Henry's old blog on Politics, Transport and Environment

THE LAST POST

2006-12-16T16:53:00.000Z

This blog has become a rag-bag of assorted topics so I have split it.
NEW BLOG ON POLITICS, TRANSPORT AND THE ENVIRONMENT
NEW BLOG ON THINGS THAT CHEER OR WIND ME UP
NEW BLOG ON GREGORIAN CHANT
LOCAL BRIGHTON AND HOVE STUFF

Land and the Catholic Church

2006-12-15T11:01:00.000Z

People have a right to the basic requirements for the sustenance of life. These are the four classical Elements - air, water, earth and fire. Air is not too much of problem, water is ok for some, and fire can be tricky. The most contentious one is land, because people can come along, put a fence round it and claim it is theirs. If anyone contests their claim to ownership, they are backed up by the law of the land plus any force of their own they may care to impose. Land is just regarded as a commodity to be traded like any other, not as something essential for people to live upon and make their livelihoods. Yet humans can do nothing without land.

Since 1891, successive Popes have issued Encyclicals dealing with social and economic issues. Collectively, this is known as the body of "Catholic Social Teaching". It has far-reaching and radical things to say about all sorts of matters but has consistently skirted round the land issue. We get hints about people's rights to property ownership and the duty of stewardship that goes with such owneship, but it stops there. Peasants' land rights in Third World countries sometimes get a mention but this is invariably discussed in terms of rural land distribution, which is no solution at all, as people are discovering in countries like El Salvador where land distribution took place in the early 1990s.

Aside from the official hierarchy we have bodies like CAFOD, which do an excellent job on the ground but go astray when they start talking about politics and economics. Thus we had the Jubilee 2000 Campaign, which was about debt relief, and ingored the fact that the biblical Jubilee was primarily about land. The only other land rights that get much of a mention are the land rights of the Palestinians, yet the English have also had their land stolen from them and most people haven't even noticed. It is not difficult to demonstrate that this is the root cause of much of the malaise in this country, as indeed in most countries in the world today.

Perhaps Pope Benedict, who has just issued a statement on Human Rights, will at last engage with the subject directly.

If you think this is just for raving nutters, try doing it yourself

2006-12-14T01:00:00.001Z

yvonne & john
Originally uploaded by lomokev.

We go in the sea at Brighton at 7.30, most mornings summer and winter. Sometimes we have newspaper and television features about us. The usual line is to portray us as raving nutters or eccentrics.

If you think that, just try doing it yourself. In the winter you could die of heart failure, cold water shock or a panic attack. If the sea was rough, you could also die at any time of the year, again, either from panic, or being swamped by the waves or smashed down onto the shingle. And you might think you would be all right and die because you have misjudged because you can't read the sea.

Sea bathing is not a trivial activity. This was well understood in the eighteenth century by Dr Johnson and his intellectual circle, who were dedicated sea bathers and came to Brighton regularly; they pursued the activity in order to hone their minds through engaging with the wild forces of nature. They treated the exercise as nothing less than a scientific experiment, in the same spirit as did the pioneering natural philosophers of the seventeenth century who founded the Royal Society. Consequently, those who entered the sea in all weathers were regarded with respect - so much so that anyone who aspired to be a "person of quality" had to be seen in the sea at Brighton. And that is why Brighton came to become Britain's leading resort at the end of the eighteenth century.

Sadly, the sight of bathers in a winter sea today is little more than an occasion for popular bemusement. Yet it remains significant. A recent article in The Observer told the story of a severely autistic boy who was taken surfing, and through this, was drawn out from himself for the first time in his life. If the effect on the mind of engaging with the wild waves were more generally understood, sea bathing would not be regarded as a mere fun activity.

Busted by the builders

2006-12-12T22:49:00.001Z

Busted in New Road
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

New Road, Brighton is getting an expensive new paving scheme for theatregoers to admire during the interval. But it is going to take several months. It seems that the people who let the contract did not stipulate that satisfactory access must be maintained to businesses affected by the work.

Worst affected was the hairdresser on the corner, who has been there about ten years. In fact, his trade has been hit so badly he has had to close down and the shop is up for letting. I wonder what compensation he will get for having his livelihood ruined.

In due course, the expensive roadworks, paid for out of public funds, will enhance the rental values of the properties that benefit, and as the owners will pocket the added value, the taxpayers whose money has been spent will see very little return on their investment.

Paying for Council services - ongoing saga

2006-12-12T15:44:00.000Z

How to pay for services provided by local councils has been a bone of contention for years. We used to have Rates, which were a payment based on the annual rental value of each property. They were unpopular because they are the only tax that is paid for directly out of pocket, so people noticed them, unlike Income Tax which is paid by employers, or VAT which comes wrapped up in the bill when you buy things.

Rates were replaced by the poll tax, officially called the Community Charge - which was a fixed charge per individual, but many exemptions had to be made and it proved unworkable. After the poll tax we got Council Tax, which is based roughly on the selling price of the house or flat. It was a quick fix and worked as long as it was low. But inflation and changes in the amount that councils get from the goverment have meant that it is being used to raise more revenue than the system can sustain, with the result that people on low fixed incomes are having to pay more than some of them can afford.

So the government set up a new Committee of Inquiry under Sir Michael Lyons, Professor of Local Government at the University of Birmingham, to study the whole business and receive submissions from interested parties. This took place in 2004 and 2005, but then the government decided to extend the terms of reference to include the actual functions and organisation of local government.

Meanwhile, it appointed three more committees - the Leitch review of skills, the Barker Review of Land Use Planning and the Eddington Transport Study, which have now produced their reports.

The Barker review was originally meant to propose way of making more land available for housing, but it has gone on to cover planning in general. An interim report advocated the introduction of development charges - payment for planning consent to capture the resulting increase in land value. This is much the same policy as failed in 1947, 1967 and 1976, when owners just kept their land off the market pending a change in government and repeal. Presumably this is why it was dropped from the final report.

The Eddington transport study is a weighty document which I ought to study but do not have the time.

And now that the three committees have done their work, the Lyons Inquiry has gone out to another round of consultation in the hope of pulling things together. Unfortuntely, there is a short deadline - presumably under pressure from the government - for submissions by 21 January. It does not give much time considering that decisions made will have to be lived with for the next few decades.

The key issue here is the is the potential role of land value taxation in solving all three of these problems. Transport infrastructure is a key factor in creating and sustaining land values. Planning decisions can result in fortunes being made from the release of latent land value when development is allowed to go ahead. And existing taxes which bear on labour - effectively, payroll taxes, have been a major reason why opportunities for on-the-job training through apprenticeships and the like have almost vanished.

However, the chances that Lyons will recommend land value taxation are slim, and he did, the report would be shelved. There are powerful vested interests who make sure they have got the ear of the civil service. Judging from the replies one receives from government departments on the subject, the vested interests appear to operate on the FUD principle, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.

About the Lyons Inquiry
About Land Value Taxation

Land speculation

2006-12-11T15:05:00.001Z

Development site
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

This is described as a development site. It was some kind of stables or building yard, and the last time it was used was more than fifteen years ago, when it had bric-a-brac stalls in it. Then they were kicked out, and somebody got planning consent for some houses. Since then it has just been something to be traded on at a profit as the land values in the area have spiralled, but nobody has bothered to build the houses. Somebody is going to get caught out when the crash comes, but the chances are that for a long time to come, the houses will exist only on paper.

The planners usually get the blame for a shortage of land but this site is one of several in the middle of Brighton which have had planning permission for years. But why bother to build when you can make money by trading sites on?

LAND VALUE TAXATION

Gregorian Chant

2006-12-11T09:40:00.001Z

10.5-gregorian-chant-notate
Originally uploaded by designucdavis.

Gregorian Chant is a good thing. Plainchant is another name for this kind of music. It is very old - at least 3000 years. Jewish Christians brought the music from the Jewish liturgy into the early church and it has been there ever since. Some tunes are found in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, though sung in a different style.

It was not written down until the eleventh century, when the four-line notation was invented by Guido d'Arrezo. Before that, the tune was indicated by little curved marks called neumes; these are similar to the cantillation marks found in Hebrew printed bibles. But because they do not indicate the actual pitch of the notes, the music had to be learned by heart, and there are sometimes slightly different versions of the same music as a result.

Musicologists have been comparing old manuscripts marked with these neumes, and it is now possible to gain a better idea of how the music was performed before the four-line square-note system was introduced. There is a book called the Graduale Triplex which includes both the four-line notation and the older neumes written in over the top of the music. If you follow both, it makes the music sound more lively and prevents it from becoming plodding and dirge-like, which is always a hazard with chant when you just look at the notes.

The four-line notation used for Gregorian Chant is easier to read than the modern five-line stave, and when chant is written in modern notation, important information about how to sing the music is lost.

It is not written in a key, but in one of eight Modes or moods, of which the modern major and minor keys are two of them. Some modes have a bright feel to them, others are sombre and reflective, so the music includes a wide range of "palettes" - colourations. Mostly, the music spans little more than an octave so is not too demanding on the singers, and a good choirmaster will adjust the overall pitch to stay within the range of his performers.

"Performers" is not the right word, though, because the music is prayer, not performance, and for this reason, "rehearsals" are live and better referred to as practice.

No special musical talent is needed to participate. The key elements are, in order of importance.

(1) Listening, because the music comes out of silence.

(2) Breathing

(3) Sounding

If a group of people follow these principles, they will make a lovely sound.

In the Western (Latin) tradition, the language of the chant has been Latin. Gregorian Chant music does not go well into English because the vowels are awkward and the stress points in English sentences are all wrong. But in these days of large-scale population movements, the need to achieve integration and increasing multi-national contacts, such is the EU and its institutions, the time for Latin has returned. You can even listen to the news in Latin on Finnish radio, as hardly anybody knows Finnish.

MUSIC YOU CAN DOWNLOAD

MORE MUSIC YOU CAN DOWNLOAD

HOW TO READ GREGORIAN CHANT

News in Latin (with a Finnish accent)

Brief glory over

2006-12-08T00:42:00.001Z

Nearly all gone
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

The gales have now torn off nearly all the leaves from the weeping prunus in the Pavilion gardens at Brighton.

Transport Integration

2006-12-08T00:36:00.001Z

Transport Integration
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

This is a really good system, a joint venture between Brighton and Hove Council and Brighton & Hove Bus Company. It takes the stress and uncertainty out of bus travel, as you know how long it will be before your arrives. If you find you will have a long wait, you can choose an alternative route, or walk, or take a taxi.

The buses are tracked by a GPS system.

This information display is on the concourse inside Brighton railway station.

How to waste a valuable corner site

2006-12-07T22:04:00.000Z

As well as being an eyesore, this is a waste of a valuable corner site. If the designers had done their job properly, they would have made better use of the site and used this frontage, eg as a showroom, thereby adding rental value and making a more attractive facade.

The Brighton planners have a lot to answer for as well, because the brief for the site should have stipulated this corner building had a frontage to both sides.

Brighton storm

2006-12-03T23:07:00.000Z

Brighton storm
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Today was the biggest sea we have had for several years - probably around 2001. At high tide the waves were touching the deck of the pier.

West Pier wreckage

2006-12-03T23:05:00.000Z

West Pier wreckage
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

The walkway has been left hanging in mid-air now that its supports have been knocked over.

West Pier wreckage

2006-12-03T23:04:00.000Z

West Pier wreckage
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

A lot more has been washed away, the stanchions in the middle of the picture have been knocked over and the walkway that it supported is hanging in mid-air.

Efficient design

2006-12-03T21:40:00.000Z

Mayflower On Shenton Embankment
Originally uploaded by Tango_hui_voine.

This steam locomotive which looks like it dates from around 1914 was a very clever engineering concept actually designed at the start of World War 2.

It was designed to be constructed out of standard and easily-made parts, many of which were also components of other existing types and therefore used a common pool of spares.

The boiler is a simple cylindrical construction which was much less costly to manufacture and repair than the complex boilers used by the other railway companies at the time. It also has the advantage of having plenty of space for steam storage so in effect it acts as an energy container, which is exactly what is needed in railway conditions when the use of energy is intermittent.

By all accounts it was every bit as good as the equivalent designs of other companies, such as the Class 5, but they had a reputation for rough riding at speed which could have been cured by adjusting the balancing/and or suspension; steam engines have heavy reciprocating components which can cause problems if not carefully balanced.

Brief glory

2006-12-01T23:30:00.000Z

Weeping Prunus
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

This tree is in the garden next to Brighton Pavilion. It is some kind of prunus. It has two brief spells of glory. In the spring it is covered with blossom. In the autumn, the leaves turn a golden colour but are gone after a few days as soon as the wind blows them off.

The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway

2006-12-01T23:24:00.000Z

New Romney station
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Went there last summer for the first time. It really does have the atmosphere of a full-scale steam age main line, with the right sounds and smells.

Most of the locomotives are scaled down versions of the LNER Gresley Pacifics, with two cylinders instead of the three cylinders of the prototypes. They were designed by the engineer Henry Greenly.

Sharpham Rainbow

2006-11-30T10:07:00.000Z

Sharpham Rainbow
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

There was a massive downpour and then the sun came out again.

Sharpham and the River Dart

2006-11-30T10:05:00.000Z

Sharpham and the River Dart
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Met up with a group of old friends in Dawlish and we went to the Sharpham estate near Totnes and walked round. It is in a loop of the River Dart.

Ornamental Squash

2006-11-30T10:04:00.000Z

Ornamental Squash
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

My friend grows these - they are mainly for decoration.

Effects of the buy-to-let craze - my neighbours at the back

2006-11-30T10:01:00.000Z

Effects of the buy-to-let craze - my neighbours at the back
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

My previous neighbours at the back had a nice garden and grew a lot of vegetables. Then they moved and the house was bought by a builder who destroyed the garden and paved it over. Then it was bought by somebody who has just let it and the tenants use it to store their rubbish, which there is a lot of. Which has not improved my view.

Buy-to-let has been a disaster for areas like this, as stable communities have been replaced by people who are on the move and don't care about where they live. The government has made matters worse by encouraging it. The effect has been to stoke up house prices beyond the reach of people who want to buy them to live in. This has helped to inflate the house-price-bubble.

Of course, it is not the price of houses that has risen, it is the price of the land upon which they stand. Like all bubbles, it will burst, the only question is when? Then the places will just stand empty and deteriorate.

Full marks to a government department for once

2006-11-20T12:02:00.000Z

I sent in my tax return using the on-line submission facility. This is a well thought-out system and easier than filling in the bundle of paper forms they send out. And it will do the calculation right up to the end of January deadline, instead of you having to send it in by 30 September.

Highly recommended. Give it a try instead of paying an accountant to do a job when you have to do most of the book-keeping work yourself anyway.

That said, there is no excuse for taxing people's labour. It is unnecessary, complicated, discourages people from working, is a cause of the problems resulting from having 85% of the population living in one-third of the land area of the country. One can go on and on. The reality is the tax is not paid by employees - that is just an illusion. It is in reality paid by employers.

To put some figures on this. A nominal wage of £25000 costs an employer £27560, and provides an employee with a real wage - the net value of what people can actually buy with their money - of £13800.

This is a huge incentive to get rid of labour, so jobs don't get done, or they get done by machines, often less well, or the work gets sent off to be done in places like Thailand. All of which helps to maintain our army of unemployed.

It also means that almost half of all government expenditure, for example, on the NHS, is actually tax which employees never see but is collected straight back, but not before a lot of time and money has been wasted in administration.

Not a clever system. What a pity that the energy that has gone into getting this bad system to run had not been put into devising a better one.

Train service disruption at Brighton last Saturday

2006-11-20T09:32:00.000Z

Last Saturday, there was a minor derailment outside Brighton station at about 9 am. But trains were still not running at 7 pm, and the disruption continued next day.

A crane had to be brought from Derby to put the train back on the track. This did not arrive for several hours, apparently because it is "out of gauge" and special arrangments had to be made to give it the necessary clearance.

There always used to be breakdown train and crane kept at Brighton, just outside the station. In the early 1980s, a new one was provided, complete with modern emergency lighting for working at night. Why was it taken away?

Twenty years ago, trains would have been running within three or four hours after a minor incident of this kind, with a normal service next day.

Are we letting too many decisions be made by the bean counters?

Some positive images for a change

2006-11-15T17:04:00.000Z

I have been back in Britain six weeks and it is starting to get to me. So here are some positive images. Balcombe Viaduct; Water meadows near Salisbury; Pavilion Gardens, Brighton; Oxford - Clarendon Building and Sheldonian Theatre - amongst the finest groups of buildings in Europe

Streets of Brighton

2006-11-15T11:43:00.000Z

The council handed out these folding boxes for people to put their rubbish in to stop the seagulls breaking open the bags and spreading rubbish everywhere. But there are such a lot of people in the city centre who just stay a few months and move on that they don't know or don't care about taking the boxes off the street, so they are left lying about and are an eyesore in their own right.

And the council doesn't care either, or it would warn and then fine people who were leaving them out - at £50 a fine it has to be worth sending someone out to deal with the problem.

Streets of Brighton

2006-11-15T11:41:00.000Z

A popular spot for our rough sleepers

Disgusting state of Brighton seafront

2006-11-15T11:37:00.000Z

Outside the Swimming Club on the sea front

Disgusting state of the streets of Brighton

2006-11-15T10:46:00.000Z

Somebody bought this with the idea of putting up a tiny house but there isn't enough room so it has been abandoned to the paint sprayers

Take the test - are you Catholic?

2006-11-12T23:09:00.002Z

Another silly test but fun if you don't take it seriously

ARE YOU CATHOLIC?

Seriously crap design by Brighton and Hove Council

2006-11-12T22:25:00.000Z

You do not need two fence posts next to each other like this. There should be a single post with the horizontal bars fixed to the adjacent corners. To do what they have done is seriously incompetent as well as looking unsightly.

This should have been picked up and prevented at the design stage. If it slipped through at that point, planners ought to have noticed - this is in a Conservation Area. And if not then, the contractor or railing manufacturer should have picked it up. If it had got through the the designer and the planners, the job architect or engineer, or even the men on the job, ought to have realised the detail was wrong. It seems as if everyone involved had their brain switched off, but that is normal for Brighton and Hove Council.

Disgusting state of the streets where I live

2006-11-12T21:42:00.000Z

How Brighton earns its title of "Skidrow-on-Sea"

1 - Rat-breeding area.
2, 3 - Rubbish boxes are never taken in and Brighton and Hove Council does nothing
4 - This one is persistent. I hope the kitchen is better managed. Strange that customers don't mind sitting right next to this.
5- Just what you need on a narrow pavement on a busy Saturday afternoon.

My heresy rating

2006-11-12T20:01:00.000Z

TAKE THE TEST - ARE YOU A HERETIC

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant.
Congratulations, you're not a heretic.
You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man
and like us in every respect, apart from sin.
Officially approved in 451.

They're back in force

2006-11-11T20:10:00.000Z

Here they are in front of the Swimming Club Arch, probably settled in for the season and more will be along later. Their stash of Tennant's is kept well-guarded.h

Outside Brighton Swimming Club this morning

2006-11-09T22:09:00.000Z

Brighton Swimming Club committee has issued a new set of rules, exhorting people to keep the arch tidy and make new people and visitors welcome. It has been beautifully printed and mounted in a posh wooden frame screwed to the wall. It is nice to know our subscriptions are put to good use.

However, what we have to encounter regularly is not at all welcoming. The problem of undesirable people messing in front of the arch would be solved if we could take over the space in front, which we need because the arch is too small for the growing number of people who use it, but the club is not seriously interested in this. The officers in Brighton and Hove City Council responsible for the sea front are not interested either, and the police are not interested in enforcing the "no drinking" rule. In fact, they hardly ever patrol the Lower Promenade, so it is used for all kinds of nefarious activities. In fact, you could load an army of terrorists on Brighton beach and it is unlikely there would be anyone to stop them.

So we will no doubt have to continue to be wading through puke, piddle and poo when we go down for our swim in the morning.

Higher interest rates - bad decision

2006-11-09T19:01:00.000Z

TODAY Interest rates have been raised to curb inflation.

The biggest inflation driver is high land prices which shows up as higher property and house prices.

Higher interest rates will hit marginal firms and businesses and even those borrowers who rent their properties and do not have mortgages.

The beneficiaries are those who are not producers but those who live on investments.

Instead of higher interst rates why does the Chancellor not tackle the problem at its source and introduce an Annual Land Value Tax on all land (LVT)?

This would reduce inflation, allow lower interest rates, dampen the property boom and provide the government with income for essential infrastructure and to enable it to reduce harmful taxes like VAT.

In addition, a useful side effect of LVT would be to encourage the use of brownfield sites which would reduce property prices, making homes and business premises more affordable, create more jobs and ease the pressure and costs of urban sprawl.

This was sent to me in an email by Dave Wetzel, Vice Chair, Transport for London

Brazil nuts nuttiness - British bonkers application of EU rules

2006-11-08T23:52:00.000Z

It has become increasingly difficult to get Brazil nuts in their shells, and the ones without shells that I get from Infinity Foods are more often than not rancid or mouldy and I have to take them back, which they are OK about. The reason it seems is due to EU regulations which are meant to cut down on the risk of people consuming aflatoxin which causes cancer. The aflatoxin comes from a mould that grows on or in the nuts.

I had correspondence with my Euro MP, Caroline Lucas, and she followed it up. Eventually I was told that it comes down to the method of testing when the product comes into UK ports. They are ground up and tested, shell and all if they are shipped in their shells, even though nobody eats the shells. But the shells often have this contamination so nuts in shell nearly always fail the test, so they have stopped shipping them.

But if they are shelled and dehusked in South America before they are shipped, they start to deteriorate and often go rancid. Also, some contaminated nuts end up getting packed and then you get a whole sackful of mouldy nuts. And as only a few sacks get sampled, you are more likely to end up eating mouldy nuts than if they were shipped in their shells.

This stupidity has the hallmark of DEFRA stamped all over it.

A terrible decision by the EU Court of Human Rights

2006-11-07T22:36:00.000Z

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of a property company, J A Pye, based in Oxford, when it appealed against a decision by the House of Lords to allow the occupant, a farmer, “squatters’ rights” - the ancient right in English law to claim ownership of land if it has been occupied without challenge for 12 years.

For many years, the farmer had been using the land, near Newbury, Berks, for grazing. Originally, it had been leased from the company under a grazing agreement, but in 1984 the company refused to renew the lease as it intended to develop the site. The farmer continued to use it and in 1997, registered a claim with the Land Registry, claiming to have aquired title by unchallenged occupation.

Legal action followed, culminating in the Law Lords’ decision. The company then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which ruled that the UK breached the human rights of the developers by not changing an ancient law sooner, to protect landowners. The government is appealing to the Grand Chamber of the European court of human rights and a decision is awaited later this week, but according to a report in the Guardian, if this fails, taxpayers could face a bill of millions of pounds for compensation to the property company.

This decision is disturbing for many reasons. In the first place, the company had acted incompetently in not protecting its title; had it continued to allow the farmer to use the land on licence, the situation would not have arisen. It is not good enough to blame English land law, since a property company should be perfectly well aware of the rules.

The second point is that English land law does not recognise absolute ownership of land; land ownership is a holding from the Sovereign, who holds it on behalf of the people as a whole. This is an excellent principle, since land was made by no man but is a Gift of Nature – or God, if you believe in such an entity. It is worrying that a European Court should be able to override this. The implications go beyond England; in Sweden, there is an ancient Right of Public Access to land which could equally come under threat if some landowner tries to make out that it is interfering with his human rights.

Related to this is a further question about an owner’s right to enjoy land. The property company in question was not enjoying the land. It wasn’t even collecting a peppercorn rent. All it was doing was holding it out of use while speculating on the likelihood of a future increase in value. To all intents and purposes, it had abandoned their land. Such speculation prevents anyone else from using it, and if we accept that land is held by the Sovereign on behalf of the people, then it is not unreasonable to expect some limit to the protection the state will give to a land holder who is just sitting on a piece of real estate whilst waiting for it to go up in value.

Furthermore, in this instance, the owner was not a human being but a corporate body, set up under legislation which gives such bodies certain privileges, and one wonders why the notion of human rights should apply at all. It sets a bad precedent.

There is a final twist to this story. Nobody would be much interested in the property if the site was merely grazing land. But with planning consent for residential development, the site is worth over £20 million. Whether the beneficiary is the property company which paid a fraction of this amount or the farmer who picked it up under squatters’ rights, there is a huge windfall waiting to be gained on the strength of a decision by a planning committee, and this cannot be right either.

To its credit, the government is aware of this latter issue and is proposing to charge for planning consents, either through something called a Planning Gain Supplement or a “Roof Tax”. Unfortunately, this is just a revival of legislation which has been tried and found wanting four times since 1945. The solution which would actually work – Land Value Taxation, remains off the agenda.

Adam Smith and Free Markets

2006-11-06T21:30:00.000Z

Adam Smith's portrait will soon be replacing that of Sir Edward Elgar on Britain's £20 notes, which has brought his ideas about free markets back to attention. Whilst staying at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article he had written, drawing attention to the limitations of free markets. It was written about 15 years ago, but it is as relevant as ever, and this is an edited extract of what it said.

One should perhaps not wonder after 120 years of Marxist/pseudo-scientific analysis of economics, to hear that people should have rights as consumers, but no mention of rights as producers. Such views are propagated in university economics courses and found in the writings of many independent philosophers. It suits the dogma of governments of both right and left complexions...

...following Adam Smith, the free-market economy was a Liberal concept. It was resisted by the Tories until quite recently. The aristocratic basis of land and capital ownership did not welcome competition, and certainly the growth of monopolies and cartels in the first half of the 20th century confirms this... However, the Liberal view was always that there is no better mechanism than the free market for distributing goods and services, but it implies prior equities. The success of the market - the achievement of a successful distribution through exchanges - requires that the participants came to it as equals -- with equal freedom to exercise a valuation and equal power to strike a bargain.

We must ask ourselves whether this requirement was met in the last 200 years. Clearly it has not been so. Take, for instance, the housing market; while there is a shortage of houses and there is speculation in land, and most people are poor or have little surplus wealth for anything, can there be fair bargaining in rents or prices of houses?

In the ‘labour market’, do an employer and a potential employee (who apparently has no choice other than to be someone’s ‘servant’) meet on equal terms? In the ‘money market’, do a moneylender and a borrower bargain as equals? Is it not true that the poorer you are (business or individual) the higher the interest rate you will be forced to pay?

The walls of lawyers offices are lined with books on landlord and tenant, moneylender and borrower, employer and employee relations which testify to the past attempts to regulate them and to protect the weaker in the market, without actually solving the problem...

The Marxist and socialist view has been that these deficiencies in the market operation were due to the power and avarice of the sweatshop owners, the greedy landlords, the filthy capitalists, and the profiteering middlemen. The blame and the attack were personalised; free economies were considered corrupt. Only by having a central state power that controlled the market and replaced those selfish operators (often with faithful party nominees) could all be set right. As we now observe in those countries that took this philosophy on board, it did not solve any of the problems. It eliminated any direct action-reaction, any feedback that could bring balance. Millions of individual decisions and choices were replaced by determinations made by bureaucrats. It did not remove the basic poverty of the people, who still came to market disadvantaged, now even more so because the vendors and landlords became faceless and monolithic.

We still hear echoes of this socialist view, although highly attenuated because of the world failures of socialism and communism. Few of us would now concede that state control was the answer. Well, perhaps just a little welfareism? Is it that because we propose no alternatives, or do we want to perpetuate a democratised socialism or a socialised democratism?

The “market” is a secondary and dependent mechanism. Other powerful influences on it take place before the market operates. For example, before you can exchange things in a market, they have to be produced. It is at the point of production, not in the market, that the initial division of wealth takes place. Those who worked to produce the wealth usually take little of it, while those who claim ownership of the production process, or their landlords, or the taxman have the prior claim and take the larger shares. The market only confirms and reflects this inequitable division.

So if we observe that the in free markets there is ill-distribution, it is not that it has an imperfect mechanism that has to be remodelled, nor that is has basically selfish people who have to be controlled, but that the bargaining power of the purchaser and vendor must initially be more equitable. The poor must be freed of their poverty; the disadvantaged must have their handicap removed. This was basic Liberal philosophy, yet in recent years we have had many Liberals advocating a tinkering with the economic mechanisms, rather than removing the root cause of the problem of our poverty.

It seems that we have all accepted the present economic structures and relationships as being benign and immutable? It is difficult to convince people they are poor, and that from their poverty follows their lack of choice, their diminished power, and their fragile freedom. In all the discussions about liberty and its limitation, no voice was heard on the effect of our economic status on the extent of our freedom and power. Indeed, at one point many were putting the case for power of the individual as a consumer, but there was only an isolated plea for individual power as a producer. Linked to this basic issue, some used to promote the causes of participation of workers in the workplace, coownership, co-operatives, and, from some of us, worker-ownership. This was not a tacked-on choice. It recognised the fact that we all have to win a living from Nature, and are not born as servants and masters. The economic forces and legal framework that cause us to become servants, employees, poor, borrowers, and mere consumers are aberrations. They are not the result of natural law, but of man-made ones. It does not have to be so.

More generally, beyond the mere participation that makes for efficient production and humane management, we must re-examine the economic needs and rights of the individual. We all need access to land and the means of production, but without the failed socialist methods of state ownership and control. This is the fundamental basis of economic freedom. If we achieve that, we can then let market forces reign freely and effectively.

A favourite quotation of mine is "Aristotle thought that slaves were the ordination of Nature; the devil of it was, the slaves thought so too." Yes, even today we willingly accept a similar status with slightly better conditions. We must recognise our predicament and our need. We must be radical enough to allow the thought that there is a wider freedom and a more just society than we have now; or is that expecting too much?

Adapted from an article by Alex Godden.

Yet another livery for Thameslink

2006-11-02T23:00:00.000Z

First Capital Connect
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

This must be about the fifth livery for these trains since 1989. They came out in Network South-East red, white and blue. Then they painted them grey and called them the Belgranos. Then they were blue and yellow, and then a few of them have been back in another mostly-grey livery.

Now First group has taken the franchise from Govia and they have got up this psychedelic colour scheme. They have also given the service a new name, "First Capital Connect", which is completely meaningless. This is particularly stupid as Thameslink is the official name of the service and a well-known brand in the area it serves, as well as being a good description of the route. And what a mouthfull "First Capital Connect" is for station announcers.

Railway privatisation has been good for the firms that cook up colour schemes for trains. Pity, too, that they haven't done anything about the horrible seating layout in this type of stock.

Beside the Sea Side

2006-10-31T21:56:00.000Z

Brighton promenade
Originally uploaded by Tibi08.

An article in The Observer on 22 October by their architectural correspondent, Steven Bayley, perpetuates the myth that Brighton first came to prominence on the strength of Dr Russell's promotion of the Sea Cure.

The real story is more interesting. The development of a sea front at Brighton, based on sea bathing, begins with Londoners buying properties for the purpose over twenty years before Russell set up his establishment in the late 1750s.

This first generation of Brighton sea bathers take up the practice as a means of engaging with the unconstrained forces of the ocean in order to replicate the habits of enquiring thought developed by the pioneering members of the Royal Society in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Russell enters the picture later on, trading on pre-scientific beliefs about intellectual efforts being powered by the production of "animal spirits". The Russell Sea Cure was based on the notion that a shock to the system would restore the "balance of humours within the body".

The idea that Russell was the first to popularise Brighton is a nineteenth century myth created when sea bathing was reduced to the status of recreational pastime, coincident with swimming becoming a mere sport.

The myth continues to do much harm to the city because nothing can
improve on the sea front whilst its true origins remain unacknowledged. Brighton sea front is one of the handful of iconic places in the world, and the model for all seaside resorts everywhere.

The greatest service that architectural writers could do for Brighton
would be to acknowledge the international significance of the sea
front and press for it to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage
Site.

Thalys - a horrible train

2006-10-26T10:07:00.000Z

Thalys train interior shambles
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

The Thalys is a train based on the French TGV, it runs between Paris, Brussels, Köln and Amsterdam.

It is an appalling train. The seats are cramped and a lot of "window" seats just give you a view of the curtains. There is not enough space for luggage and it gets left in the doorways. At the next stop the platform was this side and all the stuff had to be moved.

Trouble is nearly all the seats are face-to-back, airline style, only the difference betweens trains and aircraft is that planes have a baggage hold but trains don't.

Compare the Danish IC3 train

How to do a pedestrian crossing on a bus lane

2006-10-25T13:06:00.000Z

Tramway/bus lane crossing
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Pedestrian facilities in British towns are often poor but in Brighton they are truIy atrocious.

In many parts of the city centre, there are no pedestrian crossings where they are most needed, forcing people into long and time-consuming detours if they are not prepared to take risks. If you try walking from St James's Street to North Street, you will see what the problem is.

People have to wait too long before they can get across the road, and because the lights show danger when it is apparently safe to cross, ignore the lights and are then liable to be hit by vehicles, especially buses, coming from an unexpected direction.

Particularly bad locations include St Peter's Church, Castle Square,
and North Street, outside Boots. There are a lot of serious accidents, including fatalities.

The layout of the bus lanes in the city needs to be re-thought, as
well as the design of the traffic lights.

The photograph shows pedestrian crossing lights in a bus/tram lane on the continent. They are set so that pedestrians can normally cross without waiting, and when the bus or tram approaches, the lights flash alternately and there is an audible warning. So pedestrians are not held up unecessarily and get a proper warning when they should not cross.

Easy, isn't it? But jaywalking is being used as an excuse to do nothing.

Common sense about recycling.

2006-10-23T22:20:00.000Z

Recycling centre
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

The principle is to reward desirable behaviour.

You put your used bottles and empty cans in and the machine reads a bar code and you get your deposit back. So bottles and cans are not left lying around and some people make a bit of pocket money by collecting them. Better than charging to have the council take your rubbish away, that just encourages dumping.

Horrid railings

2006-10-22T21:26:00.000Z

211020061739.jpg
Originally uploaded by Robert Brook.

In other countries they manage perfectly will without putting up miles and miles of this expensive and hideous hardware so why do we have to have it in Britain?

Royal Mail Corporate Identity - 1980s

2006-10-22T12:09:00.000Z

Royal Mail Travelling Post Office
Originally uploaded by Tango_hui_voine.

This is from the days when corporate identities spelled out "Quality Public Service". Nowadays corporate identity is about marketing. Once Margaret Thatcher had asserted that there was no such thing as society, the notion of public service disappeared and we just have lip service paid to "customers" or "clients" who are treated like punters.

A travelling post office was a mobile sorting office - the mailbags were put on the train and sorted as it went along. Mail could be picked up and dropped on the way without the train having to stop, using a system of nets on the trains and by the track.

How to do pedestrian crossings

2006-10-20T00:29:00.000Z

Helsingborg street crossing
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

This road is just as busy as Brighton sea front. But there is no pig-pen in the middle, and when the lights change you can cross in one go. The safety-conscious Swedes seem to manage without putting up miles of railings in their streets so why do we need them?

How not to do pedestrian crossings

2006-10-20T00:15:00.000Z

Crossing
Originally uploaded by Elsie esq..

This crossing is on Brighton sea front by East Street. It is a perfect example of how Brighton's traffic engineers make life hard for pedestrians.

* The waiting time is too long.
* You have to cross the road in two stages, and are made to wait in the pig pen in the middle.
* When you have crossed the road you also have to cross the cycle lane, but this is not controlled by the traffic lights so you step right into the path of fast-moving cyclists.

Wonderful.

Rat in my street this morning

2006-10-17T19:26:00.000Z

Rat in my street this morning
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

There are a lot of dirty people live round here and restaurants who put their food waste out. Good for foxes as well as rats. Brighton and Hove Council are curiously slack about enforcement, which is odd because they could make quite a lot in fines until people got the idea that they should not leave their muck about everywhere.

Internet problem in hotel - solved fast

2006-10-17T13:10:00.000Z

The hotel I stayed at in Helsingborg had just opened and the internet access was dodgy - there was an American journalist who had not been able to email to his office using his Apple laptop. They let me speak to their ISP who told me what the settings should be but they didn't work. As I was using Linux I could get some information, I was getting a faulty IP number.

I made several telephone calls to the UK and Germany and enquired in the local Apple shop, then the hotel people let me speak to the ISP again - this time they gave me a fixed IP number which didn't sound right but it worked.

Next thing was the computer at the reception desk had lost its internet connection, which was obviously because I had taken the IP number, so I disconnected and their computer regained its connection. I asked about router and they said they couldn't get to it, I asked where ethernet cables came from room and they showed me a box in a cupboard.

I noted make and model number and looked it up on the internet, it turned out to be a network switching box, not a router.

The hotel promptly called an IT person who found there was no router, he got one from a late-opening shop, fitted it and everything was quickly up and running.

When I left, the hotel thanked me for the help and didn't charge me for the international calls I had made.

Somehow, I can't see things happening like that in Britain. It would have been, more likely, 'nothing wrong with our system, must be your computer, Guv', so things don't get sorted out.

What a mess round Palmeira Square, Hove actually.

2006-10-17T10:24:00.000Z

What a mess
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

They are renewing the paving in this Conservation Area and they are making a complete mess of it as the blocks are too widely spaced. They had to fill in the gaps with wet cement which is wrong and it looks as if they did the pointing with their fingers. Either there wasn't a proper specification or it is bad workmanship and supervision. And all in a Conservation Area and costing a fortune. There is someone, somewhere, very incompetent.

Integrated transport

2006-10-15T00:30:00.000Z

Spårvagn
Originally uploaded by Johannes Martinsson.

The green box is where you validate your ticket which costs SEK100 (about £7.50) and does for six trips then you have some money left over which goes towards payment for the next one. It would be better if the fares were an exact fraction of 100. The clever thing is that they last for 90 minutes which takes you on the ferry all the way to Vrångö and you can use the for local train journeys too.

You put your ticket in the slot at the top and press one of the buttons depending on your journey. The starting time and cost of the journey is printed on the back. The top button is marked BYTE which confusing at first as it is nothing to do with computers but means "change". It is the one to press if you change eg from tram to ferry or from one tram to another.

Why am I still using film?

2006-10-11T19:36:00.000Z

Me taking pictures
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Most of my pics are taken with a Canon Ixus but it has serious limitatations.

(1) The lens can't draw straight lines and there is bad barrel distortion. This could be corrected digitally if they built in the software.

(2) It is difficult to see the image on the LCD display at the back of the camera except in subdued light.

(3) I have to hold the camera at arm's length to see the display and it is not steady in this position so it tends not to be sharp except in very bright light.

(4) The optical viewfinder is not accurate and you can't see what is not in the picture.

(5) It does not cope well with a wide range of light and dark in the subject. Light areas bleach out or dark areas do not show shadow detail.

(6) It does not do will with subjects like dark twigs viewed against the sky as they come out grey and blurred.

So I am still using my worn, shabby, Leica M2 made in 1961 and will be for quite a while.

Obstacle course outside Brighton station

2006-10-11T19:00:00.000Z

Obstacle course outside Brighton station
Originally uploaded by seadipper.

I have written repeatedly to Cityclean, the people supposedly responsible for keeping the streets of Brighton in good order but they don't do anything.

Having just returned from Sweden where this sort of thing just doesn't happen, I am not that bothered by it right now as it is just part of living in lovely Britain, but after a few months living in a permanent tip will get on my nerves and then I will want to go away again.

Robin Hood in reverse

2006-10-10T10:30:00.000Z

Writing in the Catholic Herald on 6 October, an article by Ed West voiced what I have long thought about the tax system - it enshrines major injustices that the Church should, but does not, speak out against.

Matters are far worse even than he claims in his article. The system is complex and understood only by qualified professionals. It has, indeed, evolved to the point that it has become a structure of loopholes, such that the whole tax-gathering operation is like trying to collect puffs of smoke in a string bag. This means that those who can afford to pay for the best advice can reduce their contributions substantially. The title of the article, "Robin Hood in reverse" is exactly right. The tax system is a major component of the "poverty trap", and when people are little better off when they work than when they are living on benefits, moral corrosion sets in.

And the running cost, about £25 billion a year, is about 6% of the total, and several times more than what a better and more efficient system would be.

The whole exercise is based on illusion. Employees are led to believe that they pay "their" Income Tax through the PAYE system. In reality, it is a tax on labour; taken together with "employees' " and "employers' " National Insurance contributions plus VAT, the overall
result is that it costs employers almost £2 to leave employees with £1 worth of purchasing power, measured in the real goods and services they can actually buy. This gives us the seemingly impossible - the high labour-cost/low wage economy. Employers are under continual pressure to reduce their labour forces, whilst in the public sector, we get "churning" - over 40% of the cost of running the NHS, for instance, is actually money that is promptly reclaimed by the government, those who work for the organisation never seeing a penny of it except as a notional "gross pay" figure on their pay slips.

The the system hits hardest on those with few skills or in disadvantaged locations, such as the former industrial areas in the northern half of the country, producing overcrowding and housing shortages in London and the South-East as people drift to that part of the country in search of jobs. Matters are much worse than the article argues, and the problem is not confined to the UK, being more severe in other EU countries such as France and Germany where it is the main cause of their persistent high levels of unemployment and regional imbalance.

And what is the money spent on? The bulk goes on either the relief of poverty ("redistribution") or on services which, in the right circumstances, most people could be sufficiently affluent to buy for themselves. Yet the need for wholesale redistribution is assumed to be a natural and unavoidable condition. Rarely is it suggested that there is something fundamentally wrong with an economic structure in which poverty is inevitable and so much has to be provided through government intervention paid for by high taxation. And those who question this state of affairs generally have little to offer other than cuts in taxes accompanied by cuts in public services, which drive large numbers of people back into poverty and leave the public realm in a state of squalor.

What is needed is not so much tax cuts as a tax shift: people should keep what they earn and the state should collect that which is not earned, thereby raising the revenue to pay for what individuals genuinely can not provide for themselves but which has to be supplied by government.

Using the social teaching of the Catholic Church as a starting point, we need to work out how that can be achieved.

Brazil Nuts - European Union Nuttiness

2006-10-07T21:21:00.000Z

Brazil Nuts
Originally uploaded by coveman.

I used to like to eat Brazil nuts, but these days I have to take three packets out of four back to the shop as they are not fit to eat. They never look nice and white like the one in the picture, but are off-white and translucent - the first sign that they are going bad.

Yet again today I have purchased a packet of Brazil nuts from my localhealth food store, Infinity Foods, only to find them rancid on opening them this evening. I had hoped to eat a few to finish my evening meal and am disappointed that I can't, and now have the nuisance of making a trip back to the shop - they are quite happy to give me my money back but this just shouldn't be happening. The previous bag I bought was mouldy through and through.

The sale of rancid or mouldy Brazil nuts is a new phenomenon. It has apparently followed the introduction of Directive 1525-98 which has effectively put an end to the sale of Brazil nuts in their shells.

The Brazil nut is the product of millions of years of evolution. The kernel has multiple wrapping, including the woody shell in which the nuts used to be sold, and the papery inner husk. This provides the best possible protection, and means that the kernel will normally remain in perfect condition for a considerable period, and remains fresh when the nut is finally cracked open to be eaten. If it was off or mouldy, this would be perfectly evident.

Occasionally, the nuts can be infected with a dangerous mould known as aflatoxin, and to reduce the hazard, the EC introduced Directive 1525-98, which in practice has meant that Brazil nuts are shelled and de-husked and then exported from their country of origin in sealed plastic sacks.

Unfortunately, once the shell and husk have been removed, the nut starts to deteriorate and go rancid. Worse still, if one nut in the sack is infected with mould, this will spread through the entire contents.

Thus the effect of the Directive is that the Brazil nuts on sale in the shops are rarely fresh and often rancid (they taste soapy) or mouldy, so that more people are put to more risk than if the nuts were left in their shells and the people who finally ate them did the checking for themselves, and even then, just the odd nut would be affected instead of a whole sackful.

In the light of this problem, the regulation needs to be reviewed and probably abolished.

Back in Britain

2006-10-06T17:33:00.000Z

Back to dirty, littered streets, having to step into the flow of traffic to get round holes dug in the pavement. And rubbish comments in most of the papers. Southern is at least keeping its new trains clean even if you have to put your luggage in the doorway.

What makes it worth coming back for? Friends and the sea. I always get a good buzz out of going in the sea, no matter what. Getting the sea buzz again this morning makes up for nearly everything, it would be a lot to give up not being near the sea where you can get to it in just a few minutes.

That's what happens when you become a sea addict. Would be hard to live without.

The sea at Brighton

2006-10-06T17:16:00.001Z

run nicklaus run #3
Originally uploaded by lomokev.

Brighton must have one of the best sea bathing beaches in Europe. What makes it the best?

The water is never so cold you can't go in for at least five minutes if you stay acclimatised.

The water is not so warm you get dangerous animals like sharks. You rarely get stinging jellyfish.

There are big tides which help keep the beach clean and give you a current you can swim with, but it is predictable and not dangerous.

The water is clean, and nice and salty.

You get a variety of sea conditions but can almost always go in and enjoy them in one way or another. It isn't always calm, nor is it constant surf. Usually you can go for a nice long swim if you want, and if you can't, you can play in the waves.

The beach is shingle. This is a bit hard on the feet but it stays on the beach and does not attach itself to you and accompany you home. When there is a sandy beach it gets between your toes, in your clothes, and then in your bed or camera.

The water is usually deep enough to swim in without wading a long way out.

The beach has an attractive sea front setting with a lot of nice buildings and there are plenty of places to go and eat after you have been in the water.

You can get to it easily as it is only 15 minutes walk from the station.

There are lots of nice beaches in different places but there must be hardly any that give you all these things. You would think that Brighton and Hove Council would promote these benefits, which make the town so special, but you would be wrong. The Council treats the sea front as a place to make money by putting things there which could perfectly well be in Brixton, like games pitches and places for heavy boozing.

1946 London Bus

2006-10-04T12:32:00.000Z

RT 1702
Originally uploaded by Boxley.

People admire the Routemaster as a good-looking and effective people mover but the immediate precessor of the Routemaster is something else again. Unfortunately, it is a bit heavier then the Routemaster and was not as well-built, which did not matter too much in the days when they were routinely overhauled on the production line at Aldenham.

But has there ever been a better-looking public transport vehicle? Indeed, has there ever been a better-looking road vehicle? The overall shape cannot be faulted, nor is there even an awkward detail anywhere to be found. As an automotive classic, this has to be up there with the greatest such is the Bugattis and the early Jaguars.

Is Britain over-populated?

2006-09-30T08:28:00.000Z

What is the optimum population of Britain? Of Europe?

Brighton is definitely over-populated. There is a limited amount of land and it is almost fully built-up. You could work out what the population should be on the basis of land area and density.

London and the South-east region is probably over-populated. This is apparent from problems such as transport, also the relatively short distances now separating one built-up area from another.

Now look at the map of Britain. Start at Bournemouth, then draw a line to Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Preston, York, Leeds, Norwich, Dover and back to Bournemouth. I think this is between one-third and one-half of the land area of Great Britain. Call this the 'box'

The only substantial conurbations in England outside this box are Tees-side, and Tyne and Wear (Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland), with a combined population of about 2 million. Scotland has a population of just over 5 million, which makes 7 million outside the box. Very few people live outside the conurbations anywhere within the box, thus around 85% of Britain's population is living in about one-third of the land area, and, incidentally, within 150 miles of Oxford.

Yet there is no reason in principle why the Inverness region could not support a city the size of Stockholm, and the area around Fort William a city of perhaps half a million. And of course a lot of the apparent problems of over-population are due primarily to our insistence on using cars and failure to invest in public transport.

It's not overpopulation, it is maldistribution.

Capitalist - Socialist: the false dichotomy

2006-09-29T09:21:00.000Z

Are you a "Socialist" or a "Capitalist"?. There is a serious problem of definition. Strictly speaking, a "capitalist" is simply someone who uses capital. And "Capital" is nothing more than goods used for production or in course of production - such as a craftman's tools or a shopkeeper's stock.

The term "Capitalism" as generally used describes a system characterised by (1) free markets in goods and labour, (2) private ownership of land free of obligation to the community. It is possible to have the first without the second, as it is the second which gives rise to inequality and a perceived need for "protection" and"redistribution".

Socialism misses the point, as its advocates rarely question why wealth is not distributed in the first instance. What it then gives us is bureaucratic control, either by brutal methods as in communist systems or by softer systems as in Western Europe. Either way, the results are bad for people, it is just that the communist system has the larger body count; Social Democracy is benign and slow-acting, but still contains the seeds of its own destruction. The good news here is that where wealth has been redistributed by social democratic policies, there is still an opportunity to avoid throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

After three weeks in Sweden

2006-09-28T08:42:00.000Z

Whilst first impressions count, three weeks in a country gives you the chance to scratch below the surface. Paradise?

There is definitely more care for public spaces than in Britain, and this makes the whole experience of being in the country more pleasant. People generally seem more relaxed and better tempered and teenagers are, on the whole, better behaved, and more polite and considerate. There just doesn't seem to be the underlying mood of aggression that is so prevalent in Britain.

You see hardly any homeless people on the streets and sleeping in shop doorways. There is much less litter and vandalism. Public spaces are invariably designed and built to a high standard. It is easier to walk around towns because it is obviously accepted that people should be able to go easily and safely. In city centres, we find pedestrian crossings all in the right places, with good facilities such as controlled lights. In the countryside, we find well-placed but discreet footpath markings.

Alcohol-related problems appear to be on nowhere like the scale they are in the UK. The beer on sale in supermarkets has a low alcohol content - about 3%; anything stronger can only be bought from the state off-licence chain Systembolaget (which has been the subject of a corruption scandal). So the Swedes generally either go abroad to drink or buy their cheap booze in Denmark. The alcoholics tend to gather in small groups on park benches or hang around the Systembolaget shop. This presumbably would have the effect of making people reluctant to go and buy booze, as the styling of the shops is a bit off-putting - it would be a bit like being seen entering a VD clinic. The same benefits could probably be achieved through the tax system.

Is there a down-side to all this? Seventy years of socialism have both yielded benefits and taken their toll.

But the UK's troubles are coming. A lot of Swedes live in on the outskirts of towns and cities, in flats on bland estates with few facilities, apart, perhaps, from a reasonably good bus or tram service. These worked well as long as people acted with restraint and respect for public space - indeed, they were, mistakenly held up as in example and the idea imported into the UK, where attitudes and conduct are very different. But there are a lot of immigrants, some of whom are, as it is tactfully put, "not well integrated". The high divorce rate (50%), which is accepted as OK, has given rise to a generation of children who are not as well-disciplined as they would have been had they been brought up in settled families.

So graffitti and vandalism, whilst nothing like as bad as in Britain, is on the rise, as is drug-taking and the associated crime. Sweden is probably about twenty years behind the UK but unless things can be brought under control, they will inevitably go our way.

The economy is also shaky. Visitors will find the exchange rate very favourable, which is not a good sign. There is a serious poverty trap, which, together with high taxes on labour, has led to an unemployment rate estimated to be about 20%, even though official figures are lower.

The price of the liberal society is also being paid in another way. A low birthrate, combined with high taxes on labour, has led to a brain-drain and a demographic problem, with a pensions crisis and difficulties in providing care for the elderly. Just like Britain, then.

For decades, Sweden's experiment in social democracy, was held up as a model alternative to Marxism. Certainly it was a gentle affair and in mny ways has been hugely successful - it remains a good country and in many ways one of the best in Western Europe. Whether there is much that other countrys can learn is questionable, because the achievement is to a great extent due to the character of the people.

The task now is to avoid throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Whether the new government can achieve this remains to be seen.

Sanctuary of Christ the King, Göteborg

2006-09-25T09:06:00.000Z

Sanctuary of Christ the King, Göteborg
Originally uploaded by tji_rornoja.

Went to Mass here yesterday. They do coffee and sandwiches afterwards which is an excellent thing as it helps bring people together.

Pity about the language problem. My own Swedish is rudimentary, but with so many different nationalities coming here, it is a case of "united we stand..."

Same thing in Brighton. The Polish people have their own Mass and the church is too small for them - we should not be separating like this. Sometimes we have visiting priests who struggle to say Mass in English, so why should they be expected to and why should congregations have to put up with hearing their native language massacred?

The need to spread the use of Latin in the liturgy has never been greater.

Do you feel threatened by any of these?

2006-09-23T08:44:00.000Z

Do you feel threatened by any of these?
Originally uploaded by helen.2006.

The hoodie is a product of the breakdown of British society, a process that has been running for the past forty years. There are lots of factors - social, political and economic; educational policy obviously has a lot to do with it.

There is a film called, "It's a Wonderful Life" in which a man is shown a vision of what his city would have been if he had never existed. It is not unlike Brighton on a weekend evening, with drunks, fights, the occasional murder. I am not usually around then, but as I make my way every morning through the trail of litter, broken glass and vandalism in the middle of Brighton, past the homeless people huddled in shop doorways, I see no reason to expect that things will improve.

The burka is the one to worry about, and it threatens the whole of European society. That feeds on and gains strength from the so-called "War on Terror". Anyone who talks of such a thing does not know what they are really dealing with, since the ultimate consequence of failure to deal with what it is really about is that the one in the middle will be there to enforce Sharia law.

Prince Charles sees himself as becoming one day a "Defender of Faiths", unfortunately this is a fantasy, as the one in the burka will not tolerate any others. This is a point that has not yet sunk in amongst opinion formers, such an idea being regarded as intolerant and illiberal.

Martin Luther

2006-09-22T08:16:00.000Z

This reproduction of the original by Cranach hangs in the Maria church in Helsingborg.

Really he has a lot to answer for, though of course he was a mere trigger who unleashed pent-up forces. Nevertheless, he is not an admirable person.

Libraries have been written on the subject, but in brief, the Reformation split the Western church, and Europe with it. First it created a north-south divide, and then led to the creation of the modern nation-state. In England, there followed the collapse of the social welfare network of schools, hospitals and almshouses which had been run by the church, with dispersion of church lands to the new aristocracy, supporters of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. In Europe, it gave us the Thirty Years' War.

Following Luther came further reformers, notoriously Calvin, whose doctrines made room for Capitalism, the Evangelical Right and the present hegemony of the United States.

Luther himself was a notorious anti-semite and helped to sow the seeds of hatred which ultimately led to the Hitler and the Holocaust. We might also do well to remember that the militaristic Prussian kingdom was and could only have been a Lutheran establishment, and it is not too far-fetched to suggest that he was a factor in causing the major twentieth-century wars.

It would certainly be a good thing if his picture was removed from public view in a church, put away in a cupboard or sold to pay for repairs or something useful.

Swedish democracy - government changed

2006-09-19T21:23:00.000Z

The Swedes got their government changed. But whether this will be beneficial remains to be seen. The country has a lot to lose. A few years of misapplied free-market policies could send it in the disastrous direction that Britain has gone, where there is hardly a public service that is functioning properly and adequately funded, wages are low and labour costs are high due to misconceived taxes.

Which is not to say that it should have continued as it was, just that everywhere there is a need for genuine alternatives to the left-right options that is all that is usually being offered.

Swedish democracy - British democracy

2006-09-15T20:34:00.000Z

There is an election campaign in progress at the moment. Of course, as a visitor who speaks next to nothing of the language, it is impossible to get a true picture of things.

However, a few points are pretty obvious. There are about seven parties. There is some form of proportional representation. And local, regional and national elections are simultaneous and at fixed - every four years - intervals.

In conversation with one of the Greens, I mentioned the British first-post-the-post system, and his immediate response was "how horrible". But the Swedish system doesn't work. The same party - the Social Democrats - has been in power for most of the past seventy years, in recent times governing with a minority as the smaller parties are unable to combine to form an alternative government. That cannot be a good thing.

Blair promised us electoral reform but New Labour abandoned that as soon at it was intoxicated by its first whiff of power. So we too are left with the dictatorship of the largest minority. Some people find their vote is always wasted, and there must be a lot of people who refrain from political activity because they could never swallow the entire set of policies of a political party. And not only that - people use local elections as opinion polls and so perfectly effective and competent local politicians get voted out due to the unpopularity of the party at national level. The system also gives rise to "tactical voting", in which people try to guess the result and vote so as to keep out the candidate they like the least.

This electoral system must be part of the reason why British politics are, and have been for generations, largely dominated by Oxbridge graduates with degrees in PPE or Law. In more recent times, they have followed a simple career path from university to parliament via a party research office or think tank. Never have they done anything like the actual work that most people have to do.

Babies and bathwater
Of course, proportional representation is not a solution in itself, and a party list system like they have in Sweden could merely hand more power to party head offices, who are liable to fill it up with their favourite hacks. The British constituency system has the huge benefit of providing people with a local representative for their areas, though these days, they mainly seem to function as chasers-up of incompetent bureaucrats on behalf of their constituents. Even if the will to change existed, this aspect of British government needs to be held on to.

One way of making parliament more representative whilst keeping the benefits of constituencies is the "Single Transferable Vote". Instead of putting an X against the name of the candidate you want to see elected, you write down numbers against their names in your order of choice - 1, 2, 3, etc. If your first choice is for the candidate who comes third, then your second choice is allocated to one or other of the first two candidates, so your vote isn't wasted. They use the system in Northern Ireland, so why not in the rest of Britain? But this could leave us with the Swedish problem, where the party with the most MPs forms a minority government.

A further useful change benefit would be fixed parliamentary terms, but why do elections need to be national? In the recent past, some local councils had elections by rotation, so that not everyone had to stand for re-election at the same time. At a national level, we might have three groups of constituencies, with staggered elections every two years, with MPs serving a fixed six-year term. This would avoid the kind of sudden change we had in 1997 and can expect again in due course, where goverments are formed of ministers with no previous experience.

Of course these changes would put an end to the two-party hegemony, and as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, we are stuck with more decades of the present ding-dong. Meanwhile, important issues are never addressed in the radical way necessary and one has to ask where things will end?

Astonishing information about my computer

2006-09-13T19:24:00.000Z

I logged onto this web site
PHONEY COMPUTER TEST
A popup window kept appearing telling me there was something wrong with my computer and urging me to select "fix it", so I did, just to see what would happen.

It gave me various bits of information including my IP
number and location (sort of except it spelled it wrong), told me my
operating system was unknown and then gave me this information about
exe programmes it had allegedly found.

"Your system is currently sending private information and documents to
a remote computer. One of these processes (Win32res.exe) has just sent
us the following information:
- \Windows\System32
- \Program Files\Internet Explorer
- \My Documents
- Drive C:\ files

The point is that I don't have a Drive C:\ and am not running any .exe programmes, in fact I don't have any. So it is all invented as a way of trying to get poor Windows users to buy some software or other which probably opens their computers to attack as well as their bank balances.

If commonsense prevails - which is a big IF
Vista should be the last of this junk.

After a week in Sweden

2006-09-11T19:32:00.000Z

This country isn't paradise but there seems to be a lot more things they get right. The design of public spaces is literally streets ahead - high quality design and workmanship is the norm. And people generally treat them with respect.

There is is plenty of graffiti, just like anywhere else, but a lot less litter and vandalism; I was astonished to see a that a sample greenhouse could be left permanently on display in the town square at Halmstad - a town of about 70,000 people. It wouldn't survive a weekend anywhere in Britain. The British bloody-minded attitude seems to be lacking here.

This could be related to the prices of acoholic drinks - ferociously expensive. Instead of off-licences, there is the Systemboglaget, a nationalised outlet, and there aren't many of them, so the alcoholics hang around nearby where the police can keep an eye on the situation. This holds the lid down on consumption until the Swedes go abroad. Stockholm is nobody's stag-night destination.

There is pressure to liberalise alcohol, but it would be a mistake to go down the path we have in Britain, where excessive alcohol consumption is a major public health and social issue.

Perhaps there is something about the culture in Northern Europe which makes so many people unable to drink sensibly and stop when they have had enough, though it might be a genetic thing. Personally I can take booze or leave it, but I object to having to make my way through a trail of broken bottles and other alcohol-related debris every morning.

Brighton Swimming Club - a lost opportunity

2006-08-30T22:00:00.000Z

The area in front of the Swimming Club is popular with substance abusers.

The doorway makes a handy target, in the absence of public toilets on Brighton sea front

It is now ten years since I was Secretary to the Arch Section of Brighton Swimming Club, as it then was, and if I recall correctly, the annual subscription was less than £20 plus voluntary payment for the use of electricity, so subscriptions alone have almost doubled.

Sadly, there is less than nothing to show for it. Numbers using the arch almost daily are about three times what they were in 1997 but the facilities are much as they were.

When I was Secretary, and, indeed, after my resignation, I produced plans to increase the usable space, to address the problems due to cramped conditions and poor configuration, in particular to achieve male/female segregation and prevent the daily nuisance users of the premises encounter due to abuse of the area next to the doorway, which at times can be very unpleasant indeed. In doing nothing about the problem for so long, the Club is party to a serious public nuisance.

My proposal is simple and obvious: to enclose the forecourt area and move the entrance to the centre, to produce male/female areas on the two sides, each roughly the same size, with showers and possibly a toilet, in the centre, and space for bicycles inside, where they would be safe from theft and vandalism. Unfortunately, despite the fact that there are club members in the building trade, nobody has, to my knowledge, progressed this or a similar scheme with costings so that effective fund-raising could take place with a definite aim. I am assured that funds are available – a Brighton councillor advised applying for them when the “Brighton City of Sport” initiative was launched in July. I have even written to the ASA asking them to offer help in preparing a bid if the club itself was unable to do so, and this is something I hoped would have been followed up. Seemingly it has not.

Instead, club members are asked to raise small amounts of money, which is then frittered away in minor improvements, whilst the main issues are not dealt with. The latest, seemingly, is a proposal to renew the flooring, when such an investment would be entirely wasted were the much-needed enlargement to take place. Moreover, although the present flooring is unsatisfactory, an inappropriate renewal could make matters worse. Given that somebody decided to install a domestic kitchen sink unit in the arch, which is disintegrating after a couple of seasons, there is evidently a lack of awareness of the harshness of the environment in the arch, which demands the use of robust and durable materials and fittings.

This certainly does not give members the confidence to make donations to the club, over and above the basic subscription.

Rubbish Rubbish

2006-08-29T17:49:00.000Z

Yet again we hear talk about councils charging for rubbish collection. Don't the policy wonks who come up with ideas like this think them through?

If people have to pay to have their rubbish taken away, some of them will just dump it. You don't need a first class degree from Oxbridge to be able to work that out.

The cost of rubbish disposal needs to be built-in to purchase prices through some tax mechanism, so people can get rid of it with no questions asked. This has the added advantage of giving a financial incentive to people not to buy rubbish in the first place.

One immediate effect would be to discourage over-packaging and promote re-use of containers, as the less they cost to get rid of, the less they would cost. So we might be able to break up our strawberry packaging and put in round the plants in our gardens, instead of having to fill up our bins with a load of plastic, whilst glass bottles would be collected up and re-used instead of being left lying around and smashed.

Landed Gents: fortunes built on bricks and mortar.

2006-08-26T16:37:00.000Z

In last Sunday’s Observer Business (20 August 2006), Jonathan Russell commented that the (property) industry... “still has a selection of property barons who have made huge fortunes from this sector”, and then goes on to list half a dozen. Of one, it says that “like a lot of entrepreneurs... his buildings were more valuable than the businesses they created”.

Wrong. It isn’t their buildings that were valuable, it was the land they were sitting on. Sites in good locations are often worth more than the buildings that are standing on them. When this happens, it is time to redevelop. That land can be under-utilised in this way is due to bad accountancy - bookeeping practice does not reflect the underlying economics. One would have thought that a Sunday broasheet's business commentator was aware of this.

A cautionary tale
I once knew someone who used to travel from Hove to Catford, where he ran a menswear shop. This was the same journey as I made to work, and we used to meet on the train sometimes and talk about this and that. There was hardly ever anyone in the shop, so he can’t have done much business. One evening, we were discussing this, and he said that business wasn't very good but they got by because they owned the shop. I asked if his accountant charged a notional market rent against the profits – apparently he did not. So my friend did not know if he was just living off the imputed rental income – the rental he would have received if he had let the shop at the market rate. I suggested that he asked his accountant to check this out – it might be that he would have been better off to close the business and let the shop.

Shortly afterwards the shop was closed and re-let, and I met my friend in Brighton. He told me he had retired – at age 35 – and was running a rock band.

Is it antisemitic to criticise Israel?

2006-08-23T19:48:00.000Z

Of course, two wrongs don't make a right, but I have long been puzzled why Israel is criticised for doing things that when other countries do them, there is hardly a squeak of protest. Where were the demonstrations against the sixty-year Soviet occupation of the Baltic states? How many are campaigning for the rights of the Tibetans, occupied by China, or the for the persecuted non-Moslem people who live in the south of Sudan? What of East Prussia, a German province ethnically cleansed in 1945 and still held by Russia? It may not be antisemitism that puts the spotlight on Israel, but the protest certainly looks highly selective.

As for the present action, if bands of Normans operating in Northern France were lobbing rockets across the Channel while a French government did nothing about it, can you imagine the headlines in the Sun, Express and Daily Mail? There would quickly be calls for the RAF to do much the same as the Israelis have done in Lebanon. So who are we to criticise the Israelis?

Brighton and Hove Council's complaints procedure

2006-08-23T14:24:00.000Z

Brighton and Hove Council has a really good complaints procedure, and after you have made your complaint, they write to you or send you an email asking what you thought of the service - I have just received one.

If the actual services were half as good as the complaints procedure, there would be little to complain about.

What happened to civic pride in Britain?

2006-08-22T23:12:00.000Z

County Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, was built about 100 years ago to accommodate the London County Council, which was formed in 1888 to bring order to the government of London, which had been run by a disparate collection of joint boards. Unfortunately, from the 1930s onwards, it was consistently Labour, which was not good for the democratic process and led to clashes when there was a Conservative government, as there was in the period before World War 2 and again from 1951 till 1965. The growth of London meant that much of the conurbation was outside the LCC's jurisdiction, so it was abolished and as part of a wider reorganisation of London government, the Greater London Council was established.

Eventually, this too became consistently Labour, and in the early 1980s there was endless conflict between Ken Livingstone, Leader of the GLC, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. So it was abolished in 1986 and replace by joint committees from the London Boroughs.

Of course, the building was a desirable piece of real estate and was sold off, to become a hotel, with various retail outlets on the ground floor. It would have been better if they had knocked the building down, but at least this way, it is clear how far the country has fallen. Margaret Thatcher famously said that there was no such thing as society, and now her statement has come true, so what better way to prove it than this?

Have you got gay fingers?

2006-08-19T13:31:00.000Z

An article in this week's New Scientist brought up the thing about finger length (the ratio between index finger and ring finger length).

The story goes that heterosexual men have a shorter index finger than ring finger, due to exposure to hormones in the womb.

When a group of us did the test, we found no correlation, so this one belongs in the total b******s bin. Apparently the New Scientist's article only told half the story, which is more complex.
SEE THE FULL STORY

What we did find, however, that there is a correlation to spatial aptitute - ability to rotate shapes in the mind, which links to ability to do tasks like map reading and taking mechanical objects apart and putting them together again. Also there is a negative correlation to language ability. But these are only tendencies, so should not be used as an excuse not to try something for which one might not be best equipped by nature. Besides which, in this life, the marks are for trying.

Britain's debt to Poland. Europe's debt to Poland

2006-08-19T13:06:00.000Z

Poland has always been in Europe's front line. A long time ago, in 1683, Vienna was beseiged by the Turkish army, seeking to expand the Islamic sphere of influence. It was the Polish king Jan Sobieski who brought his army over the Tatras and relieved them.
LINK TO WIKIPEDIA ENTRY

In more recent times, we should remember the role of the Polish Air Force which fought with the RAF in the Battle of Britain, and of the Polish Resistance, which consistently sabotaged the Nazi war effort. It has been said that one result was to delay the attack on Soviet Russia for several weeks, as a result of which the German army was caught in winter weather, for which they were not prepared - and despite further advances, they never really recovered from their failure to capture Moscow. Later in the war, Polish sabotage interfered with the transport of oil into Germany from the east, a favourite ploy being to place delayed-action incendiaries under trains, which would ignite once safely inside Germany.

In 1944, there was the Warsaw uprising, when the Soviet army treacherously halted its advance and allowed the city and its people to be pounded into ruins by the Germans, not crossing the River Vistula until this was complete. This paved the way to making it easier to install their puppet politicians after the war, Poland having been betrayed by the west at the Yalta conference, which allocated the country to the Soviet sphere of influence.

Then we need to remember the role of Polish free trade unionists and the Polish Pope in helping the final overthrow of the Communist system in an almost bloodless revolution which almost no-one could have foreseen.

Sadly, the country does not seem to have got its economic policy in order - like many former Communist bloc countries, it is not going to thrive with the kind of tax policy we have in the west. Replacing taxes on labour and capital by a tax on land is going to be part of the solution, unfortunately it does not seem to be part of the economic vocabulary.

Polish Immigrants are stealing British jobs

2006-08-19T13:03:00.000Z

This is the implication from comments in the press and things people are saying. As far as I can make out, they are doing jobs that no-one else wants to do, like keeping the sea front clean, which is a job that is very well done. We are very fortunate to be "invaded" by immigrants like these.

One does, however, wonder why they are having to come here. There must be something seriously wrong with the economic policies of successive Polish governments if there is an apparent shortage of work in Poland. After all, there is still a massive amount of reconstruction still to be done there and there is no shortage of land to work on - it is a big country. It is also a well situated country, not too far from the main population centres of Europe, and unlike Britain and Ireland, not cut off by a strip of water. Seventeen years after the end of communism, the place ought to be thriving. Perhaps the policies advocated in the the following web site might help things along.
LAND VALUE TAXATION

Messing up the HST fleet

2006-08-03T00:09:00.000Z

The Inter-City 125 fleet has done the railways well, but it should not be forgotten that bicycle restrictions came with these trains as they were designed to run in fixed formations - they had little van space in their original form and it is not easy to add on carriages at short notice, as used to be common practice if a large crowd turned up. And the size and spacing of the windows of the mark 3 coach mean that there are always a number of window seats which have no window, but a piece of plastic in the line of sight, and the windows themselves are too high. So I have never been a great enthusiast for HSTs. Nevertheless, compared to recent stuff like Voyagers and Pendolinos, they are wonderful.

However, First Great Western's scheme to shorten and reconfigure the interiors of its HST fleet seems inappropriate in view of the present trend of growing passenger numbers. Surely FGW should be planning for this? Trains need to be lengthened rather than shortened. We have a window of opportunity to do this at low cost with the spare mark 3 vehicles that are currently available and will otherwise go for scrap.

If the aim is to increase acceleration, then all that is necessary is to re-gear the power cars as part of the modernisation package. This will reduce top speeds, but with present-day traffic patterns with stops about 25 miles apart or less, the effect on overall journey time will be minimal and a robust timetable can still be achieved.

The need to cram in as many passengers as possible by using airline seating may not be received with as much enthusiasm as MD Alison Forster expects. Given adequate legroom, unidirectional seating is obviously acceptable to passengers going by themelves, especially on a route they use freqently - they plug in their i-Pods and laptops, and retreat into their private bubble with their personal computer and sound system.

However, in other circumstances, airline seating creates problems in trains. Firstly, unlike aircraft, trains do not have baggage holds. If seats all face the same way, the space between seat backs which could have been used for luggage is lost, which is an important consideration as Great Western trains serve many popular holiday destinations. Problems with luggage interfere with boarding and alighting and cause delays at stations.

Second, unidirectional seating is unsatisfactory for family and other groups travelling together, as they have to split up - again, an important consideration when passengers are making leisure journeys.

Third, the overall ambience of the vehicle can become cluttered and claustrophobic. Although this is not the case in stock such as SNCF's Corail fleet, which benefit from the larger continental dimensions and windows spaced to suit the seat positions, within the tight confines of British stock, the interior environment will feel as cramped as it does in other British trains with mostly airline seating, an impression that will be aggravated by the mark 3 window spacing which means that many "window" seats will actually be windowless.

A season of problems with luggage on holiday trains could well force a rethink, with seats having to be taken out and replaced with luggage stacks.

There may, incidentally, be useful weight savings to be made by designing seating which was indended to be fixed back-to-back, or against a bulkhead; the heavy framing needed for free-standing seats would not be required as as a pair of seats fixed back to back is an inherently strong structure.

FGW should review this proposal.

Luggage space between seat backs on a Danish IC3 DMU

Airline seating can be fine - but there is much more space inside this continental train, the windows and seats all line up, the luggage rack is of generous size and there are a lot of other places inside the vehicle where luggage can be stashed without it getting in anyone's way.

This German inter-city train has plenty of spaces for large items of luggage, which would not be possible in a British train.

Brighton's Volk's Railway messed up

2006-07-31T10:39:00.000Z

Brighton Council has realigned the Volk's Railway. It has been laid to a high standard with proper ballast, which is good, but this shows the curves are too sharp - the four-wheeled cars squeal as they go round. This is wearing out the wheels and the track and could cause damage to the old trains, which weren't designed for such curves.

There was no need to make the curves so sharp. This has been done to make way for a commercial development of various sports facililities, but these should have been fitted around the original route which dated from the 1880s, then there would have been no need to move the railway at all.

Howver, the exposed situation is not very suitable for what is proposed, which could as well go in Brixton as Brighton, so it is squandering a seafront location. Meantime there is a massive unsatisfied demand for beach huts - if you want somewhere to change apart from on the beach, you have to joing Brighton Swimming Club, which does not make non-athletes welcome (though this should not stop anyone who wants to swim in the sea from joining - you will just be a thorn in their sides).

Full English Breakfast

2006-07-29T22:58:00.000Z

For some reason people have got the idea that I am a vegetarian. A lot of people who come and eat at my house are veggie and vegan and they will always get the food they want. But although I hardly ever buy meat to have at home, I eat what is put in front of me and if I am in a restaurant I go for the best menu option. I don't think it is a good thing to separate yourself from other people by sticking rigidly to special diets. It is unkind to reject food when one is a guest, especially as they might have gone to a lot of trouble to prepare it.

And I always look forward to a full English breakfast at the weekends. The sea dippers go off to Carotts at Southwick or some other place and we tuck into a big fry-up. After a long swim or a swim in cold water it won't do any harm to have once or twice a week and they keep you going all day. If done well, it is very tasty but probably quite unhealthy if eaten daily and you do a sedentary job and drive everywhere.

Re-use is better than recycling

2006-07-28T22:16:00.000Z

Brighton's sea front cleaning team do a wonderful job against all the odds, but this should not be happening. If food and drink containers were subject to a heavy tax if they were not re-usable, then people would collect them and take them back to the shop to get their deposit, if for no other reason than to buy more beer.

This is one for the EU - have the bottle manufacturers knobbled the Brussels bureaucrats so they are not going to do anything about it?

Football supporters

2006-07-27T11:13:00.000Z

I was on the way to Germany with a load of football supporters. Here they are having their fry-up and beer on the boat. When they had finished they cleared their tables and took their trays and dirty plates back to the serving hatch.

Brighton City car parking changes are a big mistake

2006-07-26T20:42:00.000Z

SUMMARY
Brighton and Hove Council proposes to amalgamate the city centre parking zones into two large zones. The proposal is unsound on economic grounds as the Council is foregoing very substantial potential revenue. This loss of revenue renders the proposal unsound on grounds of economic justice and equity, since it is at the expense of the poorest members of the society.

The proposal is not based on sound economic principles of resource allocation.
The proposal will generate additional traffic in the city centre.
The proposal will cause hardship to residents.
The scheme needs to be re-thought. Any scheme should:
1) Recognise the differential demand in different locations within the city centre from one area to another in as fine-grained a way as reasonably practicable.
2) Avoid queueing as a means of allocation. There should normally be places available, if at a price, since, amongst other benefits, this enables the true economic value of the parking spaces to be manifest.
3) Optimise revenue through some form of market price mechanism. This is in the interest of all citizens, especially those least well-off
There are numerous well-known ways of achieving this, which, as a town planner, I could enumerate, but as I am not a consultant employed by Brighton and Hove Council, I must refrain from doing so.

DETAILED OBJECTIONS TO PROPOSED CITY CENTRE PARKING SCHEME
The allocation of parking spaces in Brighton city centre could be a textbook exercise in resource allocation. Parking space, in economic theory, is “land”. All land is ultimately a “public good” - it is space that is there for everyone to use, and everything humanity does takes place in space and time. Space on the ground is a prerequisite, and as such, it takes on monetary value. Moreover, its value varies according to location and time; identical properties in different locations change hands for different amounts. Likewise, space on the highway, used for parking.

When land is developed, part of the site is given up for use as highway, whose primary use is for passing and re-passing, to allow people and vehicles to move from one place to another, to give access to properties, such as to people’s own homes, and to accommodate vehicles belonging to tradesmen and enable delivery of goods. The use of highway land for, in effect, the long term storage of vehicles, always detracts from that primary function of the highway which is integral to social and economic life. It follows that vehicles not actively in use should normally be kept off the highway, within the curtilage of individual sites.
For political reasons, local authorities have moved away from this position and allow the highway to be used for the long-term storage of vehicles. In effect, this has created a set of sites for occupation. The value of these sites, as with any other land, varies enormously from one part of the city to another, as the Council tacitly recognises through its differential zonal parking charges. On the other hand, it entirely fails to acknowledge the value of these sites when it makes them available to residents at what could well be little more than the cost of administration. And as always happens when goods are priced at well below their market value, demand exceeds supply, leading to a waiting list and rationing by queue.

The Council’s attempt to address the problem by amalgamating the zones demonstrates the profoundest economic ignorance, to everyone’s loss. People in the most contended areas, in the city centre, will find that they will have difficulty in parking near their own homes, whilst the Council is forgoing the opportunity cost through sub-market pricing, losing substantial revenues in the process. The larger zones will also encourage people to drive within the zones.

The scheme needs to be re-thought. Any scheme should
1) Recognise the differential demand in different locations within the city centre from one area to another in as fine-grained a way as reasonably practicable.

2) Avoid the use of queueing; there should normally be places available, if at a price, since, amongst other benefits, this enables the true economic value of the parking spaces to be manifest.

3) Optimise revenue through some form of market price mechanism. This is in the interest of all citizens, especially those least well-off.

EFFECT OF TAX LUNACY

2006-07-25T19:51:00.000Z

At 4.00 am, all the ferries are converging on Mariehamn, population about 10,000? Where is Mariehamn? It is the capital of Åland, which is ethnically Swedish but belongs to Finland. Rather than blowing each other up, they agree to go their own ways, so they opted out of the EU tax regime. The ferries stop there so they can have a duty-free shop on board. Nutty, isn't it?

Brighton Bin City

2006-07-25T15:28:00.000Z

I walk down to the sea front every morning around 7.30 and the streets all look like this.

Obviously Brighton and Hove Council doesn't care that much or it would have worked out other systems of dealing with rubbish.