Cricket: The problem with the Australian Line of Control

Sharda Ugra in Cricinfo


Don't mean to be intemperate or rude or politically incorrect, but why is it that whenever there is an epic-proportion bust-up in international cricket, Australians are almost always involved?

Let's not think Dennis Lillee-Javed Miandad 1981. A rough 21st century brawl-recall will do.

Going backwards from the 2018 Warner-De Kock stairwell skirmish, you meet Josh Hazlewood giving umpire Ranmore Martinesz and New Zealand batsman Corey Anderson a mouthful in Christchurch, 2016.

In 2015, there's Warner and Rohit Sharma having a verbal stoush over an overthrow in a tri-series.

In 2014, Mitchell Starc and Kieron Pollard are involved in a ghastly altercation during the IPL.

In 2013, Warner and South African keeper Thami Tsolekile are ticked off over an incident in an A Test in Pretoria.

Only a few months later, Australian captain Michael Clarke is heard telling James Anderson on air, "Get ready for a broken f**** arm."

In 2010, Mitchell Johnson gets stuck into Scott Styris during an ODI in Napier.

The 2017 Ashes was marked by umpire Aleem Dar standing between James Anderson and Steven Smith in Adelaide, if only to stop the first punch from landing. There were debates over whether stump mikes should be turned down to prevent exchanges between adult men reaching the ears of children. We are not referring to the haw-haw "not even the best cricketer in your family, mate" banter, which has many genuine moments of mirth and forms part of the game's folklore. These are cricket's dramas on the other side of ugly, imprinted into the brains of kids as "normal" on-field behaviour, and last for weeks, full of whisper campaigns, leakages, ICC hearings and sentences.

Bored yet? Annoyed even? Then don't bother going back to Lehmann v Sri Lanka 2002, or McGrath v Sarwan 2003. Yes, let's set aside the Warner v Root walkabout, Harbhajan v Symonds, and even Virat Kohli's last two episodes: the 2014-15 send-offs, and the dramatics over Smith's 2017 "brain fade".


----- Also read


Smith and Lehmann culpable in Warner incident - Ian Chappell

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Stand back from the institutional defence that "David Warner has not been pulled up for any ICC code violation for the last three years and the demerits points scorecard reads South Africa six, Australia two." No need to go into a stats breakdown of how many times out of ten Australian cricketers get involved in cricketing boilovers or reducing to the "the other guys started it" argument. What cricket must deal with is the fact that the Australian cricket team may have turned what used to be spontaneous sporting combustion into their version of Tactic 2.0. Pre-meditated toxic confrontation, a drama scripted between balls.

Other countries manage to play tense, competitive cricket without lapsing into uber-nastiness. Those contests have their heated moments (James Anderson and Ravindra Jadeja, go stand in the corner), but they are not the template for every series between the sides. The cricket still dominates public memory, not the arguments and the controversy. Put Australia on one side of the contest and it's not quite the same.

Throughout its colourful and rich history, Australian cricket has offered us some of the game's most magnificent qualities: competitiveness, daring, energy, positivity. For the better part of the last two decades, they were the gold standard for the game. Yet, slowly, during the same period, so many major series featuring the Aussies has begun to produce an overheated, eventually absurd subplot. In which they usually claim to be the victims, while often being deliberate, and even skillful agent provocateurs.

Unseemly and juvenile conduct is then gift-wrapped into convenient catchphrases: "playing hard but fair" and "not crossing the Line". And what a shapeshifter of a Line it is: imaginary, planted into quicksand, travelling where and when it suits those who claim to own it. To be fair, every cricket team claims ownership of the Line too - usually when they have committed a transgression. On Wednesday, Ottis Gibson described the situation quite poetically: "They are saying they didn't cross the line, but where is the line, who sets the line, where did the line come from? When you are saying you didn't cross the line but we didn't cross the line, you went very close to the line whose line is it?" Now that Sledging is trademarked Australian, no surprise that the team considers themselves rightful rulers of the Line and chooses to dictate what lies on either side.Green and gold are the hottest colours: if verbals are flying, Aussies might be in the vicinity Getty Images

Not so long ago, race and culture were safely on this side of the Line and could be tapped into to mentally "disintegrate" opposition. The players, it is hoped, have moved on from calling each other "curry-munchers", "terrorist", "monkeys". But the Warner-de Kock incident now informs us that "personal" is out of the question and that "family" aka wives or significant others, are on the far side of the Line, off limits. It is not certain if that means only Australian families, or does it apply to the other cricketers' families too? What happens to "your wife, my kids"? And what is the exact definition of personal? Surely, private parts are personal? But male or female? Or both? Or do only Australian cricketers know? Such righteousness from the prime offender can only invite ridicule. England captain Nasser Hussain once called this Australian cricket's habit of "preaching". Except no one is interested in following this gospel.

In other sports around the world, Australian athletes are admired for their titanium-strength fighting qualities. Barring a few, recent tennis brats, generations between Rod Laver and Pat Rafter showed us skill with grace. Whatever their personal issues, Australian swimmers don't expend energy dissing their rivals. There are more than a few Aussie rugby players who demonstrate what playing hard and fair really means. Then how and why does its cricket team unfailingly produce such habitual, perpetual, collective bad conduct? Of the kind they wouldn't want anyone's children indulging in on a playground?

Cricket "verbals" are said to form a part of the Australian game, even at club level. Gideon Haigh called it "just sound effects almost like the sound of bat on ball."

During a 2013 research study around multiculturalism in Australian cricket, some newly arrived Asian immigrants told me they were staggered by the level of sledging in grade cricket. "Even umpires get sledged," one said. The use of fruity language in local cricket is common, but sledging umpires is not. Why, even Australia's own Usman Khawaja told the Player's Voice website in October 2017 that as a junior, "Getting sledged by opposition players and their parents was the norm when I watched the Aussie team, I saw men who were hard-nosed, confident, almost brutish. The same type of men who would sledge me about my heritage growing up." He then went on to say that the situation had improved on the ground and that Australian cricket was changing, becoming more inclusive.

Who knows how long meaningful change in player behaviour will take to get to the top in Australia? Never mind fixing what is an endemic problem, even accepting that it exists is going to be tough - because Australian cricket has turned the profane into their sacred creed. 

Adani mining giant faces financial fraud claims as it bids for Australian coal loan

by Michael Safi in The Guardian


Exclusive: Allegations by Indian customs of huge sums being siphoned off to tax havens from projects are contained in legal documents but denied by company 


 

Men wearing masks of Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Adani chairman Gautam Adani protest outside Parliament House in Canberra. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP


A global mining giant seeking public funds to develop one of the world’s largest coal mines in Australia has been accused of fraudulently siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars of borrowed money into overseas tax havens.

Indian conglomerate the Adani Group is expecting a legal decision in the “near future” in connection with allegations it inflated invoices for an electricity project in India to shift huge sums of money into offshore bank accounts.

Details of the alleged 15bn rupee (US$235m) fraud are contained in an Indian customs intelligence notice obtained by the Guardian, excerpts of which are published for the first time here.

The directorate of revenue intelligence (DRI) file, compiled in 2014, maps out a complex money trail from India through South Korea and Dubai, and eventually to an offshore company in Mauritius allegedly controlled by Vinod Shantilal Adani, the older brother of the billionaire Adani Group chief executive, Gautam Adani.


Vinod Adani is the director of four companies proposing to build a railway line and expand a coal port attached to Queensland’s vast Carmichael mine project.

The proposed mine, which would be Australia’s largest, has been the source of years of intense controversy, legal challenges and protests over its possible environmental impact.

 Abbot Point, surrounded by wetlands and coral reefs, is set to become the world’s largest coal port should the proposed Adani expansion go ahead. Photograph: Tom Jefferson / Greenpeace

Expanding the coal port to accommodate the mine will require dredging an estimated 1.1m cubic metres of spoil near the Great Barrier Reef marine park. Coal from the mine will also produce annual emissions equivalent to those of Malaysia or Austria according to one study.

One of the few remaining hurdles for the Adani Group is to raise finance to build the mine as well as a railway line to transport coal from the site to a port at Abbot Point on the Queensland coast.

To finance the railway Adani hopes to persuade the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (Naif), an Australian government-backed investment fund, to loan the Adani Group or a related entity about US$700m (A$900m) in public money.


While it awaits the decision on the loan, in Delhi the company is also expecting the judgment of a legal authority appointed under Indian financial crime laws in connection to allegations it siphoned borrowed money overseas.

The Adani Group fully denies the accusations, which it has challenged in submissions to the authority.

The investigation

News of the investigation was first reported in India three years ago, but the full customs intelligence document reveals forensic details of the workings of the alleged fraud which have not been publicly revealed.

The 97-page file accuses the Adani Group of ordering hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment for an electricity project in western India’s Maharashtra state using a front company in Dubai.

To read the pdf click here.

The Dubai company allegedly sold the exact same equipment back to Adani Group-controlled businesses in India at massively inflated prices, in some instances said to be eight times the sale price.

According to the allegations in the file, the effect of these transactions was that the Adani Group spent an average 400% more for the materials. That money was allegedly paid to a company Indian authorities allege was owned through a series of shell companies leading to a Mauritius trust controlled by Vinod Adani.

If true, one effect of the alleged scheme would have been to move vast sums of money from the Adani Group’s domestic accounts into offshore bank accounts where it could no longer be taxed or accounted for.

Because tariffs for using electricity transmission networks are determined partly by what they cost to build, if the DRI’s accusations are correct, the overvaluation of capital goods would have been likely to have led to higher power prices for Indian consumers.

 Adani Power company thermal power plant at Mundra, India. Photograph: Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images

A significant proportion of the money the Adani Group allegedly siphoned out of India was provided by taxpayers in the form of loans from the publicly-owned State Bank of India and ICICI, a private bank. There is no suggestion either bank was aware of or involved in any illegal activity.
‘We are cooperating with investigating agencies’

The Adani Group said in a statement to the Guardian on behalf of itself, its subsidiaries, and Vinod Adani that it “strongly denies the allegations of overvaluation”.

Government loan to Adani could be tainted by interference, economists say



“It is a standard procedure for the group to follow international competitive bidding route for major capital expenditures to ensure transparency and competitiveness in the process. All our transactions are always conducted within the framework of extant regulatory guidelines and provisions,” it said.

“The fact that our projects have incurred the lowest cost across central, state and private utility players has gone to establish the robustness of the processes followed by our group.

“It may be noted that Mr Vinod Adani who is the elder brother of Mr Gautam Adani has been a non-resident Indian for about 30 years and has his own established business interests outside India,” the statement said.

“Adani Group is aware of the investigations being conducted by the DRI, and has fully cooperated, and shall continue to cooperate with the investigating agencies.”
The Australian loan

The Adani Group, or a linked entity, has reportedly been granted “conditional approval” for the US$700m (AU$900m) concessional loan from Naif, the Australian government investment fund.


But due to secrecy around the operation of the investment fund, it is not clear whether the loan application discloses the existence of the DRI notice or the ongoing legal proceedings, or whether the applicant is required to do so under the Naif’s anti-money laundering provisions.

  Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani meets with Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2016. Photograph: Cameron Laird/AAP

Adani Group did not clarify whether it had informed Naif about the allegations when asked by the Guardian.

Naif’s investment mandate includes a clause preventing it from “act[ing] in a way that is likely to cause damage to the commonwealth government’s reputation, or that of a relevant state or territory government”.

Vinod Adani is currently listed as the sole director of four Singapore-based companies which, through their Australian subsidiaries, are proposing to build the railway line using the government loan. The companies also control a project to expand the Abbot Point port.

All four entities are ultimately owned by Atulya Resources Limited, an Adani-controlled company in the Cayman Islands.

Status of the Indian investigation

The Guardian understands the allegations of over-invoicing have been passed from the DRI to the Enforcement Directorate (ED), an Indian agency tasked with investigating financial crimes.

The Adani Group says the case is currently before a legal authority, the Adjudicating Authority, indicating that Indian officials are pressing either to seize assets they regard as being connected to money laundering or to levy a fine up to three times the sum allegedly siphoned overseas.

The company declined requests to clarify what if any penalty the authorities are seeking, but a spokesman said a decision was expected shortly. “We follow the process of corporate governance and comply with the applicable laws,” he said.

“All our transactions are always conducted within the framework of law. We have already submitted our detailed reply. Adjudication process on the subject is going on and we expect the order in near future.”

The Guardian is publishing excerpts from the DRI file in the interests of ensuring Naif, as well as the public, have access to as much relevant information as possible in assessing whether Adani or linked companies would be suitable recipients of public money.


In a separate case last year, six Adani subsidiaries were listed among 40 other companies being investigated for allegedly running a similar price-inflation scheme. The companies are accused of inflating the price of coal imports from Indonesia to hide profits in overseas tax havens.

The DRI and the ED did not respond to a request to clarify the status of the investigations.
The alleged money trail

India is electricity-starved. More than 240 million Indians – enough people to form the fifth-largest country on Earth – lack access to regular power.

In the early 1990s, to encourage power companies to build electrical infrastructure, the Indian government eliminated import tariffs on technical equipment such as reactors and transformers. Profit margins on these projects increased overnight.

Adani saw the business opportunity. In 2010, the Maharashtra Eastern Grid Power Transmission Company Limited (MEGPTCL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, was granted a license to develop two electricity transmission networks in the north-east of the state.

The company used another Adani subsidiary, PMC Projects, to source the equipment it would need to build the networks. In turn, PMC, subcontracted the work to a company in Dubai.

According to the investigators’ report, bank records suggest that that company, Electrogen Infra FZE (EIF), charged significant – and to Indian authorities, suspicious – markups on the equipment it sold to PMC.

In one of the 57 invoices cited in the report, EIF is alleged to have ordered equipment from Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea. Bank records allegedly show the company paid Hyundai about US$65m.

According to the DRI, it sold the same equipment to PMC for about US$260m – a mark-up of nearly 400%.

Extract from page 14-15 of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence file on Adani Group. Photograph: The Guardian

“[This] appears to be an abnormal and gross inflation, contrary to ordinary economic logic and prudence,” investigators concluded.

In total, the report alleges EIF made about 26 orders from Hyundai Heavy Industries and sold them onto PMC for an average mark-up of more than 400%, making a profit margin of US$189m.


There is no suggestion Hyundai Heavy Industries or any other supplier was aware of or involved in any illegality.

Extract page 19-20 of the DRI file, section 4.1.16. Photograph: The Guardian

EIF allegedly purchased another 25 shipments of equipment from three companies in China. According to the report, these were sold to the Adani Group for an average markup of about 860%.

Investigators calculated the total assessable value of the allegedly marked-up invoices to be nearly 15bn rupees.

  Extract from page 78-79 of the DRI file, section 15.4. Photograph: The Guardian

“Given the scale and extent of invoice inflation, it is apparent that it [was done] with fraudulent intent of siphoning money from India,” the DRI said.
Who controls the companies?

Key to the alleged fraud, according to investigators, is that EIF, the company subcontracted to purchase the equipment from manufacturers in South Korea and China, was directly controlled by the Adani Group and its associates.

Investigators claim EIF was partly staffed by ex-Adani Group employees who had recently left the company.

According to a letter from the company to an Indian bank that is cited in the notice, EIF was owned by another company called Electrogen Infra Holding Pvt Ltd (EIH). The trail of ownership eventually leads to a trust based in Mauritius – headed by Vinod Adani.

  Extract from page 21-22 of the DRI file, section 4.2.3. Photograph: The Guardian

Investigators concluded: “From the above information given to the bank by EIF, it appears that Vinod Adani had a direct control over the activities of EIF through the Asankhya Resources Family Trust.”

Vinod Adani is also listed as having been the director of EIH between January 2010 and May 2011, though the notice states he told investigators he had no involvement in the day-to-day running of the company.

Investigators also claim to have discovered that an employee of the Adani Group subsidiary PMC had been granted permission by EIF staff to sign multimillion-dollar supply contracts on its behalf.

“All these go to show that there is no distinction between PMC and EIF, they are only working for common interest as part of a large modus-operandi for siphoning off money from India by invoice inflation,” investigators concluded.
The DRI and the ED were both contacted for comment. Attempts were made to contact EIF but the company could not be reached on its listed email or phone number.

Hyundai Heavy Industries did not respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear when the allegations of invoice inflation will be resolved in Delhi other than the Adani spokesman saying that they expected an order “in near future.” In Queensland, Naif’s decision on whether to grant Adani the nearly A$1bn loan is expected by the end of this year.

The struggle to be British: my life as a second-class citizen

Ismail Einashe in The Guardian

I used my British passport for the first time on a January morning in 2002, to board a Eurostar train to Paris. I was taking a paper on the French Revolution for my history A-level and was on a trip to explore the key sites of the period, including a visit to Louis XIV’s chateau at Versailles. When I arrived at Gare du Nord I felt a tingle of nerves cascade through my body: I had become a naturalised British citizen only the year before. As I got closer to border control my palms became sweaty, clutching my new passport. A voice inside told me the severe-looking French officers would not accept that I really was British and would not allow me to enter France. To my great surprise, they did.

Back then, becoming a British citizen was a dull bureaucratic procedure. When my family arrived as refugees from Somalia’s civil war, a few days after Christmas 1994, we were processed at the airport, and then largely forgotten. A few years after I got my passport all that changed. From 2004, adults who applied for British citizenship were required to attend a ceremony; to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch and make a pledge to the UK.

These ceremonies, organised by local authorities in town halls up and down the country, marked a shift in how the British state viewed citizenship. Before, it was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain – now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society. In 2002, the government had also introduced a “life in the UK” test for prospective citizens. The tests point to something important: being a citizen on paper is not the same as truly belonging. Official Britain has been happy to celebrate symbols of multiculturalism – the curry house and the Notting Hill carnival – while ignoring the divisions between communities. Nor did the state give much of a helping hand to newcomers: there was little effort made to help families like mine learn English.

But in the last 15 years, citizenship, participation and “shared values” have been given ever more emphasis. They have also been accompanied by a deepening atmosphere of suspicion around people of Muslim background, particularly those who were born overseas or hold dual nationality. This is making people like me, who have struggled to become British, feel like second-class citizens.

When I arrived in Britain aged nine, I spoke no English and knew virtually nothing about this island. My family was moved into a run-down hostel on London’s Camden Road, which housed refugees – Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovans. Spending my first few months in Britain among other new arrivals was an interesting experience. Although, like my family, they were Muslim, their habits were different to ours. The Balkan refugees liked to drink vodka. After some months we had to move, this time to Colindale in north London.

Colindale was home to a large white working-class community, and our arrival was met with hostility. There were no warm welcomes from the locals, just a cold thud. None of my family spoke English, but I had soon mastered a few phrases in my new tongue: “Excuse me”, “How much is this?”, “Can I have …?”, “Thank you”. It was enough to allow us to navigate our way through the maze of shops in Grahame Park, the largest council estate in Barnet. This estate had opened in 1971, conceived as a garden city, but by the mid-1990s it had fallen into decay and isolation. This brick city became our home. As with other refugee communities before us, Britain had been generous in giving Somalis sanctuary, but was too indifferent to help us truly join in. Families like mine were plunged into unfamiliar cities, alienated and unable to make sense of our new homes. For us, there were no guidebooks on how to fit into British society or a map of how to become a citizen.

My family – the only black family on our street – stuck out like a sore thumb. Some neighbours would throw rubbish into our garden, perhaps because they disapproved of our presence. That first winter in Britain was brutal for us. We had never experienced anything like it and my lips cracked. But whenever it snowed I would run out to the street, stand in the cold, chest out and palms ready to meet the sky, and for the first time feel the sensation of snowflakes on my hands. The following summer I spent my days blasting Shaggy’s Boombastic on my cherished cassette player. But I also realised just how different I was from the children around me. Though most of them were polite, others called me names I did not understand. At the playground they would not let me join in their games – instead they would stare at me. I knew then, aged 11, that there was a distance between them and me, which even childhood curiosity could not overcome.

Although it was hard for me to fit in and make new friends, at least my English was improving. This was not the case for the rest of my family, so they held on to each other, afraid of what was outside our four walls. It was mundane growing up in working-class suburbia: we rarely left our street, except for occasional visits to the Indian cash-and-carry in Kingsbury to buy lamb, cumin and basmati rice. Sometimes one of our neighbours would swerve his van close to the pavement edge if it rained and he happened to spot my mother walking past, so he could splash her long dirac and hijab with dirty water. If he succeeded, he would lean out of the window, thumbs up, laughing hysterically. My mother’s response was always the same. She would walk back to the house, grab a towel and dry herself.

At secondary school in Edgware, the children were still mostly white, but there was a sizeable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. My new classmates would laugh at how I pronounced certain English words. I couldn’t say “congratulations” properly, the difficult part being the “gra”. I would perform saying that word, much to the amusement of my classmates. As the end of term approached, my classmates would ask where I was going on holiday. I would tell them, “Nowhere”, adding, “I don’t have a passport”.

When I was in my early teens, we were rehoused and I had to move to the south Camden Community school in Somers Town. There, a dozen languages were spoken and you could count the number of white students in my year on two hands. There was tension in the air and pupils were mostly segregated along ethnic lines – Turks, Bengalis, English, Somalis, Portuguese. Turf wars were not uncommon and fights broke out at the school gates. The British National party targeted the area in the mid-1990s, seeking to exploit the murder of a white teenager by a Bengali gang. At one point a halal butcher was firebombed.

Though I grew up minutes from the centre of Europe’s biggest city, I rarely ventured far beyond my own community. For us, there were no trips to museums, seaside excursions or cinema visits. MTV Base, the chicken shop and McDonald’s marked my teen years. I had little connection to other parts of Britain, beyond the snippets of middle-class life I observed via my white teachers. And I was still living with refugee documents, given “indefinite leave to remain” that could still be revoked at some future point. I realised then that no amount of identification with my new-found culture could make up for the reality that, without naturalisation, I was not considered British.

At 16, I took my GCSEs and got the grades to leave behind one of the worst state schools in London for one of the best: the mixed sixth form at Camden School for Girls. Most of the teens at my new school had previously attended some of Britain’s best private schools – City of London, Westminster, Highgate – and were in the majority white and middle-class.

It was strange to go from a Muslim-majority school to a sixth form where the children of London’s liberal set attended: only a mile apart, but worlds removed. I am not certain my family understood this change. My cousins thought it was weird that I did not attend the local college, but my old teachers insisted I go to the sixth form if I wanted to get into a good university. A few days after starting there, I got my naturalisation certificate, which opened the way for me to apply for my British passport.

Around the time I became a British citizen, the political mood had started to shift. In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst race riots in a generation. These riots, involving white and Asian communities in towns in the north-west of England, were short but violent. They provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society. This conversation was intensified by the 9/11 attacks in the US. President George W Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” created a binary between the good and the bad immigrant, and the moderate and the radical Muslim. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 added yet more intensity to the conversation in Britain. 

Politicians from across the spectrum agreed that a shared British identity was important, but they couldn’t agree on what that might be. In 2004, the Conservative leader Michael Howard had referred to “The British dream” when speaking about his Jewish immigrant roots. After 2005, he wrote in the Guardian that the tube attacks had “shattered” complacency about Britain’s record on integration. Britain had to face “the terrible truth of being the first western country to have suffered terrorist attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ suicide bombers – born and educated in Britain”. Many commentators questioned whether being a Muslim and British were consistent identities; indeed whether Islam itself was compatible with liberal democracy.

Howard defined a shared identity through institutions such as democracy, monarchy, the rule of law and a national history. But others argued that making a checklist was a very un-British thing to do. Labour’s Gordon Brown, in a 2004 article for the Guardian, wrote that liberty, tolerance and fair play were the core values of Britishness. While acknowledging such values exist in other cultures and countries, he went on to say that when these values are combined together they make a “distinctive Britishness that has been manifest throughout our history and has shaped it”.

For me, at least, becoming a British citizen was a major milestone. It not only signalled that I felt increasingly British but that I now had the legal right to feel this way.

But my new identity was less secure than I realised. Only a few months after my trip to Paris, the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases. Before 1914, British citizenship, once obtained, could only be given up voluntarily by an individual, but that changed with the advent of the first world war. According to the Oxford politics professor Matthew Gibney, the 1914 act was a response to anti-German sentiment and fears about the loyalty of people with dual British-German citizenship. A further law, passed in 1918, created new and wide-ranging grounds to revoke citizenship.

In theory, since 1918, the home secretary has had the power to remove a naturalised person or dual-nationality-holder’s British citizenship if it was considered “conducive to the public good”, but a 1981 law prevented them from doing so if it made the person stateless. Since 9/11, that restraint has been gradually abandoned.

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he will be subject to judicial oversight when he makes an order”.

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

 

‘Before, citizenship was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain, but now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society.’

People have largely accepted these new powers because they are presented as a way to keep the country safe from terrorism. After 9/11, the public became more aware of the Islamist preachers who had made London their home in the preceding decades. Abu Hamza, who was then the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, and became a notorious figure in the media, was, like me, a naturalised British citizen. For several years as a teenager, I attended the Finsbury Park mosque. It was small; I remember the smell of tea, incense and feet that greeted you every time you walked in. I also remember the eclectic mix of worshippers who visited – Algerians, Afghans, Somalis and Moroccans. Unlike Muslims of south-Asian background, few of these people had longstanding colonial ties to Britain. Most had fled civil war in their home countries, while some of the North Africans had left France because they felt it treated Muslims too harshly. The mosque was not affiliated with the Muslim Association of Britain, and its preachers promoted a Salafi form of Islam.

I remember Abu Hamza as a larger-than-life character, whose presence dominated mosque life, especially at Friday prayers when he would go into very long sermons – usually about the dangers of becoming too British. Attending this mosque was like being cocooned from the realities of modern life. I recall Abu Hamza once going off about how, as young Muslim teens, we were not to follow the “kuffar” in their habit of engaging in premarital sex. For much of my teens, this mosque held a kind of control over me, based on fear. That changed when I moved to my new sixth form and felt able to start exploring the world for myself, and began to realise that I could be secular, liberal and humanist.

I went in one direction, but other people I knew chose different paths. Before 2001, I don’t recall many women wearing the niqab, but as the years wore on it became a more common sight on the streets of London. My sister even began to wear one – contrary to media stereotypes of women being coerced, she chose to, as did many of the young women I had gone to school with. The way that young Muslims practised Islam in Britain changed, in line with global developments. They dropped the varied cultural baggage of their parents’ versions of the religion and began a journey to a distinct British Islam – something that connected the Somali refugee and the second-generation Bangladeshi, the Irish and Jamaican converts.

Some of the white working-class kids I grew up with converted to Islam. Daniel became Yusef and Emma became Khadija. Before I knew it, they were giving me advice about how Muslims should behave. I observed this role reversal with amusement. One boy in particular would preach to me while incessantly saying “bruv”. I also saw the young men I had grown up with move away from a life sat on bikes wearing hoods under bridges in Camden listening to grime, to practising their Islam more visibly. Out went the sneaky pints, spliffs and casual sex. Now it was beards, sermons about the faith and handing out Islamic leaflets on street corners. But I did not heed their words. When I was 16 I stopped attending the mosque and I began to question my faith.

Mahdi Hashi was one of the young men I grew up with. Hashi was another child refugee from Somalia. As a teenager he used to complain that he was being followed by the British security services. He said they wanted to make him an informant. Hashi was not alone. In 2009, he and other young Muslim men from Camden took their allegations to the press. One said that a man posing as a postal worker turned up at his door and told him that if he did not cooperate with the security services, then his safety could not be guaranteed if he ever left Britain.

For most newcomers, citizenship is not just confirmation of an identity, it is also about protection: that you will be guaranteed rights and treated according to the law. Hashi lost that protection. In 2009, he left for Somalia because, his family say, of harassment by the security services. In June 2012, his family received a letter informing them that he was to lose his British citizenship. Later that summer Hashi turned up in Djibouti, a tiny former French colony on the Red Sea. He was arrested. He alleges that he was threatened with physical abuse and rape if he did not cooperate with authorities in Djibouti – and he alleges that US officials questioned him. In November 2012, he was given over to the Americans and taken to the US without any formal extradition proceedings. In 2016, Hashi was sentenced in New York to nine years in prison for allegedly supporting the jihadist group al-Shabaab. He will be deported to Somalia upon his release.

Hashi’s case is not unique. Bilal Berjawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon as a child, had his British citizenship revoked in 2012 and was killed in a US drone strike on the outskirts of Mogadishu. His friend Mohamed Sakr, who held dual British-Egyptian nationality, was also killed by a drone strike in Somalia after he had been stripped of his UK citizenship. Together with a third friend, the two young men had visited Tanzania in 2009 on what they claimed was a safari trip, but were arrested, accused of trying to reach Somalia and returned to the UK. The third friend was Mohammed Emwazi, now better known as the Isis executioner “Jihadi John”.

The war in Syria, and the attraction that Isis and other jihadist groups hold for a small minority of British Muslims, has led to a further increase in citizenship-stripping. In 2013 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, removed the citizenship of 13 people who had left for Syria. The government has a duty to protect people, but the tool it is using will have wider, damaging consequences.

The right of newcomers to be considered fully British has been a long struggle. The first border controls of the 20th century were introduced to stop the movement of “alien” Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave citizenship to anyone who had been a subject of empire, but those black and Asian migrants who took up the offer – indeed, who often thought of themselves as British – were met with shocking racism: with “no Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The 1962 Immigration Act began to limit the citizenship rights of people from the non-white colonies, and by the 1982 Act it was all over.

Now we are caught in a paradox, where the state is demanding more effort than ever on the part of the migrant to integrate, but your citizenship is never fully guaranteed. Fifteen years on from the events of 9/11, gaining British citizenship is a much tougher process. And becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen. Citizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state, and it is defended in the usual vein, which is to say: “If you have not done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The usual caveat is that this concerns terrorists and criminals – a red herring that masks the true purpose of such laws, which is to empower the state at the expense of ordinary people. The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described citizenship as “the right to have rights”, but for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.

As I was writing this piece, Donald Trump issued his executive order that bans people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, from entering the US – even if they hold dual nationality. I happened to be visiting New York at the time, and the ban has left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again. Despite assurances from Britain’s government, it remains unclear whether the ban applies to people who hold a British passport, but were born overseas. Trump’s ban did not happen in a vacuum: there is a thread linking the anti-terror policies of western governments and this extreme new step.

Today, I no longer feel so safe in my status as a naturalised British citizen, and it is not just the UK. In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.

White fragility, white fear: the crisis of racial identity

Marcus Woolombi Waters in The Guardian

With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.

Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.

Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.

Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.

White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.

Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.

In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.

Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.

Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.

Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.

Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.

As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.

It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.

As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.

Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.

The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”

In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.

'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians



And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.

As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”

They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.

Australia bet the house on never-ending Chinese growth. It might not end well

Lindsay Davis in The Guardian

Assumptions about coal and iron ore exports helped build Australian prosperity. But with China’s economy threatening to unravel, a less rosy picture is emerging

 

Chinese tourists in Sydney. The two countries have prospered through their close economic ties but there could also be a downside. Photograph: David Gray/REUTERS


Over the last couple of decades, China has undergone profound change and is often cited as an economic growth miracle. Day by day, however, the evidence becomes increasingly clear the probability of a severe economic and financial downturn in China is on the cards. This is not good news at all for Australia. The country is heavily exposed, as China comprises Australia’s top export market, at 33%, more than double the second (Japan at 15%).

Is 2016 the year when the world tumbles back into economic crisis?



A considerable proportion of Australia’s current and future economic prospects depend heavily on China’s current strategy of building its way out of poverty while sustaining strong real GDP growth. To date, China has successfully pulled hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty and into the middle class through mass provision of infrastructure and expansion of housing markets, alongside a powerful export operation which the global economy has relied upon since the 1990s for cheap imports.

Though last week’s volatile falls on the Chinese stock markets alongside a weakening yuan sent shockwaves through the global markets, Australia’s exposure lies much deeper within the Chinese economy. The miracle is starting to look more and more fallible as it slumps under heavy corporate debts and an over-construction spree which shall never again be replicated in our lifetimes or that of our children.

As of the second quarter of 2015, China’s household sector debt was a moderate 38% of GDP but its booming private non-financial business sector debt was 163%.Added together, it gives a total of 201% and its climbing rapidly. This may well be a conservative figure, given it is widely acknowledged the central government has overstated GDP growth.

Australia, though it frequently features high on lists of the world’s most desirable locations, currently has the world’s second most indebted household sector, at 122% of GDP, soon to overtake Denmark in first place. Combined with private non-financial business sector debt, Australia has a staggering total of 203%, vastly larger than public debts at all levels of government.

Australia’s long-term bet on China was and still is conceptually simple – an incredibly flawed assumption that the country would never cease to consume increasingly more iron ore.

The assumption ran right to the top. Back during the Labor (Rudd/Gillard/Rudd) administrations of 2007-13, the bureaucrats at the Reserve Bank and the treasury, alongside the then treasurer Wayne Swan, forecast that China would import so much iron ore up to 2029 that the only way so much steel could be consumed was if they built more houses than there were people. There would also be infrastructure projects like airports, highways, exhibition centres and sports stadiums.

This was just the base forecast. The best-case scenario manufactured by Australian bureaucrats would liken parts of China to resemble the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars movies (the political centre of the galaxy, whose surface is covered by an entire city). With incredible complacency, politicians from both sides of parliament basked in the glory and reacted smugly when the US and the eurozone hit a brick wall.

So what did Australia do with this rosy outlook? Like a letter of guarantee, the financial services industry used it to convince the international wholesale lending community that the Australian economy was as safe as houses. Lenders around the world were facing an indefinite period of zero interest rates and were desperate for better yield. Australia must have seemed a good place to put their money.

For a time, the Australian bet looked good. The banking and financial system collected all the debt they could source from overseas wholesale lenders, underpinning increasingly greater expansion into Australia’s already grossly overvalued residential housing market.

Like most other nations in the Asia-Pacific region, the problem for Australia now is that riding on the back of China’s economic growth is no longer a “letter of guarantee” but a statement of significant overexposure to a bad bet and risky mortgage debt. The current downturn in China is smashing the Australian mining industry via lower demand for commodities amid increased global supply, especially in iron ore.

As well as hitting Australia hard, the mining export-driven states and territories (Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory) will suffer the most.Population growth rates are falling in these regions, growth is softening and underutilization (unemployment and underemployment) is steadily rising. Spillover effects into the other states are likely, which could impact the country’s largest and most leveraged asset class: the housing market.

This may leave little desire for international wholesale lenders to provide credit to the banking and financial system in the future as Australia’s economic prospects deteriorate. It is becoming obvious both domestically and internationally that the country is beset with a massive housing bubble, driven by debt-financed speculation. Without Australia’s lenders importing an ever increasing sum of credit, the overleveraged and overvalued housing market will run into trouble.

Government and industry have managed over the last decade and a half to instill severe complacency in Australia, hoping policymakers’ two big bets on the finance, property and mining sectors would continue to pay dividends far into the future. While these bets paid off in the short-term, genuine productivity-enhancing policies which would diminish the incredible and mostly unearned wealth millionaires and billionaires have siphoned off could then be ignored.

With the Chinese economy beginning to falter, the fear is Australians must now figure out where their economic future lies for the next generation who have been brainwashed into believing that digging up rocks and flipping houses by accumulating a gargantuan mountain of private debt is how a modern western country builds its future. The results will not be pretty.

Arjuna Ranatunga - Large and in charge

Defiant, passionate, cunning - Arjuna Ranatunga was a mighty tough cookie on the field and an unwavering friend off it

MARTIN CROWE in Cricinfo MAY 2015

Truth be known, I love to hate the Australians more than anyone else. And therefore the man who got under their skin the most is my hero. Appearances can be deceiving, and when it comes to Arjuna Ranatunga, the rotund Sri Lankan mastermind, there was nothing soft in his underbelly. He is as tough a cricketer as I have ever come across.

We represented our countries at the same time, both very young, eager allrounders hoping to fit into the cut and thrust of international cricket. Sri Lanka were just beginning their climb, possessing many fine cricketers, if not hardened professionals. New Zealand were a nice mix of amateur and professional, led in example by the pro's pro, Richard Hadlee.

I first spoke to Arjuna while fielding under a helmet at short legin Kandy in 1984. He was defiantly chirpy at the crease, never taking a backward step. His game was a bit limited - the cut and sweep were his release shots. He appeared unfit, yet he never lacked for effort or punch. He quickly became known as "Chef": hungry, dressed in white, and ready to give hell to anyone who didn't conform to the rules of his workspace.

We teased each other a little but deep down we had huge respect for one another, and I loved his smile and zest for life. He had no out-of-control ego, or fear, just a massive heart and a cunning mind. Despite Sri Lanka having no experience as such, Arjuna soaked up all he could. It was as if it was preordained - his apprenticeship was a natural platform for him to learn how to mastermind his team to unprecedented glory.

He quickly became known as "Chef": hungry, dressed in white, and ready to give hell to anyone who didn't conform to the rules of his workspace

I was more comfortable bowling to Arjuna than batting against him. I could swing it away from him, and enjoyed following up my bouncers with a prolonged look to see his response. He was always muttering something and smiling. When he bowled to me, he knew I feared getting out to his miserable deflated wobblies.

Regrettably, he dismissed me too often, notably in Wellington, when I was one short of being the first Kiwi to post a triple-century. I recall the moment when he got to the end of his run-up, beaming ear to ear. He had a gift for me. At that precise moment, up popped the thought that I had already achieved the triple-century. I didn't remove the thought; instead, I hung on to the feeling a bit longer. "Heck, you've done it," I muttered.

Arjuna rolled in and offered up a juicy half-volley wide of off stump. It was a glorious finish to a hard-fought draw, and some history. I never saw the ball leave his hand. My mind was scrambled as I jumped from "Done it", to "Where is it?" Seeing it very late and very wide, I lashed out in desperation, the blade slicing the ball and sending a thick edge into the slip cordon. Hashan Tillakaratne, the wicketkeeper, moved swiftly and calmly to his right and plucked the ball millimetres from the ground.

While Arjuna was upset for me, I was angry and inconsolable. A couple of weeks later, in the Hamilton Test, he dealt it to me again with the same mode of dismissal. Unintentionally, he had got under my skin, in the nicest possible way. I began to hate facing his gentle floating autumn leaves.

By 1996 he was a wise sage. He knew his team and their strengths, and he knew what buttons needed pushing. He saw the Australians as an easy target. He saw how false they could be: loud, lippy banter masking their own fears, often turning into personal abuse when the pressure mounted. He believed the more they resorted to mental disintegration the more they exposed themselves, diverting their attention from their obvious skill and from the job at hand.

A streamlined Arjuna bowls in the 1983 World Cup © Getty Images

On the eve of the World Cup final he told the many drooling media hounds that Shane Warne was just an average bowler. It caused a violent reaction, more so because "Chef" had been pecking away at the Aussie psyche for a few years and this was the ultimate insult. While Warne tightened with fury, Aravinda de Silva - Arjuna's right-hand man and master batsman - loosened up. Two buttons pressed, both for different purposes, both pushed to achieve one result.

Arjuna dabbed the winning run down to his favourite third-man area. Upon seeing it disappear to the boundary, he reached down and grabbed a stump. It was as if he were picking up the stake he had earlier rammed in the ground upon his arrival. That stake stood for a nation that had cracked the code to win a world title. Ranatunga's name was etched in history forever.

We became close companions off the field. He would take me home to dinner, offering his favourite foods and delights. Not surprisingly, he enjoyed a fine feast, probably more than he did cricket, and I loved hanging out with someone so at ease. He also helped me get expert treatment for my ailing legs, so I could get fit again after developing hamstring problems due to my knee condition. He took me to places I never knew existed, and I felt safer with him in a foreign land than I did in any other.

Arjuna wasn't really an arch-enemy or a player I loved to hate. I loved him, full stop. Mostly I loved the way he stood up to the big boys, the bullies, and bulldozed them back in his unique inspiring way. He represented the underdog.

Arjuna left everything out on the park and, going by his healthy waistline, that was quite a plateful.

Keith Miller lived his life and played his cricket king-size

Ashley Mallett

November 3, 2014

 

Keith Miller on his way to a hundred in one of the Victory Tests at Lord's © PA Photos

Arguably Keith Miller was cricket's greatest swashbuckler. Larger than life, he leapt straight at you from the pages of Boy's Own Paper.

He was born in November 1919, named after airmen brothers Keith and Ross Smith, who were creating world aviation history with their first epic flight from England to Australia. He never lost his stamina or zest for life. Miller whacked sixes, backed horses, had film-star looks, bowled bouncers, caught blinders and attracted beauties.

He flew night missions over Germany and Occupied France in his Mosquito, bombing and strafing Nazi rocket bases. The stories from his war days are legion.

Michael Parkinson quizzed him about the pressure in the Test arena once. "Pressure?" Miller asked, "There's no pressure in Test cricket. Real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt up your arse!"

Flight Lieutenant Miller's love of classical music compelled him on one mission to turn his Mosquito back to the war zone. Taking a slight detour, he flew over Bonn, Beethoven's birthplace.

One day at Great Massingham, Norfolk, Miller fought to control his plane as he came in to land. The starboard engine was spurting flame and Miller crash-landed the ailing aircraft, which lost its tail on impact with the ground.

Miller once flew up the straight at Royal Ascot one clear Saturday afternoon and another day he buzzed the Goodwood track. His commanding officer gave Miller a dressing down, calling him an "utter disgrace to the air force".

How the worm turned.

During the Australian team's tour of England in 1953, Miller, resplendent in top hat and tails, drove to Royal Ascot in a gleaming Rolls Royce. As he drove into the car park he noticed that the attendant was none other than his old RAF Commanding Officer. Miller stepped from his vehicle and, pretending not to have recognised his ex-CO, said in his best official voice, "Ah, my good fellow. Park my Rolls in the shade, will you? That's a good chap."

A week or two earlier Lindsay Hassett's Australians had visited Buckingham Palace. Miller was rumoured to have been friendly with Princess Margaret, and when he emerged from the bus he began to wander from the vehicle and headed towards a distant building.

"Nugget, where are you going?" Hassett asked.

"Oh, it's okay, skipper. I know of another entrance here," came the reply.

For much of the war, Miller was based near Bournemouth. Every Friday night it became tradition for Miller and his mates from the RAF base to meet at the Carlton Hotel in Bournemouth. One fateful Friday night, Miller couldn't make the regular appointment and when he returned he found the town barricaded after a German raid. A Focke-Wulf fighter bomber had strafed the church next to the hotel, causing the church spire to collapse directly on to the front bar, instantly killing his eight mates. Each year for more than 50 years Miller returned to England and spent time with a relative of each of his mates killed that tragic night in 1943.

Miller's attacking batting and brilliant fast bowling made an instant impact in world cricket when he impressed as an allrounder in the Victory Tests in 1945. He scored 514 runs in the series, including a brilliant 185 at Lord's, where he hit Eric Hollies for seven sixes, one of the hits crashing into the top of the Lord's pavilion.

Miller bowls in the nets at Lord's in 1948 © PA Photos

John Arlott once wrote that Miller seemed to be "busy living life in case he ran out of it". Miller found a classical-music soulmate in Neville Cardus and had an equally good rapport with the great conductor Sir John Barbirolli.

Miller never captained Australia but he did lead New South Wales with distinction in the 1950s. Richie Benaud regards Miller as the best captain "never to have captained his country", for the way he led by instinct and by example.

In November 1955, Miller's New South Wales struggled to 215 for 8 on the first day of a Sheffield Shield match against South Australia. At stumps Miller declared the innings closed and then partied long and hard to celebrate the birth of his first child. His NSW team-mates were already on the ground when Miller arrived the next morning, so he hurriedly tossed on his cricket gear, his bootlaces trailing as he wandered onto the ground. When he focused his bleary eyes on the wicket, they opened wide, for the wicket was green as a tree frog.

Left-arm paceman Alan Davidson had already measured out his 15-paced approach and was eager to bowl the first ball. He was standing at the top of his mark when Miller approached.

"Ahem, now Davo, I think you can do a job for us today," Miller said before turning his back and walking down towards the stumps and the beginning of the green pitch. He stopped, turned around and waved to Davidson. "Ah Davo, try the other end, I'll have a go here."

Within a few overs South Australia were dismissed for 27. Miller took a career-best 7 for 12. Davidson didn't get a bowl.

As NSW captain, Miller's legend grew. Once, someone alerted him to the fact that there were 12 men on the field. "It seems we have too many men out here," Miller said. "Will one of you blokes piss off?"

In 55 Tests between 1946 and 1956, he took 170 wickets at 22.97 and scored 2958 runs at 36.97. He also pulled off some wonderful catches in the slips. He was agile, some said he possessed lightning reflexes and moved swiftly and gracefully, like a panther.

In 1969 I was invited by the NSW Cricket Association to take part in making a coaching film. The event was sponsored by the Rothmans Sports Foundation. I was rapt at getting the chance to spend time in the company of Alan Davidson and Keith Miller. Each of us was required to bowl a couple of balls at a set of stumps on the SCG No. 2 Ground.

Miller borrowed some gear and as he walked past me, he said, "Ahem, I'll pitch leg and hit off." He did not measure out his run. He simply wandered back a few paces, turned and began his approach. Despite being 50, not having bowled a ball in a decade, he moved in with the grace and power of a finely tuned racehorse. The ball left his hand seam up. It came from a fair height, for Miller stayed "tall" throughout and the ball pitched on the line of leg stump and hit the top of off. He bowled three balls and two of his deliveries pitched leg and hit off. Then he walked away. It was the most amazing thing I've seen in cricket.

Benaud once confessed to Miller: "You know, Keith, I wish I had been given the chance to bowl to Don Bradman. I came into the side just too late." Miller coughed and replied, "Ahem, Richie, my boy, your not having to bowl to Bradman was your one lucky break in cricket."

Miller and Bradman chat during a charity event in London in 1974 © PA Photos

Len Hutton, one of the greatest England batsmen of all time, always found Miller a handful. "He'd just as likely bowl me a slow wrong'un first ball of a Test match as he would an outswinger or a searing bouncer," Sir Len told me in Adelaide in 1984. "Keith was the greatest bowler I ever faced in Test cricket."

Miller admired Hutton's cricket too, and when I once pressed him about the relative merits of Hutton and Geoff Boycott's batting, Miller said: "Both were fine players. Hutton had a far greater range of attacking strokes, but defensively I reckon they were pretty much on a par." He then looked at me and smiled, "But for heaven's sake, don't tell Boycott!"

Miller greatly admired the skill of Bradman, but he didn't quite know how great the Don was until he bowled to him in a match after his retirement. "I decided to bowl a few short ones, "just to test his reflexes," Miller said. "First one was a medium-fast bouncer. It didn't get up too far, but Don was swiftly into position and he smashed it like a rocket past mid-on.

"Fast bowlers don't like that treatment, so I charged in for the next ball and gave it my all. It was a tremendous bumper, straight at his head, but he simply swung into position and cracked it forward of square, almost decapitating Sam Loxton on its way to the fence. If Bradman was 'better' in the 1930s he must have been some player."

So too Keith Ross Miller, Australia's greatest allrounder.

Sledging is an art, and here are the secrets of it

HOWARD JACOBSON 

Friday 29 November 2013

You'll need a ripe vocabulary, an ear for cadence - and respect for your opponent

 

Today I write on “Sledging Considered As One of the Fine Arts”. Sledging, for those not familiar with the term, is the practice of on-field verbal intimidation much favoured by Australian cricketers though by no means confined to them. Every cricket team sledges, though some do it with more aplomb than others.

As with all aspects of sport, national character is the first determinant of success. The more refined and well-mannered the culture, the less accomplished its sledgers. I don’t say the corollary follows – I am too fond of Australia to put its love of vilification down to something primitive in the country’s psyche – but you only have to read Australia’s national poem, “The Bastard from the Bush” (“Fuck me dead, I’m Foreskin Fred, the Bastard from the Bush”), to see an essential connection between verbal violence and a remote colonial lifestyle.

That said, it’s important to place sledging in a tradition of insult-flinging to which even the most sophisticated literature owes a debt. Drama, we are told, originates in the sacrificial, propitiatory rituals of ancient communities. We put on a show for the gods and hope they applaud. Poetry originates in the impulse to exchange insults with fellow mortals. “Get back to where you come from, that’s somewhere in the bush” is how the Captain of the Push responds to the challenge to his authority thrown down by Foreskin Fred. “May the itching piles torment you, may corns grow on your feet,/ May crabs as big as spiders attack your balls a treat./ Then, when you’re down and out, and a hopeless bloody wreck,/ May you slip back through your arsehole, and break your bloody neck.”

Indistinguishable from the satisfaction of getting your own back, hurling abuse and imagining someone else’s suffering is the joy of deploying rhyme and rhythm. We never curse better than we curse in verse. Primary school playgrounds resound with the scurrilous ditties small children make up about one another. My best friend Martin Cartwright couldn’t leave the classroom without hearing “Farty Marty/ Spoils the party”. For years I had to put up with “Howardy Cowardy Custard/ Thinks his pants have rusted”. And a poor religious boy called Manny was yoked with such tireless invention and horrid ingenuity to fanny that his parents had finally to remove him from the school.

Flyting, it’s called in Scotland – where poets would formalise the loathing they felt for each other into a contest of invective strictly governed by the laws of poesy. “Come kiss my Erse,” was how the 16th-century poet Montgomerie began his assault on the poet Polwart. “Kiss the Cunt of the Cow,” Polwart retorted in kind. We can perhaps look forward to a resumption of such well-honed hostilities when the campaign for Scottish independence begins in earnest.

At carnival time in Trinidad, some of the country’s smartest poets, singers and comedians take to the stage to compete in Extempo War, an off-the-cuff battle of wits in which the grosser they are to one another, the more the audience likes it. Whether the Dozens – the game of dissing, snapping and toasting played on the streets of Harlem and St Louis – is an offspring of Extempo War I don’t know, but it seems likely. It values the same qualities of quickness of wit and coarse discourtesy.

Another name for it is Ya Mama – unmannerliness to one another’s mothers being part of the fun. “You wanna play the dozens, well the dozens is a game,” rhymed the comedian George Carlin, “But the way I fuck your mother is a goddam shame.”

Which is a bit ripe even for the Gabba where the Australian captain, Michael Clarke, was heard to say to say to an English player, “Get ready for a f****** broken arm.” I resort to asterisks, not because Clarke did, but because that was how most of the papers reported it. Myself, I think asterisks make what he said even worse. Clarke himself has a baby face, so his outburst appeared doubly shocking, but some among his team look as though they were born with asterisks in their mouths.

What concerns me most about this incident, however, is the placing of the expletive. What Flyters, Extempo Warriors and kids in the school playground all know is that word order matters. Put a fucking where a fucking shouldn’t be and you take fatally from the affront. “Get ready for a fucking broken arm,” doesn’t work for two reasons. 1: It doesn’t scan. And 2: The epithet’s misaligned; it’s not the “broken” you’re meant to be cursing but the “arm”.

I haven’t played much cricket myself. Table tennis was my game. But I was always careful at the table to be precise when I swore. Attentive to both the music and the meaning, I’d have said to my opponent, “Get ready for a broken fucking arm.” Except that I wouldn’t, of course, have said that because it’s pretty difficult to break someone’s arm with a celluloid ball measuring 40mm in diameter and weighing 2.7g.

This could be the reason so few words are exchanged between players in the course of a game of ping-pong. You look ridiculous issuing threats when you don’t have the equipment to carry them out. Or the will, come to that. Somewhere at the back of every table tennis player’s mind is the knowledge that your opponent is as sad as you are. Why compound the lack of self-esteem that made him a table tennis player in the first place?

So humanity comes into the equation after all. To sledge with style requires a ripe vocabulary, an ear for cadence, a fastidiousness as to the positioning of epithets and respect for your opponent. You want to topple him from high estate to low. You don’t want him down and out to start with. Australians don’t always get that.