AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Rosa and Blå Express bus routes have now been re-routed to run direct from Järntorget to Nordstan and Centralstationen, via the Opera House. That solves the problem of the long journey time between the station and the west side of Gothenburg city centre, which is the main benefit of Västlänken. If these buses are not sufficient, a new route could be introduced to run from the station to Järntorget via the inner ring road (past Heden). So now Västlänken can be dropped and a few tens of billions of kronor saved.

The UK government is not proposing to restrict the flow of goods INTO the UK, nor is the EU proposing to restrict the flow of goods OUT of the the EU. That poses a set of questions, but not the ones that are being asked; there have been warnings about Britain running short of food after Brexit, due to customs delays. But there has been no threat of sanctions against the UK, so what is this all about? More relevant was an article last week in the Guardian described the problem of reinstatement of customs at Rotterdam. EU rules will require customs checks on goods from Britain at every port. However, there does not seem to be any corresponding need to do the same thing at Harwich and Felixstowe, nor does the UK government appear to have the inclination to commit the considerable resources. Likewise, passengers arriving at E27 destinations from the UK will theoretically have to declare goods purchased in the UK. I can envisage being made to queue for customs checks on returning home...

In the dream, the Jewish Israelis all pack up and go, leaving only the Christians, Muslims and Druze. The Palestinian refugees, now in their third generation and numbering five million descendants of the estimated 700,000, can now return. To redress all the other injustices, compensation is be paid to the estates of 1948 landowners on the basis of 1948 use value, plus 70 years rent. Tenants displaced in 1948 are compensated on the basis of 70 years disturbance. That raises a practical question. How would the restored ownership and tenancy rights be allocated seventy years later? Would there be a court to settle disputes between claimants, eg second cousins? How long would it take to settle these disputes, which would inevitably arise? What would happen in the meantime?

Conflicting predictions are being made by Brexit opponents. Brexit will lead to the collapse of British agriculture and industry. There will not be sufficient workers for seasonal agricultural work. Both predictions cannot be true. Assuming a near, but not total collapse, there will be millions of unemployed workers willing to pick strawberries at a pittance wage. Fantasy aside, there are not a fixed number of workers in a country, any more than there is a fixed amount of work to be done. Unemployment in the UK is allegedly at a very low level, though this conceals big regional and sectoral differences. Unemployment figures are also politically loaded. There has, for decades, been a drive to remove the unemployed, in one way or another, from the numbers of those seeking work or potentially economically active. The amount of harassment needed to claim benefit and remain as an unemployed statistic is an incentive to drop off the list, thereby becoming classified as not economicall...

The rumour mill in Sweden is increasingly talking about election fraud. There is certainly a big discrepancy between the pre-election predictions and the result, particularly in the case of the Sverigedemokraterna (SD), which is about one-third down. There were reports that there were no voting slips for the SD at many polling stations (there is a different slip for each party), and that counts and registration of votes may have been irregular. The government website crashed for over an hour after the election. The Swedish voting system is complicated and the votes are not counted as they are in Britain. It does not happen under the eye of the public, as in Britain, where the ballot papers are sorted and counted in a large hall, closely watched by scrutineers from all the parties. Nor is there the exciting moment when the Returning Officer stands up to announce the result. There is much wrong with the British first past the post system, where people vote for the major party or ca...

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, shocked by the shift of the Labour Party back to the Marxist Left, has argued that it is time. My reaction is just a weary, “Here we go again!”. In the 1980s it was called “Militant”. Now it is “Momentum”. Behind it are the same public sector white collar staff and college lecturers. We need to think beyond the one-dimensional Left-Right political model. Left and Right are both failed paradigms. Both are driven, conceptually, from the extremes. It was Lenin who said that “The wind always blows from the Left”. At the other end of this spectrum is the false libertarianism inspired by thinkers such as Rothbard, Benson and David Friedmann (son of Milton), More success is likely from a party which stood in a triangular relationship to Left and Right, as indeed did the British Liberal Party until the end of World War 2. If it had held to its guiding principles, an alliance with the centrist SDP would not have hapened since it would have been conceptual...

Here is a mystery which I cannot unravel. The Midland Railway procured a fleet of locomotives from US manufacturers in 1899. This is what was said about them. The American 2-6-0 tender engines were erected at Derby in 1899 and were supplied by Burnham Williams and Co., namely Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia and by the Schenectady Locomotive Works, New York. Recourse was made to America as the Derby shops were full to capacity with work, and the private locomotive builders were in the midst of a boom and suffering from strikes. As more six-coupled locomotives were needed Johnson (the Midland Railway’s Chief Mechanical Engineer), in company with his opposite numbers on the Great Central and Great Northern Railways, obtained sanction to purchase from the USA and orders for thirty locomotives were placed with Baldwin and ten with Schenectady.  Within a few weeks the first crates arrived at the Derby Works on 24 May 1899, the engines having been previously assembled and the...

The opening of Crossrail has been delayed by yet another year. It never was a good scheme. The stated need was for additional capacity on the northern section of the Metropolitan between Paddington and Liverpool Street. This could have been met by a new tube line between Paddington and Liverpool Street, on the same alignment as Crossrail. Because these are not logical starting points, it might have run westward to Heathrow and/or Hammersmith (the Metropolitan branch), and eastward to Stratford or Woolwhich, but as a tube. With no need to run on the national network, and running in tunnels of just over half the diameter, it could have been completed 15 years ago at a fraction of the cost. This was a bad case of mission creep. Like HS2.