AN OUTSIDE VIEW

“Yeah, sure. Let’s open all our borders and compete with Indian sweatshops instead.” Another comment in the Guardian. Has this commentator looked at the labels in his clothes lately to see where they are made? Does he apply his noble principles and choose a £100 shirt rather than a £30 one of equivalent fit and quality? Boycotting Indian clothes is the most effective way of perpetuating sweatshop conditions in India. If there is a buoyant demand for Indian clothes, Indian workers acquire the industrial muscle needed to enable them to demand better pay and conditions. Can’t he see this? The other side of the picture is that a supply of low cost clothes means that consumers have money over to spend into the rest of the economy of their own country. Why is this so difficult to understand?

“There is no such thing as ‛wisdom of economists’”.   Comment in the Guardian. But why is this prolific commentator bothering to comment at all?

“The UK may end up having to accept a large tonnage of tariff-free lamb and beef etc.” Comment in the Guardian

I was not sorry to see that the LibDems received so little support at the election. It is sad that the party has taken up a set of policies that were diametrically opposed to those the Liberal Party had stood for from the 1830s until the late 1970s, when they seem to have forgotten what Liberalism was all about. The same can be said of the Labour Party, which was founded as a popular movement on much the same set of policies as the contemporary Liberals. Labour held firmly to them until it was taken over by intellectuals in the Fabian mould, and by Keynesians, in the late 1930s. These gave the country Fabian and Keynesian policies when Labour came to power in 1945. Then came the disastrous influx of Marxists in the late 1970s, followed by New Labour opportunism, which was based on next to no coherent principles at all. It is a tragic story, because it leaves Britain with no effective alternative to Conservative politics, although it is not a problem confined to Britain. Radi...

My Marxist friend was despondent at the election result. She put it down to the dominance of what Marx himself called the ‘lumpen proletariat’. In other words, democracy is a good thing for Marxists as long as the people vote the way they agree with.

After a period where train design in Britain has been to a reasonably high quality, poor design seems to have returned and is a widespread feature of recent trains in Britain; board-hard and badly profiled seats lacking in lumbar support are the norm. Traditional moquette is no longer standard for seat covers, with flat weave fabrics becoming widespread. In the case of the new inter city trains these are plain and unpatterned, and show the mark and stain of every drop of spilled coffee and crumb of greasy food, looking dirty and shabby after just a few months in service. Ugly and over-styled front ends crop up in many of the new types; perhaps the worst are the Scotrail’s porcine Hitachi class 385 , and grotesque Siemens class 380 , and the Siemens 700 class for Thameslink. The Hitachi trains for Scotrail are the result of trying to fit a gangway into the standard Hitachi nose, resulting in a piggy appearance and what must be a very tight space for the drivers, who refused to oper...

We are being warned that the World Trade Organisation is on the verge of collapse, which would result in the loss of a mechanism for settling trade disputes. What has not been noticed is that these trade disputes would not arise if governments were not hell-bent on pursuing mercantilist policies to the detriment of their own people. Mercantilism  had been utterly discredited several times over before 1800 but it refuses to die. It is as if present day doctors still insisted in treating serious infections with leeches. In this situation the best policy for any government is to look after its own people and not get in the way of inward trade so that its citizens are able to purchase the goods they want, from whoever they want, wherever they are, on the best terms they can obtain. Any interference is a denial of the basic human right of people freely to exchange goods and services on mutually agreed terms. If the governments of other countries do not reciprocate, the mai...

Greenhouses work as follows: radiation from the sun heats up the objects inside, which in turn warm the air in contact with them. This warm air cannot escape because it is contained by the glass, and is trapped inside. On a clear night the temperature in the greenhouse falls quickly due to radiation through the glass. That is why it is necessary to have blinds inside the roof to prevent this night-time radiation. The so-called “greenhouse effect” is ascribed to absorption, at night, of radiation from the surface of the earth by greenhouse gases and its subsequent re-radiation in all directions ie 50% of the captured radiation is returned back towards the surface of the earth. However, given that all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would form a layer less than 4 metres deep, and that carbon dioxide absorbs infra red radiation in just a few narrow frequency bands, I would like to see calculations which show that this process can have any significant effect. If the planet is warm...

I have been in Britain for a couple of weeks, including the Friday when the London Bridge murders took place. There were two things that struck me. The first was that the event at which the murders occurred had been organised by academic criminologists, and that the one of the victims was himself qualified in the discipline. I would have thought that these academics were aware by now that there is a difference between ordinary criminals and criminals whose actions were motivated by Islamic teaching. This difference is so obvious that their failure can only be ascribed to willful blindness, verging, in view of the consequences, on criminal negligence. What are the driving forces behind this? The second point is that the police appeared to have arrived on the scene just in time to prevent a third murder from taking place, with the inevitability of a court case which would have been embarrassing for both the authorities and the Cambridge academics who had organised the fatal event.

It has been announced that no charges will be brought in respect of the accident in 2016 when a tram was derailed and overturned at Addiscombe, resulting in seven fatalities and 62 injuries. The tram was travelling at 45 mph on a curved section of line where the speed limit was 12 mph and overturned. Since the incident, safety measures have been introduced. The decision not to prosecute for corporate manslaughter is hard to understand, since the curve is situated in a cutting close to a tunnel, and should have been recognised as a potentially hazardous configuration even before the opening of the line in 2000. One also has to question the role of the Health and Safety Executive, successor to the Railways Inspectorate.

Ideas for grandiose infrastructure projects have a habit of refusing to die. One such is for a 50 kilometre tunnel under the Gulf of Finland between Helsinki in Finland and Tallinn in Estonia, priced at £15 billion, including substantial EU funding. It would give a 20 minute crossing time between the two cities, compared to the present ferry crossing times of two to three hours. Also, in the longer term, the idea is to provide Finland with a direct rail connection to the rest of Europe via the proposed Rail Baltica. For this reason, the EU is insisting that the railway is built to standard gauge (1435 mm) despite the fact that both the Finnish and Estonian railways are built to the wider Russian gauge (1520 mm). Rail Baltica itself is a €6 billion scheme for a conventional speed standard gauge passenger and freight railway from Warsaw to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, connecting the three capital cities of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. The problem with the r...

The British constitution is a finely balanced structure of duties which has come under stress in recent months, especially following the decision of the Supreme Court which declared the Prime Minister’s prorogation of Parliament unlawful. The UK Supreme Court itself is a constitutional innovation which was established by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and took over responsibility from the Law Lords in October 2009. The Law Lords, officially known as the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary , formalised ancient practice whereby the House of Lords was the final court of appeal, acting on powers derived from the Sovereign. Thus, before the pre-2009 reform, the ultimate court of appeal was within Parliament itself, which raises the question of whether it had the authority to question this action of the Prime Minister. This throws up a further issue, which is that of the Sovereign who acts in person in Parliament. One step back from this is the question of where and how the authority of th...

The two prime ministers are shown standing side by side. Johnson looks frustrated and bewildered. Small wonder. It is difficult to negotiate with people who insist on irrational behaviour. The Single Market trade rules are nothing if not irrational, since their underlying principle is that goods should be KEPT OUT of one’s own country. That is what the EU tariffs and other restrictions are intended to do. They are an application of the long discredited seventeenth century economic theory known as ‛Mercantilism’. The Irish will be the biggest losers after Brexit because so many of their imports come from the UK. They will either have to bear the additional costs of the EU's tariffs or obtain their supplies from alternative sources in mainland Europe. Since this involves a long voyage round the tip of Cornwall, these goods will carry the burden of higher transport costs; the route is too long for economic RoRo services. The Republic was effectively obliged to follow ...

Force people to migrate to where the work is, and suck the life out of the peripheral regions. With 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels and an unaccountable and unelected Commission, policymaking was long ago captured by the most powerful producer, banking and landowning interests - the very same who supported the fascist regimes before WW2. It is astonishing how the progressive left has been mesmerised into supporting this.

Some things to look forward to. Queues at the EU customs post at Berwick leading to a traffic tailback on the A1 all the way to Alnwick, if not to the suburbs of Newcastle.  Crowds of Scottish shoppers descending on Gateshead Metrocentre and a boom in the north-east.  Trains terminating at Berwick as passengers have to disembark and pass through customs control. Goods imported from England subject to EU tariffs and extra VAT, and a thriving smuggling industry as people tried to import the bargains purchased on their shopping trips. Higher prices for substitute goods imported from mainland Europe due to extra transport costs; it is too far for low cost RoRo movement. Value of savings destroyed as Scotland enters the Euro at at realistic rate. Great idea - independent Scotland in the EU.

I received a parcel from the US yesterday. I was asked to pay 110 kr tax (Value Added Tax), plus 75 kr collection fee. By my calculation, that makes it 65% efficient.

The current preoccupation with exports is a manifestation of the seventeenth century theory of economics called Mercantilism, which had been discredited several times over by all the Classical economists before 1800, including of course, Adam Smith in “Wealth of Nations”. People ought to read it. A balance of payments surplus means that real wealth flows out of a country and paper claims on wealth flow in ie there is a net loss of real wealth. A balance of payments deficit is a healthy sign because goods are always worth more to the purchaser than to the seller – otherwise the trade would not take place. Imports transfer goods to where they are more wanted ie they represent an increase in wealth due to the mere act of transporting them. It follows that any impediment to importation eg tariffs, is an obstacle to wealth creation, and from that, it further follows that unilateral free trade is more advantageous than reciprocal free trade. In reciprocal free trade, both sid...

The main impact of Brexit will be on people and businesses inside the EU. This has been scarcely remarked on in discussions in Britain. It is one reason why the dispute over the Irish border has been so confused and acrimonious; the Irish do not seem to appreciate what will hit them, not because of Brexit itself but because of the way the protectionist Single Market rules operate. It would be nice to see some articles about what the governments of EU countries will be doing. Interviews on Swedish television explain how business will be put to expense and inconvenience, internet sales will be delayed in customs and purchasers from UK internet sites will have to pay double VAT, plus handling charges, plus delays in the inefficient postal service which cannot handle the traffic even now. Visitors returning from the UK will be harassed by customs. They will not even be allowed to bring cheddar cheese into the country. Here are a few links to these interviews which explain what is in...

In a rational world the alleged need for the backstop would have triggered an urgent review of the regulations governing the protectionist Single Market, which are the reason why there needs to be a customs border; the UK government has indicated that for its part, it has no objection to the free flow of goods inwards. A substantial proportion of IMPORTS to the Republic come from the UK. If they are required to cross the EU's tariff barrier, it is consumers and manufacturers in the Republic who will be faced with the extra costs of the tariffs, or the expensive alternative of sourcing goods from mainland Europe, thereby incurring added transport costs. Why this has been so rarely referred to is a mystery. I suspect the reason is the return to dominance of seventeenth century mercantilist thinking. Ireland will be in the same situation as countries on the eastern marches of the EU such as the Baltics, Romania and parts of Poland, which are cut off from their neares...

Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, when a peaceful meeting at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was violently dispersed by the military. Eighteen people were killed and over 600 injured. The meeting was set up to air people’s many and well justified grievances, most of which had their origin in the enclosures of agricultural land, a process which began in 1760 and resulted in the displacement of the English peasantry, who were deprived of their livelihoods and forced into city slums where their only means of supporting themselves was to work long hours in terrible conditions for penurious wages. An important object of the protest was the Corn Laws, which was one of the objects of the St Peter’s Fields protest. The Corn Laws were a body of tariffs and other regulations intended to restrict the importing of cheap foreign wheat and other food, which put up the cost of the food on people’s tables. The massacre was followed by a cover-up. An important event in ...

The government has announced plans for a commemorative Brexit coin , to be issued on the day. It will be a 50p coin with the inscription ‘Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.’ What a pity that is the best the authorities can come up with. It has a horrible script typeface (bog-standard Zapf Chancery by the look of it) and the horrible seven-sided shape which is overdue for change. A £2 coin would have been more suitable; the inscription could go round the edge and the image could have been a traditional one; perhaps the original Britannia as on the Victorian penny, with a ship and lighthouse, or the thrift from the old threepenny bit, or the ship from the halfpenny, or the wren that used to be on the farthing, or Pistrucci's classic St George and the Dragon. If this is the best the authorities can do, it does not augur well.

The A$AP Rocky business has provoked a lot of criticism from the USA, who have expressed shock at the Swedish justice system, judged by US standards. It does not look good by British standards, either. Swedish justice is on trial in front of the world.  The video material which has been published shows that there was harassment by the Afghan youths; however, since they ended up in hospital, it looks as if excessive force was used. We also do not know how the fight began, or the background to the whole incident. It seems improbable that the performer would have initiated the trouble. The Afghan youths should also be charged, since they are possibly guilty of a criminal act. If, as seems to be the case, the incident was the result of a provocation, then anything more than a suspended sentence gives the wrong message to people like these youths who go about harassing the public. I have experienced the same thing myself in Gothenburg. The Afghan youths are probably not refug...

The book is one of the Narnia series, by C S Lewis, ‘The Horse and his Boy.’ The book would probably be considered racist and Islamophobic. In the narrative, the boy is a slave to a cruel master in a desert country. The horse and boy escape, and on their way the pass through a magnificent and vast city where they catch a glimpse of the great and tyrannical ruler, the Tisroc. The references are obvious: the Tisroc is modelled on an oriental potentate such as the Sultan of the Ottomans, or the Caliph of Baghdad. It would no longer be safe to make and show such a film, such would be the threats and protests. What have we come to?

Being a science graduate, I would expect to be able to understand how the Greenhouse Effect works, but have not seen a convincing explanation for how a concentration of one part in 2,500 of the gas can have such a disproportionate effect. The greenhouse effect theory has been around for over a century, when it was first noted by the Swedish chemist, Arrhenius. However, carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in three narrow bands of wavelengths, which are 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM). This means that most – about 92% – of the heat producing radiation escapes it. About 8% of the available black body radiation is picked up by these characteristic frequencies of CO2. Can someone please explain how a concentration of 1 part of carbon dioxide in 2500 can cause a greenhouse effect?

The case of US rapper A$AP Rocky concerns an incident which has led to him being imprisoned since late last month, leading to the intervention by President Trump and the rejection of his plea by the Swedish Prime Minister. From the published videos it is obvious that A$AP was being persistently harassed by two immigrant men. There may be more behind this; the original causes are not clear. To judge from the videos, the two men should possibly also have been arrested. It appears, though possibly misleadingly, that Rocky’s action was in self-defence. It is improbable, though not impossible, that US rapper and his bodyguard would assault a couple of men for no reason at all. That the situation has got to this stage, however, reflects badly on the authorities, no least on the Swedish PM who, following the intervention by Trump, could and should have ordered an immediate investigation as to why this case has got to this point. Unless a lot happened which was not recorded, I would hope t...

In the run-up to the election for the Conservative leadership, the Guardian ran a determined campaign to discredit him. One of its initiatives was to dig out an essay written by Johnson in 2007, in which he had written that the Muslim world is “centuries behind” the west, because of a “fatal religious conservatism” that prevented the development of liberal capitalism and democracy. According to Johnson “virtually every global flashpoint you can think of – from Bosnia to Palestine to Iraq and Kashmir” is defined by “some sense of Muslim grievance”. Echoing his hero Winston Churchill’s view that there was “no stronger retrograde force” than Islam, Johnson believes “that the real problem with the Islamic world is Islam”. The Guardian then enlisted Professor Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary’s College, London, to refute Johnson’s these in an article describing it as “historically illiterate ” Brotton writes,   “But Johnson’s 2007 essay – an appendix to a later edition of his book praisin...

Edmondson ticket on the North Western Railway It seem to be more difficult than ever to make casual journeys. On Sunday evening, around 7pm, I tried, and failed to buy two tickets from Stockholm C to Uppsala C, using the SJ app, being on our way to the station in someone’s car. First, the app asked what train I wanted to travel on. Obviously, I wanted to go on the first train to depart, but we did not know when we would get to the station. Next, it asked for the name of the person I would be travelling with. Then it tried to reserve seats. Since there were three of us travelling and we wanted to sit together, we absolutely did not want reserved seats but to find the seats for ourselves once we were on the train. Then I realised that the credit card I had with me is registered to another mobile telephone than the one I had with me, so would not have been able to pay for it. When I got home I tried to register my card to the SJ app but there no means of doing so.  ...

The drip, drip, drip of propaganda continues. Jesus is often described these days as a ‘first century Palestinian’. Yesterday’s ‘Uppsala Nya Tidningar’ ran a similar line in its daily feature on name days, 22 July being the feast day of St Mary Magdalen. The article explained, unhelpfully, that the saint came from a village called Magdala, in Palestine. She could not have done. ‘Palestine’ was a name applied to the territory by the Romans after the defeat of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135AD. The site of her birthplace, on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, north of Tiberius, is in present day Israel. It is in the region which was and is known as Galilee. If the author of the article could not bring herself to use the dreaded word ‘Israel’, she could have referred to the place as being in the ‘Holy Land’. To refer to Jesus and other characters of the New Testament as Palestinian is anachronistic and ludicrous. Scripture relates that Mary Magdalen anointed the feet of Jes...

Dr. E. Michael Jones is an American academic who in 2008 published a 1200 page book called ‘The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’, which claims that there is a consistent pattern in history whereby organized Judaism opposed and attacked Western Christian civilization. Jones asserts that the origin of the supposed Jewish anti-Catholic sentiment and activity can be traced to the passion of Jesus, when they as a group rejected Him as their messiah, or as he puts it, when they rejected Logos. Jones then ‘reveals’ some moments in history where a few Jews aligned themselves with anti-catholic revolutionaries, and, he claims, not a few times where they created those movements themselves: the failed attempt of reconstructing the Temple in the time of Julian, an alleged later use of Muslim rulers and Protestant revolutionaries, and to their present day influence on American politics and media. Jones purports that Jews have tried, and often succeeded, in destroying neighbourhoods, created wars and pe...

There are hundreds of miles of electrified railway in Sweden where there are a handful of trains – one or two an hour, and in some cases just a dozen a day. It is generally considered that a railway is not worth electrifying if there are less than six trains per track per hour. The embodied energy in all the overhead structures and the copper cable is colossal. If you travel in the north of Sweden in the winter, you can see a constant shower of sparks which is a continual waste of energy. These routes – eg Gothenburg-Strömstad – should never have been electrified in the first place, but useful amounts of energy could be saved by recovering the fixed equipment (which could be put into store for re-use) and using diesel locomotives, or even steam locomotives, which can be ‘green’ since they can run on renewable fuels such as waste material from the timber industry.

“The New Statesman, Observer and Guardian were the least likely to portray Muslims (their spelling) in a negative light, according to the analysis of 11,000 articles and news broadcasts during the final months of the year.” Of course it is the handful of bad eggs who make the news, but since the teachings and practices of Islam are fundamentally at odds with western society based on liberal enlightenment values, as soon as the number of Moslems grows beyond a certain point, conflict is inevitable; members of that community can then expect to be portrayed negatively. It makes matters worse that Islamic teachings also take an extremely negative view of Christians and Jews, although there is scope for common cause there because Christianity and Judaism are also both at odds with contemporary secular values. There are indeed real issues within the Moslem community, which need to come under public scrutiny: female genital mutilation, the disproportionate number of Moslems in prison,...

The Guardian makes much of its moral and intellectual superiority. It claims to be open, a supporter of liberal western Enlightenment values, evidence-based claims, and, of course, free speech. For many years I have been commenting under the name of Physiocrat, mostly about economic policies but on a range of other subjects too. I have carefully avoided being offensive, even when I have received offensive responses from other commentators. The number of topics open for comment has been steadily decreasing in recent years and is mostly confined to topics like the weather and the state of the railways. However, I was surprised to see that the message above has been appearing under the few articles which remain open for comment, and I enquired of the Guardian what was the reason. This was the reply. “Your account was banned after multiple spells in premoderation. A lot of your comments could be interpreted as Islamophobic.” The first point is untrue. My comments were pr...

When the flood was over, Noah told all the animals to go forth and multiply. After a while, Noah found that all the animals had offspring, apart from a pair of snakes. “What is the problem?” asked Noah. “We can’t multiply”, answered the snakes. “We’re adders.” Noah and his sons started to make furniture for themselves, using rough hewn logs for chairs and tables. Next time Noah checked, he found the snakes with a clutch of young. “I thought you said you couldn’t multiply”, said Noah. “We can’t. We used the log tables”, answered the adders.

I come across a fair number of discontented Catholics these days, who are looking at the Orthodox church as a solution to their dissatisfaction. This is not a decision to be made lightly, or possibly, at all. It is a big commitment. An important reason for not moving are the current scandals within the Catholic church; misbehaviour is a human attribute and will be found in every organisation. However, these are a few things to ponder when approaching the matter. The Roman claim to Papal supremacy is based on an interpretation of Matthew 16:18. From this verse is derived the Roman ecclesiology. You have to be satisfied that Rome is wrong and that the Orthodox are right. The subject has been much discussed and disputed, to put it mildly. No firm conclusion can be drawn. What does the history of the early church tell us? One needs at least a broad picture of developments from Apostolic times to the thirteenth century, by which time the Schism had hardened. Here too, no firm conclusion...

This extract from The Silver Chair, by C S Lewis comes to mind. “All the same,” said Puddleglum, “I wish we knew a bit more about her.” “I was going to ask her all about herself,” said Jill. “But how could I when you wouldn’t tell her anything about us?” “Yes,” said Scrubb. “And why were you so stiff and unpleasant. Didn’t you like them?” “Them?” said the wiggle. “Who’s them? I only saw one.” “Didn’t you see the Knight?” asked Jill. “I saw a suit of armour,” said Puddleglum. “Why didn’t he speak?” “I expect he was shy,” said Jill. “Or perhaps he just wants to look at her and listen to her lovely voice. I’m sure I would if I was him.” “I was wondering,” remarked Puddleglum, “what you’d really see if you lifted up the visor of that helmet and looked inside.” “Hang it all,” said Scrubb. “Think of the shape of the armour! What could be inside it except a man?” “How about a skeleton?” asked the Marsh-wiggle with ghastly cheerfulness. “Or perhaps,” he added as an afterthought, “not...

Einstein wrote this in 1927 “The position of our scattered Jewish community is a moral barometer for the political world. For what surer index of political morality and respect for justice can there be than the attitude of the nations towards a defenceless minority. The barometer is low at the present moment.”

Long distance trains in Britain dating from the 1970s and 1990s are being replaced wholesale by the new 800 series trains from Hitachi. They could have been worse, but the designers have not really addressed some of the fundamental problems which go back to the time when mark 3 stock was introduced in the 1970s. Seats misaligned to windows. This is primarily a matter of getting the bay dimension correct in the first place. If this is 1.90 metres there is sufficient legroom for everyone and all the seats can align. The luggage space is in the wrong place. People will not use the large luggage areas as they are not secure. The optimum location for luggage is between seat backs but this means that most of the seating should be in facing pairs as in the mark 1 and mark 2 stock. As soon as the seats are arranged in an airline configuration, this useful luggage space is lost. Given that it is too late to change the fundamental design, the large luggage areas should be fitted with some me...

Gothic cathedrals have been having a bad time lately, what with the Notre Dame fire, and now Salisbury Cathedral, which currently has a giant Gaia hanging in the nave. It dominates the view as you come in and is there for the annual festival. Its presence proclaims how the Church of England has forgotten what it exists for, and what the cathedral was built for in the first place. Christianity deals not with the earthly realm but with the heavenly one. The Gaia would have been perfectly in place in the Cathedral Close or even in the cloister, only not inside the cathedral itself. There is not even a scriptural text to set it in its context, such as, ‘Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’, or ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’, or ‘Heaven and Earth are full of Thy glory’. The Bishop, Dean and Chapter need to think more carefully about what is allowed to take place in their cathedral. Its primary purpose is not as an arts ve...

“Islamophobia” is a dishonest neologism which has been used to shut down discussion of Islam and label critics as racist. There has been discussion of the subject recently, in an attempt to define it, perhaps as a prelude to making it a crime. A phobia is an irrational fear. Christians and Jews have had good reason to fear Islam for the past 1400 years. Mohammed himself was responsible for a notorious atrocity against Jews, Banu Qurayza, when 600 men were beheaded on his orders, and the women and children taken into slavery. Since Islam venerates him as the perfect man, fear of Islam is anything but irrational. Christians and Jews have rarely been well-treated under Muslim regimes. The recent experience of Christians under ISIS is not an exception to the general case; 3 million Greek and Armenian Christians were murdered in Islamic genocides in the 20th century alone. This is not to deny that dislike of Muslims has a racist component, since most Muslims are foreigners with dark skins...

The posters for the Swedish election to the European Parliament have produced the usual crop of platitudinous virtue signalling. For democracy, against division and extremism. (Social Democrats) Our grandchildren come first - every country should take responsibility for the climate (Social Democrats) Take a stand for secure jobs, not pay cuts (Social Democrats) Oil lobbyists versus climate activists (Vänster) Our fight against right-wing populism is needed in Europe (Centre Party) Hope instead of hate (Green Party) Yes! Vote out extremists and nationalists (Liberals) They give the impression that they have been generated by a computer programme.

Apparently, the silence on Christian persecution is due to fear of offending trading partners like Saudi Arabia, not political correctness. So says the Guardian’s Religious correspondent, Andrew Brown. That is an interesting angle. It does not explain why the persecution, which is systematic, is confined to certain countries. There is none in Japan, or Thailand, for example, and there was little in India until recently. Brown manages to avoid naming the principal persecutors and their motivations, which are grounded in their own religious, or stringently non-religious, ideologies. It is amazing the lengths that some people will go to in order not to state the obvious.

It is amazing how an article in the Guardian , reporting the publication of a study about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, fails to mention the M-word. Who do they think is responsible for this persecution?

The Union originated due to the Scottish having lost a vast amount of money in an ill-fated colonial project. It will not break up unless the money settlement works. Scotland in the EU, but England outside it would not work. England is the main source of goods imported to Scotland; they would become more expensive as they would be subject to the EU tariff, which would lead to cross border shopping in places like Newcastle and Carlisle. This in turn would lead to long tailbacks down the A1 and M6, as cars and HGVs waited to clear the EU customs barrier that would go up. There are also issues over who would pay for defence. The Scots would do better to focus on the highly concentrated pattern of land ownership in the country, and to use the freedom that already exists to apply a land value tax. However, Scottish politicians do not seem to be particularly smart or they would not be operating policies such as higher income taxes in Scotland.

My friends live in a house overlooking this lake, about 15 km from Gothenburg. The lake is man-made, having being created by the construction of a dam. A few hundred metres downstream from the outlet is the remains of a mill. Further downstream still, there was yet another mill; the present owner retains the rights to the flow of a certain volume of water. These rights were acquired in the 1920s, when the government (foolishly) gave away water rights in exchange for an undertaking to construct electricity generating facilities. However, this particular facility, is, I am informed, barely functioning, and even if it was, it would make little use of the head of water that is potentially available and is consequently inefficient. In dry weather, as we have had recently, this owner complains of insufficient flow, and water then has to be released from the lake. Prolonged dry weather results in a significant fall in the water level and the exposure of unsightly areas of mud. Loss of...

I picked this up in an article headed “ Would the UK be better off outside the Customs Union .” A YouGov survey last July found that independent trade policy was voters’ joint fourth Brexit priority, behind control over immigration, and ending EU rules and budget payments. Trade experts say deals get more contentious once they become real. “It is one of those things that sounds great but when it actually comes down to it trade has always been controversial because people always want something from you,” said David Henig, who was heavily involved in negotiations on an EU-US trade deal. “New Zealand want to sell more lamb and Australia certainly want to sell us more lamb. That’s not going to go down very well in Wales or Scotland.” Henig’s mercantilism is showing. Cheaper New Zealand and Australian lamb would go down very well with shoppers in Cardiff and Glasgow. Why is there this blindness to the obvious? Should this man be in charge of negotiating trade deals when he evidently ...

There is a long article on this subject by a Peter Beinart in The Guardian today, not open to comments. Zionism is a philosophy of Jewish nationalism originating at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to widespread persecution in Europe, particularly in the Russian Empire, though it was the Dreyfus trial in France which gave the movement its impetus. It was originally opposed by many, if not the majority of Jews, who had not the slightest interest in trying to set up a Jewish state in a country consisting mostly of sand dunes, swamp, semi-desert, and eroded rocky hillsides. The USA, the Golden State, was the goal. It was the events of the 1930s and the aftermath of the Second World War which caused Zionism to gather momentum. Even then, the land of the then Palestine was a last choice, or Hobson’s choice, for the majority of those who went to live there. As late as the nineteen-fifties, in countries where Jews felt safe and comfortable, Zionists were regarded by other J...

Hydrogen powered trains are in the news at the moment. They are being promoted as a means of making railways less dependent on carbon as a fuel. The idea is that the unwanted electricity from wind generation can be electrolysed and used as fuel in fuel cells. The system is being trialled in Germany on a new train, the i-Lint, and in the UK on a converted class 321 multiple unit train dating from the late 1980s. There are at least four snags. The hydrogen has to be compressed and stored in heavy tanks. Overall energy efficiency is about 27%. Fuel cells have a limited life. Cost. I have attempted to obtain figures for the power output of these devices but a search reveals nothing on the subject, not even on the website of the manufacturer, Alstom. My guess is that it is around 1000 hp, about the same as diesels such as British Railway class 20, or a class 4 steam locomotive such as the 80xxx class 2‑6‑4 tank class. The latter, burning light oil and with draughting ...

The economic case for Brexit was never put, because of the incompetence of Minford and his associates. Short of full-blown communism, it would be difficult to devise a worse set of policies than those at the heart of the EUʼs trade and economic policies: CAP, VAT, the tariff wall and the Euro. The so-called four freedoms are in reality a way to ensure that skinflint employers and greedy landlords can pay the lowest wages and charge the highest rents. Employment Rights are a fig leaf and do nothing for those on the edge of the labour market. However, CAP and the tariff wall are a useful source of pocket money for the dukes and lords whose rental income would have been hit. Since the same people are the leading Tory grandees, they were bound to insist on it being replaced by a home grown version of the same thing, which is what has happened. On top of that there is a clueless Chancellor who is taken in by surfaces appearances and does not appreciate how much of the headline yield from ...

I am coming to the conclusion that Brexit is becoming an irrelevancy. After the announcement by Gove - a leading Brexiter - of new UK food tariffs to replace the EUʼs, I am coming to the conclusion that Brexit is becoming an irrelevancy. What is the point of it? The EU has been running four egregious trade and economic policies from its outset: CAP, VAT, the tariff barrier and the Euro (fortunately the UK avoided the latter, but the fact that it even exists is proof of the incompetence of those responsible for the those policies). It is becoming evident that the leading supporters of Brexit are intent on replacing the EU policies with home-grown versions of the same thing. It is as if a prisoner is told he is free, but remains in his cell, and is then required to pay for his food and lodging in the jail. Such a Brexit is all pain and no gain. The ERG - this includes J Rees Mogg - and Economists for Brexit, should have raised their voices in protest when Gove announc...

Uplands farming seems to be most at risk from Brexit. The land will not, of course disappear. The uplands, and, indeed, the landscape as a whole, should be regarded as a national resource which needs to be managed for a variety of objectives. to maintain, and preferably increase, opportunities to earn livelihoods;  to enhance its aesthetic value;  to enhance its biological diversity so as to support native species;  to protect downstream areas from flooding; to make a contribution to the carbon sink;  sustainability.  This needs to be done is such a way as to ensure that the enhanced rental values resulting from public investment are efficiently recovered for the exchequer. Although the sums of money involved are relatively small, this strengthens the case for land value taxation on agricultural land. However, it should not be forgotten that present taxation gives rise to an artificial margin where land which could support economic activity in the absen...

Will Brexit destroy British farming if it is not protected? Remainers say it. The National FU says it‒but then it would, wouldn’t it? The leading Brexit economist, Minford, has said it. What is the truth of the matter? Agricultural rents are in the range £50 to £200 per hectare. Faced with a general fall in farm gate prices, the worst land, by definition marginal land, goes out of agricultural use and rents of all other land must fall. The cut-off point comes where rental values drop to zero. This is standard Ricardian theory. Some agricultural land will obviously go out of its present use, but the questions are how much, and what other uses will replace them? I have not seen any analysis of the problem, neither by Brexiters or Remainers. In the absence of any sound analysis, all there is on both sides is blind speculation. The apparent dearth of well-publicised and solid information is a mystery. The calculations are not the kind of thing that can be done on the back of ...

The bad news is that Gove has announced that food tariffs will continue after Brexit. This should not come as a surprise since the National FU has always made sure it has the ear of British politicians. It shows that the battle for sound economic policies is only just beginning. Getting out of the EU was only ever a first stage, since the vested interests still remain to be faced down and put in their place. There are potential benefits from Brexit because the core EU trade and economic policies are fundamentally unsound. But if the UK government is just going to perpetuate all the same rotten EU policies then the country suffers all the disruption of Brexit but gains nothing. If the public do not get to see the benefits there will be hell to pay. As for farming, New Zealand showed the way in the 1980s. There was initial disruption but the industry adapted and is, if anything more successful as a consequence. The difficulty with achieving change in the UK is that the country ha...

Now corrected (perhaps), thanks to Dinero who spotted an error in the original source for overall electricity consumption. Overall annual electricity consumption in the EU is 3 million Gigawatt hours ie 3E6 x 1E9, a total of 3E15 watt hours. Source (the decimal point has been omitted from the graph, hence the earlier mistake) According to this blog, 19TWh would be saved by the maximum power regulation for vacuum cleaners ie 1.9E13 watt hours. I make that saving about 0.7% of the total EU electricity consumption, but it is easy to go wrong with teras and gigas. However, this came to me from Mark Wadsworth, which suggests that the figure is in the right ball park. ʻWe use a fair bit of electricity, about 400 kWh a month, my online thingy tells me. Let us assume we spend half an hour a week vacuuming. Our vacuum cleaner is 2,200 watts.  ʻ Half an hour per week = 1.1 kWh, times 4 and a third = 4.7 kWh per month  = about 1% of our usage.  ʻ Let us assume that the...

People are more emotional than logical and the process of paying LVT would feel different to some of the other taxes it would replace. People would notice the payment more and object.   Perhaps, but one of the issues with other taxes is that the INCIDENCE of the tax is not necessarily the person nominally responsible for payment, as taxes are passed along. The incidence of PAYE Income Tax and NI is on the employer and forms part of labour costs. It is functionally equivalent to a payroll tax. This means that employers are under pressure to reduce labour costs by replacing workers with capital even though it results in a worse service, or no service at all, and is, in reality, uneconomic. Supermarket self-service checkouts are an example. Alternatively, the employee taxes are passed on in higher prices. It does not stop there, because these taxes cut into employers' profits, resulting in less being collected in other taxes including property taxes (UBR) and Corporati...