AN OUTSIDE VIEW

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...

Richard Murphy, the accountant and policy analyst, has just produced a video on the fallacy of the £20 billion black hole in government finances. It is worth watching, but can you spot the hole in his argument? Murphy is partly correct, but also dangerously misleading. He has forgotten that there is a fixed supply of some things, such as land, which all buildings require—homes, factories, shops and offices. Creating money too freely leads to a land price boom. This was the main long-term effect of Quantitative Easing. It sent house prices sky high.  The notion that unemployment is due to shortage of aggregate demand is the great Keynesian fallacy. If Murphy understood the idea of the NAIRU (the Non Inflationary Rate of Unemployment), which has been around since 1959, he would know that pushing money into the economy cannot get rid of unemployment without causing accelerating inflation. Money has lost 98% of its value since 1945. It is one of the reasons why Britain's industry has...