AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Jag har köpt en ny mobil telefon. En Motorola. Den ser vacker ut. Men jag kan inte skriva alla bokstävar. ”Å” och ”Ö” och ”Ä” saknas. Exempelvis kan jag inte skriva Håkan. Det är dumt eller hur? Mina gamla adresser kan jag inte överfors från min gamla mobil och jag kan inte ändra språket. När jag anslöt telefonen till datorn, fick jag meddelande som sade att telefonen inte passar med datorns mjukvara. Jag sökte på internet men hittade ingenting. Nästa dagen ringde jag telefonföretagets så kallade kundtjänst. Naturligtvis svarade en automat. ”Tryck knapp ett... Tryck knapp tre... Tryck knapp ett igen... Tryck knapp fyra... ” Sedan började tråkig musik som heter "When the revolution comes." Den hemska musiken fortsatte många minuter. Sedan sade en röst, ”Var snäll och vänta! Våra kunder är viktiga för oss.” Sedan fortsatte musiken och sedan sade rösten igen, ”var snäll”. Och igen. Meddelandet repeterades några gånger. Kallas den här kundtjänst! Vilket slags kundtjänst?, tänkte ...

Overhead Electrification Contractors 1 , originally uploaded by jovike . In 1981 British Rail and the Department of Transport produced a report (Review of Mainline Electrification) which concluded that even on purely commercial grounds not only was 'a substantial programme of railway electrification financially worthwhile' but that the more extensive and faster options would be better propositions than the more modest ones. It also suggested that the most cost effective way to electrify railways would be by a rolling programme - a specialist team of experts would electrify one line and move on to the next. Since then, the East Coast Main Line was wired to Edinburgh, and a short section of the Great Western main line has been electrified to Heathrow, but that is about it, and so the expertise has been dispersed. Nowhere else in Europe are there to be found busy lines such as the routes through Reading, operating entirely with diesel traction. Last year there was a petiti...

Plastic Pig at Brighton , originally uploaded by seadipper . The train services on the Brighton line have gone on getting better under Southern, the Govia group company that holds the franchise. It took over a mess from Connex, the company that was thrown out. New trains being delivered from Bombardier had a host of teething troubles and were - and remain - essentially unsuitable for this service, being a suburban design of train on a long-distance route. But the teething troubles seem to have been sorted out and with a few interior changes in specification from the originals, it is nearly always possible to find a comfortable seat outside the rush hour. The trains are always cleaned to a high standard, and the windows are not scratched. Punctuality is generally good as well. And the stations are clean and tidy too. Problems with the ticket machines have also been addressed. This are primarily due to a poor interface and software, but apparently it is in compliance with some nati...

private land keep out , originally uploaded by Vertigogen . Some time after, those with the muscle grabbed most bits of the earth that were worth having, fenced them off, and then allowed their fellow humans onto "their land" only when they had paid the rent they could wring out of them. The same people then took control of the political system, entrenched their position (literally so) and fixed the laws so the robbery was concealed in a cloak of respectable legality. In reality, it was nothing more than a polite form of chattel slavery. Over the centuries, this theft led to accumulations of money in the pockets of landowners, who, when the industrial revolution came, were the only ones able to take on the role of suppliers of capital, thereby enriching themselves still further. And it still goes on under a veneer of civilisation, with sufficient being conceded in welfare handouts - state charity - to stave off revolution. In the 107 years of Catholic Social Teaching, this f...

When I worked for a London borough in the late 1970s, the union branch, NALGO, had been taken over by a Trotskyite group, the Socialist Workers' Party. Amongst the items on their agenda was the promotion of abortion rights, which they termed "Women's Right to Choose'. Since the union's purpose was to deal with terms and conditions of employment, such a campaign was well outside its remit, and I worked with others, without success, to get the policy overturned. Ultimately, the union branch destroyed itself in a futile and unnecessary strike engineered by the same group of militants, but that is another matter. How abortion has come to be seen as a progressive cause is incomprehensible except in a world of newspeak where words mean the opposite of what they seem to mean. The photograph, taken just seven weeks after conception, shows that bones are clearly starting to develop. This is not surprising, as anyone who has kept tadpoles will know the speed at which they ma...

Looking away , originally uploaded by nicasaurusrex . Every street busker and Big Issue seller knows something about the economy that most politicians and their advisers do not. Location counts. Experts ignore this elementary fact. Karl Marx ignored it in most of his writings and so Marxist economies were run on the principle that location does not matter. Assuming the busker is adequately competent and picks a good spot, the amount they will earn depends on where they set up their pitch. They will do well at busy stations like Oxford Circus and Victoria. They will do quite nicely at places such as Ladbroke Grove or Hammersmith. They will just about get by at somewhere like Highbury and Islington if they pick their time. It isn't worth bothering at quiet suburban stations like West Finchley. These are exactly the sort of observations that led David Ricardo to formulate the Law of Rent at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The marginal location - somewhere like Highbury...

All Change at King's Cross , originally uploaded by Richard and Gill . The replacement programme for the Inter City 125, under the mismanagement of civil servants at the Department of Transport, continues to consume resources to no effect- several millions have already disappeared in consultancy. The specification is calling for a train that can be both diesel and electrically powered, run at 140mph, comply with present safety requirements and weigh less than an HST. Alstom has already dropped out of the procurement programme and Bombardier looks likely to follow suit, which will still leave them with a juicy order for the Thameslink and London Underground replacement, so why should they bother. That leaves Siemens and possibly Hitachi in the running. Hitachi would probably offer a run-on of the train they have supplied for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link commuter services to Kent. But the whole concept is looking increasingly un-feasible. What is actually needed? It depends on...