AN OUTSIDE VIEW

I was pleased that Handel won the vote for BBC Composer of the Year. This was a difficult choice, the others being Purcell, Haydn and Mendelsson. Most mornings when I am in Brighton, I am down at the seafront at dawn. Sometimes the sea is rough and the sky an angry red, presaging a stormy day. The scene is operatic. Scene Two of some Handel opera, in fact. I have put a selection of Handel operas on my iPod, which are perfect for a long train journey.

29th December is the anniversary of the murder in 1170 of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. It is usually celebrated as one of his two feast days but the feast seems to have been superseded on account of the readings which are those for the Feast of the Presentation. At a time when Britain is plagued by bad government, it seems fitting to commemorate an Englishman who resisted it. About twenty years ago, the curate of my parish church in Brighton was Fr Mark Elvins who is a descendant of the Thurnhams of Thurnham on the North Downs, who were connected to Ranulph de Broc, one of the four knights who committed the murder on the instigation of King Henry II. Whilst on a visit to Rome he had mentioned the fact to someone in a religious house and was presented with a relic of St Thomas. King Henry VIII had intended all relics of St Thomas to be destroyed, but Fr Elvins related to me that relics had been presented to the King of France and the Papal Legate at a state visit some ti...

I thought that there were many disturbing aspects of this case. I am not in favour of the death penalty, but it is the decision of the Chinese to punish drug smuggling in this way and that surely is the end of the matter. There is a good case to be made for the severest punishment for drug dealing. There is an even better case for decriminalising it altogether. What there is not a good case for is to make it a criminal offence and not imposing the severest punishment, which is the policy in the UK. Chinese society was for centuries enfeebled by opium addiction and the country's determination is understandable. The Chinese have not forgotten that the British went to war against China to protect the "rights" of British merchants to sell opium in China. Also worrying was the fact that that a man with severe mental illness had been lost track of by both his family and the British health care services, to the extent that he had ended up in China. Is this part of "Care i...

The Daily Express today ran a headline about how badly Britain's local councils had dealt with the snowy weather. Normally this newspaper's promotes the view that the best councils are those with the lowest council tax. Being prepared for snow and ice is expensive and must be paid for through taxation. The Express editorial team seems to be suffering from cognitive dissonance.

CAN YOU HEAR THE POWER? You need to listen hard. There is something very odd about 71000, the Duke of Gloucester, which sounds different from any other steam locomotive: the exhaust sound is soft and almost perfectly regular, sometimes described as a "chatter", and presumably due to the special valve gear with which it is fitted. The video shows it pulling hard - probably flat out - up the notorious Wellington bank. It also shows that there is surplus steam which is being released from the safety valves. As part of the programme of research, upgrades and remedial work which the owners have been engaged in ever since the locomotive was removed from the scrapyard in the early 1970s, it is presently undergoing further modifications to remedy yet another manufacturing error. This fault apparently meant that the centre of the three cylinders has only been producing half the power it ought to, so that the locomotive is only running at 5/6th of its potential. Since, this defect...

Once again, the snows are upon us and once again the roads are not being cleared. Are councils to blame? Perhaps, but keeping the roads clear of snow costs money. If councils were to take the responsibility, then council tax would rise. But the way for councils to win approval is to keep the council tax low. So the real reason why the roads are blocked with snow is because people are not willing to pay for the service.

The British government is preparing a report on the future of high speed rail in Britain. A firm proposal is expected in the spring. Enthusiasm is growing, as more and more people become familiar with travel on high speed lines on the continent. But Britain is not the continent and the British railway network is not tied in to the continental one except through the Channel Tunnel. The case against high speed rail in Britain is strong, and it needs to be put, because investment in high speed rail could turn out to be bad value for money, especially bearing in mind how else it could have been spent. France, Germany and Spain, which have the best-developed high-speed systems, are large countries with cities far apart, separated by sparsely-populated countryside. Britain has a completely different pattern of settlement, with 80% of the population living in less than one-third of the land area, but relatively spread-out within that area, in low-density suburbs that are difficult to se...

SAVE THE PLANET - BECOME A NUN!

No, it is not, but Tax Justice has been making approving comments about what is being hatched in Copenhagen, which should put one on one's guard immediately . The proposals are for a financial transactions tax and a carbon tax, so that the rich can help the poor. But the likely effects of a financial transactions tax are unpredictable, as the system is a delicately balanced one. An effect of trading at high frequency and volumes is that exchange rates keep within close limits, which probably helps to stabilise the system. But since it is working quite well at the moment and is peripheral to the land-based boom-bust cycle, it sounds like a bad idea to interfere through taxation. In any case, where is the principle behind such a tax? Taxes on carbon hit those in cold or remote areas the hardest, which adds to congestion in the more populous regions. That is a bad idea. And poor people, being tenants, are not in a position to do much to reduce the size of their heating bills. This sou...

Children's favourite Thomas the Tank Engine has been attacked by a Canadian academic for its "conservative political ideology" and failure to adequately represent women. I read this in the Daily Telegraph, so it could have been a spoof (see link at bottom). Had it been April 1st, one could have been certain. But then again, such things are possible. Apparently the trouble is that the engines have boys' names and the carriages have girls', such as Annie and Clarabel, which makes it sexist. Eventually came Daisy the railcar, which solved the problem a bit, but she took a long time to settle down and could misbehave at times. A lot has happened since the last Thomas story was written, what with the railways being privatised and so many new trains replacing the old ones. There are real possibilities here. How would the engines react to finding a real stinker like a Voyager? Here is an attempt to bring things up to date. Latest news from Thomas ... When the Big ...

Man säger att en biskop i den svenska kyrkan blev den första lesbiska biskopen i världen. Men det kan inte vara sant. Det finns redan en biskop i Lesbos - den är faktiskt den grekiska ortodoxa biskop Metropolitan Iakovos III.

Punishing the bankers with a windfall tax is this week's political big idea. The trouble is that it is based on no principle. Worse, it is retrospective and therefore contrary to a fundamental principle of jurisprudence. It is difficult to believe that no laws or contracts have been broken. Have none of those responsible obtained money by false pretences, or failed to exercise due diligence or, indeed, reasonable professional competence? This is what needs to be investigated and tested in open court. Those found guilty or responsible should be duly punished if any crimes have been committed, sued if contracts have been broken, or both. Windfall taxes are a blunt instrument and set a bad precedent.

The past few years have seen a spate of attempts to build new steam locomotives in Britain. Tornado, Mostly the aim is to construct examples of types that were never made it into preservation, such as, Tornado, the brand new A1 Pacific completed last year, the culmination of a twenty year project. It seems to be performing particularly well, perhaps because the construction is to a higher standard of precision than was usual when the original locomotives were built in the last 1940s, and possibly also because the machine receives more care and attention than was possible in the days of British Railways. Following this have come two further projects for large main line locomotives to fill preservation gaps: a Clan class British Railways standard Pacific and a Patriot class 4-6-0, a type designed in the 1920s. A third new build project is for the construction of a small tank locomotive to the North Eastern Railways G5 design, introduced in 1893. Yet a fourth is to build an example of the...

Following disclosures about leaked emails, people no longer know who or what to believe on the subject, since few of those making statements on the subject are completely impartial and are without any vested interest in the outcome. In an attempt to settle the argument, the front page of today's Times reports, "The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. "The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at ...