AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Is this what comes from reading The Institutes of the Christian Religion ?

From the EU website:   The European Commission is the EU’s politically independent executive arm. It is alone responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and it implements the decisions of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. There is the key problem: the Commission alone can propose and consequently acts as a gatekeeper. Nor is it politically independent. The Commission appointments are made by politicians and the members are politicians; it is misleading to compare it to the British Civil Service. Add in multi-member constituencies and there is a built-in disconnection between individuals and their representatives. The EEC was founded on the the principle of subsidiarity. In practice, subsidiarity was been ignored. The EU ’ s trade and economic policies neglect the basic principles of sound economic practice as they had been understood since before the end of the eighteenth century. Four blunders is an achievement: CAP, VAT (a condition ...

The 800 series stock have 88 seats in the trailer cars. Realistically, they could have 80. They have 9 bays ie 72 seats, and another 8 could be fitted in. I don't know what the bay dimension is, but optimal is 1.90 meters. I suspect the bays are 2.0 metres. British railways are optimised for vehicles 20 metres long, with space for 64 seats and a couple of toilets. This was established in 1951. That allows them to be full width, nominally 2.82 metres, which is the old C1 loading gauge. These are the dimension of British Railways mark 1 stock, as well as the recent types running mostly south of London. Vehicles with these dimensions can run anywhere on the system. Longer 23 metre vehicle (Mark 3) were introduced in 1971 to a new loading gauge, C3. These are 2.74 metres wide ie 8 cm narrower than the Mark 1 stock; the reduced width is to provide the additional clearance on curves where the vehicles overhang more. They also have a restricted range of operation as routes have to be...

The typical inter-city journey in Britain is about 100 miles. Now look at this table of speeds and journey times; remember that to achieve an average speed of 100 mph will involve a period of running at 120 mph or more. 30 mph, 3 h 20 m  40 mph, 2 h 30 m  50 mph, 2 h  60 mph, 1 h 40 m  70 mph, 1 h 26 m  80 mph, 1 h 15 m  90 mph, 1 h 7 m 100 mph 1 h  The time savings for each successive 10 mph speed increment are 50, 30, 20, 14, 11, 8 and 6 minutes respectively. It is a situation of diminishing returns. It gets worse than that, because there are break points. 50 mph is the maximum operating speed for light rail. After that, the regulations for heavy rail come in, which affects safety standards, signalling systems, vehicle design and track design, with engineering costs to match. At 100 mph, the EU’s Technical Standards for Interoperability apply, which are even more stringent; at over 125 mph, there is another step change, in design requir...

Crossrail has been plagued by delays and cost over-runs which have attracted widespread criticism. A simpler scheme, possibly a tube line, could have been built for, perhaps, 40% of the cost, given 80% of the benefits and opened 15 years ago. However, the scheme as it is will transform ease of movement in and across London and will be adequate for many decades to come, which a new tube will not have been. The delays and extra cost will soon be forgotten. The real Crossrail scandal is that it will generate many times the construction cost in land value uplift but the taxpayers will see little of that back in return for the money that has been spent.

The EU has consistently got its fishing policy wrong. There used to be a flourishing inshore fishing industry all along the Sussex coast, with a self-policing mafia. After 1973, the French fishermen came across and scooped the sea clean. In another ill-conceived incarnation of fishing policy, the result was that small fish were thrown back into the sea, dead. This is a good example of where Georgist principles could apply. The seas within UK territorial waters would be divided into zones – Worthing, Shoreham, Brighton, Newhaven, Eastbourne and Hastings, for example, for which a limited number of fixed term licences would be bid in an open auction, something like the auction for radio spectrum; there would also be zones where no fishing at all was permitted, to allow stocks to recover. There might be a limit on the size of boats which could be used – ten metres, perhaps. The bids would be open to anyone; if French fishermen thought it worthwhile to use fuel and spend the time t...

When the new EU copyright rules kick-in, I would expect a lot of the remainers will be losing their enthusiasm. Being inside the EU, I have already come across numerous non-working links due to EU regulation. Reminder to self: sort out VPN.