AN OUTSIDE VIEW

This is the standard 88 seat intermediate IEP vehicle. As I predicted, the seats will be crammed in, and mostly in the unidirectional arrangement. A Swedish survey showed is preferred only by about 30% of passengers. Many of the so-called window seats will not be window seats, including those in the facing bays, which are perfectly placed with a solid panel directly in people's line of vision. That adds up to an unsatisfactory travel experience for a lot of people. There is only one toilet for all this crowd. Note too, the shortage of luggage space - by the exit, where people will not be able to supervise it. Aren't we constantly being reminded to keep our luggage with us at all times? There was a notorious case when a thief who exploited the possibilities discovered that the suitcase he had stolen contained an IRA bomb. Only a few months ago, a couple of men were convicted of theft of passengers' luggage. Yet the problem is still not addressed, and this on trains which cou...

The government has been accused of attempting to suppress the drawbacks of its flagship transport project after previously unseen research revealed cities across the UK could lose up to £220m each as a result of HS2. The KPMG study, commissioned by the government, predicted more than 50 areas would be worse off as a result of the high-speed rail project – including Bristol, Cambridge and Aberdeen. Read article in The Guardian.

The Catholic church in Sweden existed in the shadows for over 400 years following the reformation. The broadcasting of a Catholic confirmation service last Sunday came as welcome evidence of its present acceptance in what has the reputation of being the most secularised country in Europe. Unfortunately, the event was not exploited as it could and should have been, to present the church's wares in the most attractive way. In fact, if one listened only to the sound, the service was hardly recognisable as Catholic. Latin, the sign and instrument of the unity of the Latin rite Catholic church, was absent. I waited for something, but in vain. Not even the familiar Missa de Angelis was sung. One might have at least expected that somewhere in the service, the congregation would have got the opportunity to sing the famous hymn to the Holy Spirit, Veni Creator Spiritus (upper), and that the choir would have performed the beautiful sequence for Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus (lowe...

At last, an increasing number of politicians and commentators are coming out against HS2, essentially for the reasons which have been repeatedly stated in this blog. The NIMBY lobby as at last lost its dominance in the debate to those who are arguing the real economic case against the scheme. It is not that the country cannot afford it. The scheme is just a bad way of spending the pot of money. Some of the opposition is from the roads lobby, which wants a share of the cake. The sad thing is that nobody has even now come up with costings for what is really needed to increase the capacity of the railway infrastructure, which would be a combination of upgrades of existing routes and the construction of some new conventional-speed routes, essentially on the alignment of HS2, which at the southern end is mostly on the former Great Central route, but with a lot of expensive straightening-out to cater for the higher speeds. With a conventional speed railway, this new construction becomes larg...

Women wearing the hijab in Sweden report that they are often treated abusively in public places. In response, some non-Muslims have taken to wearing the hijab as a gesture of solidarity. Abusing people for any reason is wrong and unacceptable. However, Muslims are world-leaders when it comes to abusing other people, since the principle of intolerance is built-in to the Koran and Hadith. Good Muslims are required to kill the unbelievers, and some of them have always interpreted these texts literally. Thus people who identify themselves very visibly as Muslims should not be surprised when other people react badly towards them. It is not right but it is understandable and explicable. There is a strong component of racism here because most Muslims have dark skins, but Islam is an ideology not a race, and that ideology is, in principle, fascistic. This makes it ironic that it is those on the liberal left who are promoting this solidarity. The same people are criticising Russia for its...

Treasury officials are privately warning that the cash cost of the controversial High Speed 2 rail line will hit £73bn. FT article

The burning of churches in Egypt this week needs to be seen in the broader historical context. This sort of thing has been going on for 1400 years. It looks as if, in the next few decades, the confrontation between Islam and the rest of the world will reach a level of hostility that will make people wish for the peaceful days when Nazism and Communism were the main disturbing ideologies and events like the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia and the Soviet Gulags were nothing more than a slightly over-the-top exception to a relatively peaceful state of affairs. We need to wake up. Things look as if they are going to get an order of magnitude worse. It also looks as if the only place in the Middle East where Christians can be secure in the foreseeable future is Israel.