paddy Power was giving odds of 100-1 against. This does not mean to say that they are useless, but they ought to take a realistic view. There is a need for a critique of the policies of both of the largest parties but the Liberal Democrats are not presenting the distinctive point of view which is so needed and which they have the potential to do. Talk of tax cuts indicates the shallowness of their thinking. The trouble with tax is more to do with what is taxed, not how much tax the government collects. What a pity that so few in the party have picked up this idea.

I came across this on Facebook and reproduce it here. Från 1 januari 1975 och fram tills idag har det utförts drygt 1 100 000 aborter i Sverige. Motsvarande siffra för hela världen är över 1 miljard. Hur förstår man något sådant? Kanske är det nödvändigt att höra berättelser från män och kvinnor som varit med om aborter för att kunna få en inblick i hur hundratusentals män och kvinnor i Sverige mår idag. From January 1975 to date there have been over a million abortions in Sweden and over a billion worldwide. How can anyone understand such a thing? Perhaps it helps to hear accounts from men and women themselves who have been involved in abortions in order to gain an insight about how hundreds of thousands of people in Britain feel today. Besök gärna två nya bloggar som startats de senaste månaderna, den ena till och med för bara några dagar sedan. Om du börjar att läsa blogginläggen bakifrån, med det äldsta inlägget först, är det svårt att sluta. Have a look at two new blogs which have...

The cost of railway vehicles is accelerating. I discussed this the other day with an expert, who told me it was just the trend of things that the price of passenger vehicles was rising to the £2.5 million level. Is it inevitable? Could it be that engineering costs have gone out of control because specifications are not being sufficiently questioned? From the passengers' point of view a modern train actually offers less in some ways than its 1950s predecessor. There is less space, seating is cramped and many of those seats offer no view out of the window. A chronic complaint is shortage of space for luggage. There is a lot of advanced and expensive technology in the background which ought to add to the comfort and convenience of the journey but the obvious things like legroom and luggage space have been squeezed out, partly because the high cost of the modern vehicles means that it is critical that as many people as possible are packed in. Fleet sizes must be pared to a minimum, lea...

The latest issue of Rail Professional is of more than usual interest. Amongst the topics examined are... Rolling stock for the future Colin Walton, Chairman of Bombardier UK, reveals that the company has a dip in orders around 2011 and would offer "a very good price" for orders placed by the end of the year. Which is why the decision by the Department of Transport to go for a new design of train for Thameslink is wrong. There is an excellent case for just going out and ordering more Electrostars and developing the next generation of electric multiple unit trains to a longer timescale. After all, Transport for London is ordering a version of the Electrostar for London Overground, operating on similar services. With a suitable internal configuration, having plenty of circulation space around the doorways, they are adequate if not ideal. In any case the Department of Transport needs to re-think how the Thameslink service is operated, as there can be no design of rolling stock t...

So says Polly Toynbee in the Guardian this morning. When four "aristocratic" families own the lion's share of Central London what else can one expect but that Britain is riven by class? Aristocratic means their ancestors enjoyed the monarch's favour in the sixteenth century and managed to avoid getting their heads chopped off. For an explanation, have a look a the web site of the Land Value Taxation Campaign here and download the exhibition brochure which spells it all out, unashamedly. There are, I suggest, several classes, at least five. (1) Aristocratic landowners (2) Government/educational establishment, opinion formers, top managers (3) Salaried employees, salespeople, tradespeople, small businesspeople. (4) Unskilled employed and low paid (5) Unemployed welfare-dependent. There is a small amount of movement between them. One of the tasks of level 2 people is to make sure nothing is said or done to damage the priviliges enjoyed by people at level 1. If they did...

There are two major objections to aid from first world governments to developing countries. First world tax systems, despite being notionally related to ability to pay, are in practice only so for the poor and not-quite poor, who cannot pay for advice to enable them to exploit the loopholes in their countries' tax systems. The second objection is that development does not necessarily help the poor in the developing countries, any more than it did in Europe in the period after the industrial revolution. With each successive wave of technical development, from the advent of steam power, railways, internal combustion, electricity, information technology and communications technology, the productive power of labour was increased manyfold. But it did not produce a commensurate increase either in wages or in the return to capital. Wages remained stuck at the minimum that labour would accept. The end product was a few fat-cat landowners and a mass of poor, a situation which was only all...

The cupboard of ideas, that is. The British economy is going through a bad patch and headed for worse. The essential emptiness of the New Labour project is now revealed. There is talk of the "total destruction" of the Labour Party. The Conservatives have got nothing to offer. Cutting waste and inheritance tax are their big ideas, as though cutting taxes on the dead will do anything for the living. If the Liberal Democrats have anything useful in their cupboard,, it is at the back of the top shelf, and well hidden. The Green Party is too small to matter. They have a few good policies, also on the top shelf and their members do not understand their significance. Some politicians talk about raising the retiring age and making benefit scroungers go back to work, though they do not explain how that is meant to happen with unemployment now above 6%. The party conference season is beginning. I fear it will just reveal the emptiness. How has this come about? Intellectual laziness, ma...

It struck me this evening that I will be on the ferry back to Britain in just four weeks time. When I read the news I cannot work up any enthusiasm about the thought. The British goverment has got the economy into a complete mess and made everyone poorer in the process. They have failed in their fundamental duty. The terrifying thought is that the Conservatives would have done no better. Can anyone be blamed? The politicians? Perhaps. They are only trying to do what people want. So came the rise of the focus group, which turned leaders into followers. What about the experts who advise the politicians? Partly, because economics turned from being a developing science into semi-quackery some time around 1885. Then again, people have freely fought to get onto the "property ladder", without thinking it was riddled with woodworm. Many imagined they could make a fast buck, as house prices rose by the week. And borrowed more than their houses were worth, or against the rising value o...

I have been looking back over my previous blogs from a year or so back. At the time, I notice that the main economc concerns were about unaffordable housing and its rising costs. In one of my comments, I suggested that there was a crash imminent. My first on Northern Rock was in mid September, and soon after I noted that it was the harbinger of the major economic collapse that is now under way. How many of the professionals got that right? The most accurate predictions, as usual, came from people like myself who subscribe to the economic analysis developed by Henry George in the 1870s. It is not a matter of being a genius, but simply of following the most reliable body of theory available. There is no satisfaction in getting predictions like this right. We are all poorer as a result of the British government's reckless policies, as becomes evident when one is exchanging one's UK pounds into petrocurrencies like the Norwegian kronor. The pound was a petrocurrency once, but unlik...

Unlimited toilet paper! Originally uploaded by Savages911 And so the UK Pound slides down, now against both the Euro and the Dollar too, which was itself in trouble only weeks ago. Since the Euro has lost value against goods and services, so matters are much worse than they seem. The government does not know what to do. In the short term it cannot do anything. If the interest rate is put up, it will hold the value of the £ but aggravate recession. If it goes down, it will aggravate inflation. The mistake was made a decade ago, when it was decided to use interest rates as the means for achieving price stabiity. Of couse it did not work. There were people who said this at the time. Come the end of the boom cycle and the government finds itself powerless, since all options must fail. I do not blame the government particularly. A Conservative government would have been in the same predicament. I blame the academics who promote false theories of economics, as they have done since the rise ...

House of Commons interior (parliamentary copyright) Members of the British House of Commons sit opposite each other in facing rows. The layout was inherited from the middle ages, when the first meetings were held in a chapel with a similar layout. There is a government and an opposition, and the confrontational approach is reinforced by the first-past-the-post electoral system. In an interview a few weeks ago, one MP praised the system as ensuring that everything gets properly discussed and both sides of every question are aired and thrashed out. He referred to its origin in the arts of debate developed in classical Greece and Rome. Confrontation is not a good principle and in a fast-changing world it is not serving the country well. There are usually more than two sides to an issue. Confrontation leaves no room for a third point of view. Worse still, such a system absolutely prevents a shifting of the fundamental terms of any argument, since both parties to the debate are sharing the ...

If the Republican McCain gets elected, nothing much will change. But then nothing much is expected. What if Obama wins? He is still committed to the futile action in Afghanistan. He will also inherit the economic problems that have bubbled up. What will he actually do about those? He utters fine words but seems to have no policies that would address the USA's problems. A bit like Tony Blair in 1997, then. Expect nothing from him either.