AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Imports = wealth comes into the country, claims on wealth go out. Exports = wealth leaves the country, claims on wealth come in . So which is more beneficial? A balance of payments deficit means that the value of what comes in is more than the value of what goes out. If that were not the case, the trade would not take place. There would be no reason for it.

A German friend was telling me about the harassment he has been receiving, even from colleagues, since the Brexit vote. This, would you believe, is at a university. It is nasty; however, what has happened is the outcome of decades of ignoring people's genuine concerns. Joining the EEC was never a good decision for the UK. It was imposed by a political elite for a variety of reasons, some creditable, others misguided. Edward Heath, Prime Minister at the time, and one of the driving forces, had been an artillery commander in WW2 and was anxious to prevent another war. The original conception of the EEC was based on subsidiarity but that principle was never followed, with ever more control being sucked to the centre. Joining the EEC meant, first, the imposition of VAT, and second, import tariffs and a big increase in food prices, as the UK lost its sources of cheap food. These changes were part of the cause of the steep inflation which followed after the UK joined in 1973. Older p...

The D-train is a project to recycle the London Underground's District Line D78 stock, introduced in 1978. It was heavily refurbished between 2000 and 2003 with new bogies and other equipment. It is basically in sound condition and good until at least 2025, but it was decided to replace it with the S-stock to provide London Underground surface lines with, for the first time, a uniform fleet. This will in due course almost certainly prove to have been a bad strategy for London. Railway rolling stock tends to suffer from some weaknesses which show up almost immediately, and others which show up after a decade or two, in both cases affecting the entire fleet. The thirty Bulleid-designed Merchant Navy class all had to be taken out of service and eventually rebuilt, following an incident in 1953 which revealed a fundamental failure with the design. A similar thing happened with the thirty GWR King class locomotives after it had been in service for almost thirty years. It would be good lu...

BBC Radio Three is running a series of programmes on "The Second Viennese School": the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna. Schoenberg himself was the subject of this week's Composer of the Week . I have never been particularly attracted to that sort of music, though if you are used to singing Gregorian chant, it is not difficult to listen to. There is an interesting background. Schoenberg, who seems to have been a thoroughly good egg who had a hard life, was trying to break out of the diatonic (major and minor key) straitjacket, which, it was felt, had reached the limits of its possibilities by the end of the nineteenth century. What is still not widely appreciated is that the dominance of diatonic music was a Western European phenomenon which took hold in the seventeenth century. Before that, and outside Europe, modal forms and other scales were and remain the norm. But even within Euro...

Nuförtiden måste jag vara försiktig med vad jag utsätter min mage för; det kan sluta med att jag inte kan äta något mer än riskakor och en burk makrill i tomatsås som jag tar med mig som reserv, utifall den mat som jag blir erbjuden är opassande. Jag var där av förhindrad att närvara under påvens besök i Malmö. Den katolska mässan i Malmö skänkte mig mycket eftertanke. De som kunde närvara talade om en riktigt härlig upplevelse. Detta trots att mässan hölls utomhus på Malmös fotbollsstadion, vilket bara i sig är opassande under november månader. Planering av mässan var nästan en sista minutens chansning, eftersom syftet med påvens besök ursprungligen var Svenska Kyrkans firande av Reformations 500 års-jubileum. För att delta i mässan hade Göteborgs city katoliker behövt avresa från Göteborg kl 03.30 för att kunna närvara vid dess start kl 09.30. Påven firade nödvändigtvis på latin. Av detta skäl kunde det inte misslyckas. Tv kommentatorerna var utmärkta och gav en detaljerad förkla...

Every so often I have had a scrap with organists and choir leaders who insist on making us sing Gregorian chant from scores in modern notation. Our choir was once invited to sing in a broadcast concert from the Brighton Festival. The scores, of familiar music, were handed out, but we found them confusing, and asked for them in Gregorian notation that we were used to, with the groups of notes shown by signs called neumes (upper line). These were gladly provided, but the concert director expressed surprise that anyone was still using them. Sometimes the dispute gets acrimonious. One choir director poked fun at the idea that anyone should even raise the matter, and said it was a fuss about nothing. To her credit, she later became convinced, started to go on courses at Solemnes and is now an Associate of the Schola Gregoriana of Cambrige. The situation is particularly entrenched here in Sweden, paradoxically, because church musicians are well-qualified; there is an abundance of ta...

Bishop William Kenney, the Auxiliary Bishop of Birmingham and former assistant bishop in Sweden, has been making statements about the practicability of inter-communion between Catholics and the Swedish Lutheran church. I am no expert on these matters, to put it mildly, but I have always assumed that when one receives communion, one does so on the clear understanding that one accepts the teaching of the Catholic church on the subject ie that, as the Council of Trent declared "in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue"  Trent further added that anyone who "saith, that, in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and deniet...