When capitalism equals chaos

It will be interesting to see today how successful Brian Souter is at breaking the railway strike. He is the chairman of Stagecoach, which owns South West Trains. In the last week, the company has advertised for new staff, and received 4,000 applications for the 2,500 jobs of the strikers.

Today, 100 senior managers will be working as guards to keep as many trains running as possible. In the General Strike of 1926, middle-class people took to driving the trains and working as mounted policemen. It was the last occasion in England when the class war was out in the open and the middle classes were prepared to take things into their own hands, rather than allow the Marxists to rule - or so it seemed to them in those rather innocent days.

Nowadays, things are all rather more complex. We are all members of the bourgeoisie now. And we all know that the railways were better run in the days before they were privatised and placed into the hands of businessmen like Mr Souter.

The record of Messrs Blair and Brown over the London Underground is woeful. They were not prepared to spend the necessary public money to get the system to work.

We see the same self-destructive stinginess causing chaos on the railways. As we shiver on the platform for a train which does not come, we do not want the railway staff to be beaten into submission by some hard-nosed businessman. We want the train to come in; we want to find a seat and we want, if it is a long journey, to have something to eat. The nationalised railways, by and large, delivered these things. Ideally, we'd prefer the train not to crash while we are aboard.

Capitalism in 2002 has brought worse chaos to England than Marxism ever did in 1926.

What is the issue which has driven Mr Raven and his friends from the Church? It is the attitude of the bishops towards homosexuals. The papers describe Raven as a former banker and Oxford educated. We must conclude that he has occasionally used his brain, and that he has been out and about in the world a bit. The bishops have supposedly taken too relaxed an attitude towards gay and lesbian people.

Why should they not "relax" their attitude? Even if you do not take the view of the late Colin Haycraft that religion is "meant for women and queers", the fact remains that a very high proportion of loyal Anglicans do belong to one category or the other. The notion that they should seek " tolerance" from a church which they have served so diligently is in itself surely offensive.

Many activities in which Mr Raven and his friends indulge are labelled heinous sins by the Bible. One could name laying up treasure on earth (ie, saving money at all); giving money upon usury (ie, having a bank account, or a pension); and making moralistic judgments about the sins of others. These are the real sins in the Christian Gospel. Poor old Saint Paul had a bee in his bonnet about men "leaving the natural use of women" who "burned in their lust toward one another" (Romans 1:27).

But it is hard to see why the people of Kidderminster, 2,000 years after these intemperate words were written, should make them the reason for founding their own special church of Jesus Christ Homophobe. In the same letter, Paul said that anyone who has loved another has fulfilled the law and that is surely a better rule of life than the rather sour one embraced by Raven and chums.

I have lost count of the number of times I have read that the Bishop of Rochester, the whiskery "Dr" Nazir-Ali, is the "front-runner" in the supposed race to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet each story about him which appears suggests that no one knows anything about him. Some say he is a Methodist, others that he is a Roman Catholic. I am beginning to wonder whether his extraordinary whiskers are stuck on with glue. Could it be that "he" is a fifth columnist for advocates of the consecration of women bishops, and that he, is in fact, female? Would anyone care if she were? One wonders who is spinning these stories that he is the "front-runner". Alastair Campbell? "Dr" Nazir-Ali herself?

A large reason for his success in that trial was said by some to be the effect of the famous "fragrance" of his wife upon the learned judge.

When Archer himself was nicked, Mary came to his defence in the witness box with her clear memories of his using a desk diary, which the jury decided had been faked to fool the jury in the libel trial. Her claim to have given away all £500,000 of the damages, when examined by the Crown was shown to be inaccurate. And yet she continues to say that she and her husband have been "wronged". Does she, we begin to wonder, know what "wrong" is?