Showing posts with label ECB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ECB. Show all posts
Tuesday 14 September 2021
Wednesday 13 May 2020
German court decides to take back control with ECB ruling
Martin Wolf in The Financial Times
The 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany was May 8. The 70th anniversary of the Schuman declaration, which launched postwar European integration, was May 9. Just days before both, the German constitutional court launched a legal missile into the heart of the EU. Its judgment is extraordinary. It is an attack on basic economics, the central bank’s integrity, its independence and the legal order of the EU.
The court ruled against the ECB’s public sector purchase programme, launched in 2015. It did not argue that the ECB had improperly engaged in monetary financing, but rather that it had failed to apply a “proportionality” analysis, when assessing the impact of its policies, on a litany of conservative concerns: “public debt, personal savings, pension and retirement schemes, real estate prices and the keeping afloat of economically unviable companies”.
Monetary policies are necessarily economic policies. But the ECB’s policies, including asset purchases, are justified by the fact that it was — and is — failing to achieve its treaty-mandated “primary objective”, which is “price stability” defined as inflation “below, but close to, 2 per cent over the medium-term”. The EU treaty says other considerations are secondary.
The court also decreed that “German constitutional organs and administrative bodies”, including the Bundesbank, may not participate in ultra vires acts (those outside one’s legal authority). Thus, the Bundesbank may not continue to participate in the ECB’s asset purchase programmes, until the ECB has conducted a “proportionality assessment” satisfactory to the court.
Yet the EU treaty states that “neither the ECB, nor a national central bank . . . shall seek or take instructions . . . from any government of a member state or from any other body [my emphases].” The court’s instruction puts the Bundesbank into a conflict of laws.
The court is also assailing the right of the ECB to make its policy decisions independently. Germany fought hard to install central bank independence within the monetary union. Now, its constitutional court has decreed that unless the ECB satisfies the justices that it has taken full account of a highly political list of side-effects of monetary policies, asset purchases are impermissible. Courts in other member countries may see fit to decree that their national central banks cannot participate in policies they dislike. Pretty soon, the ECB will have been sliced and diced into a nullity.
Above all, the German court decreed that it can ignore an earlier ruling of the European Court of Justice in favour of the ECB, because the former “exceeds its judicial mandate . . . where an interpretation of the Treaties is not comprehensible and must thus be considered arbitrary from an objective perspective.” This is an act of judicial secession.
The EU is an integrated legal system, or it is nothing. It rests on the acceptance by all member states of its authority in areas of its competence. In a press release after the constitutional court’s judgment, the ECJ rightly responded that “the Court of Justice alone . . . has jurisdiction to rule that an act of an EU institution is contrary to EU law. Divergences between courts of the member states as to the validity of such acts would indeed be liable to place in jeopardy the unity of the EU legal order and to detract from legal certainty.” Imagine if the courts of every member state were able to decide that ECJ rulings were “arbitrary from an objective perspective”.
What are the implications?
If the German court is ultimately satisfied that the ECB adequately assessed the economic impact of its purchases, the PSPP might continue. But the courthas reduced the ECB’s future flexibility by limiting its holdings of any member country’s debt to 33 per cent of the outstanding total and insisting that asset purchases be allocated according to member states’ shares in the ECB.
In the absence of other eurozone support programmes, the chance of defaults has jumped. Indeed, spreads on Italian government bonds have duly risen a little since the court’s announcement. A crisis might ultimately ensue, with devastating effects; perhaps even a break-up of the eurozone.
Others might follow Germany in rejecting the jurisdiction of the ECJ and EU. Hungary and Poland are obvious candidates. Future historians may mark this as the decisive turning point in Europe’s history, towards disintegration.
What can be done? The ECB cannot be accountable to a national court. But the Bundesbank could provide the court with the proportionality analysis. Maybe that would be enough, albeit also a bad precedent. Or, the decision could be ignored. If a German court can ignore the ECJ, maybe the Bundesbank can ignore that court. Alternatively, the ECB could just abandon efforts to rescue the eurozone and accept whatever outcome emerges.
The EU could initiate an infringement proceeding against Germany. But its direct target would be the German government, which is caught between the EU organs on the one hand and the court on the other. It could not change the ruling.
More radically, the EU could act to create the needed degree of fiscal solidarity. But the obstacles to this are large. A new treaty looks out of the question in today’s environment of intense mutual distrust. Finally, Germany could boldly secede from the eurozone. Yet, before it makes such a decision, one hopes it, too, will be required to do a full analysis of whether that would be “proportionate”.
One point is clear: The constitutional court has decreed that Germany, too, can take back control. As a result it has created a possibly insoluble crisis.
The 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany was May 8. The 70th anniversary of the Schuman declaration, which launched postwar European integration, was May 9. Just days before both, the German constitutional court launched a legal missile into the heart of the EU. Its judgment is extraordinary. It is an attack on basic economics, the central bank’s integrity, its independence and the legal order of the EU.
The court ruled against the ECB’s public sector purchase programme, launched in 2015. It did not argue that the ECB had improperly engaged in monetary financing, but rather that it had failed to apply a “proportionality” analysis, when assessing the impact of its policies, on a litany of conservative concerns: “public debt, personal savings, pension and retirement schemes, real estate prices and the keeping afloat of economically unviable companies”.
Monetary policies are necessarily economic policies. But the ECB’s policies, including asset purchases, are justified by the fact that it was — and is — failing to achieve its treaty-mandated “primary objective”, which is “price stability” defined as inflation “below, but close to, 2 per cent over the medium-term”. The EU treaty says other considerations are secondary.
The court also decreed that “German constitutional organs and administrative bodies”, including the Bundesbank, may not participate in ultra vires acts (those outside one’s legal authority). Thus, the Bundesbank may not continue to participate in the ECB’s asset purchase programmes, until the ECB has conducted a “proportionality assessment” satisfactory to the court.
Yet the EU treaty states that “neither the ECB, nor a national central bank . . . shall seek or take instructions . . . from any government of a member state or from any other body [my emphases].” The court’s instruction puts the Bundesbank into a conflict of laws.
The court is also assailing the right of the ECB to make its policy decisions independently. Germany fought hard to install central bank independence within the monetary union. Now, its constitutional court has decreed that unless the ECB satisfies the justices that it has taken full account of a highly political list of side-effects of monetary policies, asset purchases are impermissible. Courts in other member countries may see fit to decree that their national central banks cannot participate in policies they dislike. Pretty soon, the ECB will have been sliced and diced into a nullity.
Above all, the German court decreed that it can ignore an earlier ruling of the European Court of Justice in favour of the ECB, because the former “exceeds its judicial mandate . . . where an interpretation of the Treaties is not comprehensible and must thus be considered arbitrary from an objective perspective.” This is an act of judicial secession.
The EU is an integrated legal system, or it is nothing. It rests on the acceptance by all member states of its authority in areas of its competence. In a press release after the constitutional court’s judgment, the ECJ rightly responded that “the Court of Justice alone . . . has jurisdiction to rule that an act of an EU institution is contrary to EU law. Divergences between courts of the member states as to the validity of such acts would indeed be liable to place in jeopardy the unity of the EU legal order and to detract from legal certainty.” Imagine if the courts of every member state were able to decide that ECJ rulings were “arbitrary from an objective perspective”.
What are the implications?
If the German court is ultimately satisfied that the ECB adequately assessed the economic impact of its purchases, the PSPP might continue. But the courthas reduced the ECB’s future flexibility by limiting its holdings of any member country’s debt to 33 per cent of the outstanding total and insisting that asset purchases be allocated according to member states’ shares in the ECB.
In the absence of other eurozone support programmes, the chance of defaults has jumped. Indeed, spreads on Italian government bonds have duly risen a little since the court’s announcement. A crisis might ultimately ensue, with devastating effects; perhaps even a break-up of the eurozone.
Others might follow Germany in rejecting the jurisdiction of the ECJ and EU. Hungary and Poland are obvious candidates. Future historians may mark this as the decisive turning point in Europe’s history, towards disintegration.
What can be done? The ECB cannot be accountable to a national court. But the Bundesbank could provide the court with the proportionality analysis. Maybe that would be enough, albeit also a bad precedent. Or, the decision could be ignored. If a German court can ignore the ECJ, maybe the Bundesbank can ignore that court. Alternatively, the ECB could just abandon efforts to rescue the eurozone and accept whatever outcome emerges.
The EU could initiate an infringement proceeding against Germany. But its direct target would be the German government, which is caught between the EU organs on the one hand and the court on the other. It could not change the ruling.
More radically, the EU could act to create the needed degree of fiscal solidarity. But the obstacles to this are large. A new treaty looks out of the question in today’s environment of intense mutual distrust. Finally, Germany could boldly secede from the eurozone. Yet, before it makes such a decision, one hopes it, too, will be required to do a full analysis of whether that would be “proportionate”.
One point is clear: The constitutional court has decreed that Germany, too, can take back control. As a result it has created a possibly insoluble crisis.
Thursday 12 September 2019
Central banks were always political – so their ‘independence’ doesn’t mean much
The separation of monetary and fiscal policy serves the neoliberal status quo. It won’t survive the next crash writes Larry Elliott in The Guardian
‘The Federal Reserve is coming under enormous pressure from Donald Trump to cut interest rates.’ Donald Trump with Jerome Powell, then his nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Washington DC, November 2017. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
Independent central banks were once all the rage. Taking decisions over interest rates and handing them to technocrats was seen as a sensible way of preventing politicians from trying to buy votes with cheap money. They couldn’t be trusted to keep inflation under control, but central banks could.
And when the global economy came crashing down in the autumn of 2008, it was central banks that prevented another Great Depression. Interest rates were slashed and the electronic money taps were turned on with quantitative easing (QE). That, at least, is the way central banks tell the story.
An alternative narrative goes like this. Collectively, central banks failed to stop the biggest asset-price bubble in history from developing during the early 2000s. Instead of taking action to prevent a ruinous buildup of debt, they congratulated themselves on keeping inflation low.
Even when the storm broke, some institutions – most notably the European Central Bank (ECB) – were slow to act. And while the monetary stimulus provided by record-low interest rates and QE did arrest the slide into depression, the recovery was slow and patchy. The price of houses and shares soared, but wages flatlined.
A decade on from the 2008 crash, another financial crisis is brewing. The US central bank – the Federal Reserve – is coming under huge pressure from Donald Trump to cut interest rates and restart QE. The poor state of the German economy and the threat of deflation means that on Thursday the ECB will cut the already negative interest rate for bank deposits and announce the resumption of its QE programme.
But central banks are almost out of ammo. If cutting interest rates to zero or just above was insufficient to bring about the sort of sustained recovery seen after previous recessions, then it is not obvious why a couple of quarter-point cuts will make much difference now. Likewise, expecting a bit more QE to do anything other than give a fillip to shares on Wall Street and the City is the triumph of hope over experience.
There were alternatives to the response to the 2008 crisis. Governments could have changed the mix, placing more emphasis on fiscal measures – tax cuts and spending increases – than on monetary stimulus, and then seeking to make the two arms of policy work together. They could have taken advantage of low interest rates to borrow more for the public spending programmes that would have created jobs and demand in their economies. Finance ministries could have ensured that QE contributed to the long-term good of the economy – the environment, for example – if they had issued bonds and instructed central banks to buy them.
This sort of approach does, though, involve breaking one of the big taboos of the modern age: the belief that monetary and fiscal policy should be kept separate and that central banks should be allowed to operate free from political interference.
The consensus blossomed during the good times of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and survived the financial crisis of 2008 . But challenges from both the left and right, especially in the US, suggest that it won’t survive the next one. Trump says the Fed has damaged the economy by pushing up interest rates too quickly. Bernie Sanders says the US central bank has been captured by Wall Street. Both arguments are correct. It is a good thing that central bank independence is finally coming under scrutiny.
For a start, it has become clear that the notion of depoliticised central bankers is a myth. When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King lectured the government about the need for austerity while jealously guarding the right to set interest rates free from any political interference. Likewise, rarely does Mario Draghi, the outgoing president of the ECB, hold a press conference without urging eurozone countries to reduce budget deficits and embrace structural reform.
Central bankers have views and – perhaps unsurprisingly – they tend to be quite conservative ones. As the US economist Thomas Palley notes in a recent paper, central bank independence is a product of the neoliberal Chicago school of economics and aims to advance neoliberal interests. More specifically, workers like high employment because in those circumstances it is easier to bid up pay. Employers prefer higher unemployment because it keeps wages down and profits up. Central banks side with capital over labour because they accept the neoliberal idea that there is a point – the natural rate of unemployment – beyond which stimulating the economy merely leads to higher inflation. They are, Palley says, institutions “favoured by capital to guard against the danger that a democracy may choose economic policies capital dislikes”.
Until now, monetary policy has been deemed too important to be left to politicians. When the next crisis arrives it will become too political an issue to be left to unelected technocrats. If that crisis is to be tackled effectively, the age of independent central banks will have to come to an end.
Independent central banks were once all the rage. Taking decisions over interest rates and handing them to technocrats was seen as a sensible way of preventing politicians from trying to buy votes with cheap money. They couldn’t be trusted to keep inflation under control, but central banks could.
And when the global economy came crashing down in the autumn of 2008, it was central banks that prevented another Great Depression. Interest rates were slashed and the electronic money taps were turned on with quantitative easing (QE). That, at least, is the way central banks tell the story.
An alternative narrative goes like this. Collectively, central banks failed to stop the biggest asset-price bubble in history from developing during the early 2000s. Instead of taking action to prevent a ruinous buildup of debt, they congratulated themselves on keeping inflation low.
Even when the storm broke, some institutions – most notably the European Central Bank (ECB) – were slow to act. And while the monetary stimulus provided by record-low interest rates and QE did arrest the slide into depression, the recovery was slow and patchy. The price of houses and shares soared, but wages flatlined.
A decade on from the 2008 crash, another financial crisis is brewing. The US central bank – the Federal Reserve – is coming under huge pressure from Donald Trump to cut interest rates and restart QE. The poor state of the German economy and the threat of deflation means that on Thursday the ECB will cut the already negative interest rate for bank deposits and announce the resumption of its QE programme.
But central banks are almost out of ammo. If cutting interest rates to zero or just above was insufficient to bring about the sort of sustained recovery seen after previous recessions, then it is not obvious why a couple of quarter-point cuts will make much difference now. Likewise, expecting a bit more QE to do anything other than give a fillip to shares on Wall Street and the City is the triumph of hope over experience.
There were alternatives to the response to the 2008 crisis. Governments could have changed the mix, placing more emphasis on fiscal measures – tax cuts and spending increases – than on monetary stimulus, and then seeking to make the two arms of policy work together. They could have taken advantage of low interest rates to borrow more for the public spending programmes that would have created jobs and demand in their economies. Finance ministries could have ensured that QE contributed to the long-term good of the economy – the environment, for example – if they had issued bonds and instructed central banks to buy them.
This sort of approach does, though, involve breaking one of the big taboos of the modern age: the belief that monetary and fiscal policy should be kept separate and that central banks should be allowed to operate free from political interference.
The consensus blossomed during the good times of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and survived the financial crisis of 2008 . But challenges from both the left and right, especially in the US, suggest that it won’t survive the next one. Trump says the Fed has damaged the economy by pushing up interest rates too quickly. Bernie Sanders says the US central bank has been captured by Wall Street. Both arguments are correct. It is a good thing that central bank independence is finally coming under scrutiny.
For a start, it has become clear that the notion of depoliticised central bankers is a myth. When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King lectured the government about the need for austerity while jealously guarding the right to set interest rates free from any political interference. Likewise, rarely does Mario Draghi, the outgoing president of the ECB, hold a press conference without urging eurozone countries to reduce budget deficits and embrace structural reform.
Central bankers have views and – perhaps unsurprisingly – they tend to be quite conservative ones. As the US economist Thomas Palley notes in a recent paper, central bank independence is a product of the neoliberal Chicago school of economics and aims to advance neoliberal interests. More specifically, workers like high employment because in those circumstances it is easier to bid up pay. Employers prefer higher unemployment because it keeps wages down and profits up. Central banks side with capital over labour because they accept the neoliberal idea that there is a point – the natural rate of unemployment – beyond which stimulating the economy merely leads to higher inflation. They are, Palley says, institutions “favoured by capital to guard against the danger that a democracy may choose economic policies capital dislikes”.
Until now, monetary policy has been deemed too important to be left to politicians. When the next crisis arrives it will become too political an issue to be left to unelected technocrats. If that crisis is to be tackled effectively, the age of independent central banks will have to come to an end.
Wednesday 31 October 2018
The ICC and cricket boards are not serious about spot fixing
Alan Bull in The Guardian
If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence.
Seems like it was Mark Wood’s bad luck to draw a short straw last week. The day after al-Jazeera released the second part of their investigation into spot-fixing in cricket Wood was put up to talk to the press. He said the accusations reminded him of “the boy who cried wolf”. Maybe Wood always used to fall asleep before his parents made it to the end of the book. Right now, five months after the first part of al-Jazeera’s expose, we are still waiting to see whether the danger they are shouting about really exists, but Wood, like everyone else in English cricket, will hope this story does not end with everyone looking the other way while the wolf eats up the sheep.
Al-Jazeera’s second film was more grounded than the first. It’s built around the fact that its source, Aneel Munawar, accurately forecast the score in 25 out of the 26 passages of play in 15 different international matches. Al-Jazeera says independent analysis shows the odds he could have done that by guesswork alone are 9.2m to one. The case is not perfect; the one big problem with it is al-Jazeera’s lawyers do not seem to trust it enough to let its journalists release the names of the players involved. But there is enough evidence there now that the story should not be swiftly dismissed.
Which, unfortunately, seems to be what some of the authorities want to do. The England and Wales Cricket Board said al-Jazeera’s information was “poorly prepared and lacks clarity and corroboration”. The tone of its response was all wrong. If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence. The ECB’s statement seemed to put it on the other side of this problem to the journalists working to expose it. Since then the conversation around the investigation has turned into a slanging match about which side is more credible than the other.
Al-Jazeera did not help by throwing back blows of its own. “The ICC, together with certain national cricket boards and their supporters in the media, has reacted to our documentary with dismissals and attacks on the messenger,” it said. “We are particularly struck by what appears to be a refusal from certain quarters to even accept the possibility that players from Anglo-Saxon countries could have engaged in the activities exposed by our programme.” That attitude may have been common once and there may still be lingering hints of it around now. But anyone who holds it is a fool.The Spin: sign up and get our weekly cricket email.
At this point the question is not whether people are spot-fixing cricket matches but who is doing it and how often. In the last 10 years bowlers, batsmen, and captains, umpires, coaches, groundstaff and administrators have been caught and banned for fixing, and they have come from England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. You should not need any more evidence that this is a universal problem. But, if you do, Cricinfo published some last week. It was the story of a corrupt approach made to the Canadian wicketkeeper Hamza Tariq at the 2011 World Cup.
Tariq explains how a friend of a friend invited him out for drinks. The man was a cricketer, which is how they got to know each other. When they went out a second time the man brought three more friends along. They bought Tariq dinner and drinks, and offered, later in the evening, to fix him up with a woman. It was only later, after an officer from the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit intervened, that Tariq realised they were grooming him. Tariq was a fringe player from an associate team but last I looked the weaknesses those fixers were trying to identify and exploit – fondness for drink, money, sex – are pretty common in countries where they play Test cricket, too.
That 2011 World Cup, it seems now, fell right in the middle of an era when spot-fixing was rife. Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif, Mervyn Westfield, Lou Vincent, Danish Kaneria: all those cases happened in 2010 and 2011. It was also around that time, al-Jazeera says, that Munawar first became involved in fixing.
It also says the ICC has known about Munawar ever since, which is one reason why it is reluctant to hand over all the information it has but would prefer to give it to Interpol instead. “We have become increasingly concerned at the ICC’s ability and resolve to police the game.”
It is not the only one to say this. Remember, Brendon McCullum criticised the ACU’s “very casual approach” in 2016. The head of the ACU, Alex Marshall, argues the unit is much stronger now and the sport has never invested so many resources in fighting corruption. But then, at the same time Marshall is saying that, the Pakistan Cricket Board has appointed Wasim Akram to its new cricket committee. Akram, you may remember, was one of a number of cricketers investigated by the Qayyum report into fixing in the 1990s. The Qayyum report concluded he “cannot be said to be above suspicion”.
The PCB chairman, Ehsan Mani, was able to justify the appointment by arguing that other players who were named in the Qayyum report were allowed to carry on working in international cricket. And he is right. One of them, Mushtaq Ahmed, was England’s spin-bowling coach for years, even though Qayyum concluded “there are sufficient grounds to cast strong doubt” on him, too. At this point indignant words do not do much to demonstrate anyone’s commitment to taking the problem seriously enough.
If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence.
Seems like it was Mark Wood’s bad luck to draw a short straw last week. The day after al-Jazeera released the second part of their investigation into spot-fixing in cricket Wood was put up to talk to the press. He said the accusations reminded him of “the boy who cried wolf”. Maybe Wood always used to fall asleep before his parents made it to the end of the book. Right now, five months after the first part of al-Jazeera’s expose, we are still waiting to see whether the danger they are shouting about really exists, but Wood, like everyone else in English cricket, will hope this story does not end with everyone looking the other way while the wolf eats up the sheep.
Al-Jazeera’s second film was more grounded than the first. It’s built around the fact that its source, Aneel Munawar, accurately forecast the score in 25 out of the 26 passages of play in 15 different international matches. Al-Jazeera says independent analysis shows the odds he could have done that by guesswork alone are 9.2m to one. The case is not perfect; the one big problem with it is al-Jazeera’s lawyers do not seem to trust it enough to let its journalists release the names of the players involved. But there is enough evidence there now that the story should not be swiftly dismissed.
Which, unfortunately, seems to be what some of the authorities want to do. The England and Wales Cricket Board said al-Jazeera’s information was “poorly prepared and lacks clarity and corroboration”. The tone of its response was all wrong. If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence. The ECB’s statement seemed to put it on the other side of this problem to the journalists working to expose it. Since then the conversation around the investigation has turned into a slanging match about which side is more credible than the other.
Al-Jazeera did not help by throwing back blows of its own. “The ICC, together with certain national cricket boards and their supporters in the media, has reacted to our documentary with dismissals and attacks on the messenger,” it said. “We are particularly struck by what appears to be a refusal from certain quarters to even accept the possibility that players from Anglo-Saxon countries could have engaged in the activities exposed by our programme.” That attitude may have been common once and there may still be lingering hints of it around now. But anyone who holds it is a fool.The Spin: sign up and get our weekly cricket email.
At this point the question is not whether people are spot-fixing cricket matches but who is doing it and how often. In the last 10 years bowlers, batsmen, and captains, umpires, coaches, groundstaff and administrators have been caught and banned for fixing, and they have come from England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. You should not need any more evidence that this is a universal problem. But, if you do, Cricinfo published some last week. It was the story of a corrupt approach made to the Canadian wicketkeeper Hamza Tariq at the 2011 World Cup.
Tariq explains how a friend of a friend invited him out for drinks. The man was a cricketer, which is how they got to know each other. When they went out a second time the man brought three more friends along. They bought Tariq dinner and drinks, and offered, later in the evening, to fix him up with a woman. It was only later, after an officer from the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit intervened, that Tariq realised they were grooming him. Tariq was a fringe player from an associate team but last I looked the weaknesses those fixers were trying to identify and exploit – fondness for drink, money, sex – are pretty common in countries where they play Test cricket, too.
That 2011 World Cup, it seems now, fell right in the middle of an era when spot-fixing was rife. Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif, Mervyn Westfield, Lou Vincent, Danish Kaneria: all those cases happened in 2010 and 2011. It was also around that time, al-Jazeera says, that Munawar first became involved in fixing.
It also says the ICC has known about Munawar ever since, which is one reason why it is reluctant to hand over all the information it has but would prefer to give it to Interpol instead. “We have become increasingly concerned at the ICC’s ability and resolve to police the game.”
It is not the only one to say this. Remember, Brendon McCullum criticised the ACU’s “very casual approach” in 2016. The head of the ACU, Alex Marshall, argues the unit is much stronger now and the sport has never invested so many resources in fighting corruption. But then, at the same time Marshall is saying that, the Pakistan Cricket Board has appointed Wasim Akram to its new cricket committee. Akram, you may remember, was one of a number of cricketers investigated by the Qayyum report into fixing in the 1990s. The Qayyum report concluded he “cannot be said to be above suspicion”.
The PCB chairman, Ehsan Mani, was able to justify the appointment by arguing that other players who were named in the Qayyum report were allowed to carry on working in international cricket. And he is right. One of them, Mushtaq Ahmed, was England’s spin-bowling coach for years, even though Qayyum concluded “there are sufficient grounds to cast strong doubt” on him, too. At this point indignant words do not do much to demonstrate anyone’s commitment to taking the problem seriously enough.
Monday 8 January 2018
Tea and sympathy won't suffice as England face up to another drubbing
George Dobell in Cricinfo
There's a pattern of behaviour prevalent in England which dictates that, in times of extreme stress or emotion, we should do almost anything but acknowledge the truth.
So we sit around the hospital beds of the dying, telling them they'll soon be back on their feet. We tell doctors we hardly drink, never smoke and go the gym almost every night. We go to funerals and tell each other the wife-beating alcoholic had a heart of gold. Her bottom never looks big in that and there's almost nothing - not nuclear war or zombie apocalypse - that can't be overcome with a nice cup of tea.
It is, in some ways, a wonderful quality. It was that stoic refusal to acknowledge reality that enabled a previous generation to win a war that, in cricket terms, had them following on in gloomy light and on a pitch showing signs of uneven bounce. And the band on Titanic - just like the Barmy Army - played all the way down.
But there are moments when it is also an incredibly irritating characteristic. And damaging. So, just as you really should get that mole checked out, just as that lump probably won't go away, England really should acknowledge that this Ashes series really wasn't close.
There were moments - flashes might be a better word - when it looked as if England could compete. When James Vince reached 83 in Brisbane; when Australia were reduced to 76 for 4 in the same match; when Jonny Bairstow and Dawid Malan took England to 368 for 4 in Perth. On these occasions, it appeared England were working their way into a good position.
But they only made 302 in that first innings in Brisbane. They trailed by 215 on first innings in Adelaide (even though Australia declared their own first innings with eight wickets down). Only three men passed 25 in England's first innings in Perth, and only two men in the top seven managed more than 22 on the flattest Melbourne pitch you ever will wish you hadn't seen.
This was a team trying to snatch a goal on the break. This was Frank Bruno catching Mike Tyson with his left hook; Greg Thomas dislodging Viv Richards' cap; England's openers enjoying a good start (they were 101 without loss) against West Indies at Lord's in 1984; Graham Dilley reducing them to 54 for 5 at Lord's in 1988. Looking back now, they were far from reflective of the general balance of power. They were the cat hissing at the dog; the condemned man cursing his firing squad. To suggest they represent squandered opportunities is largely delusional.
So, while it's true that Steve Smith was a difference between the teams, he wasn't the only difference. The same could equally be said about Nathan Lyon and the Australian pace attack. So that's the batting, pace bowling and spin bowling covered, then. England were out-gunned from the start. They haven't squandered moments of great promise. They've occasionally caught sight of them in the distance when the clouds parted for a moment. But, actually, now they look again, it may have been a cow.
You can't really blame players for buying into the narrative - a narrative repeated several times by Joe Root and most recently by James Anderson - that the series was decided by a few key moments. It comes with the territory in top-level sport that the protagonists have to maintain high levels of self-belief. They have to believe they can win. It's part of the make-up of a champion.
But you would hope that none of those in positions of power fall for such nonsense. You would hope they reflect on this Ashes series - a series in which Australia scored in excess of 600 twice, won by an innings twice (despite losing the toss on both occasions), had the three highest run-scorers and four highest wicket-takers - and understand that it was a rout.
Nor should it be dismissed as an aberration. England have now lost nine of their most recent 11 overseas Tests. Sure, playing in Australia and India is tough. But England didn't win in the Caribbean, either. Or Bangladesh. Or New Zealand, the UAE or Sri Lanka. Living off their success against South Africa in 2015 - excellent result though it was - is a car driving on fumes.
It'll keep happening, too. Sure, they may snatch the odd series - perhaps in New Zealand in a couple of months, perhaps in the Caribbean at the start of 2019 - because they have, in Ben Stokes and Root and Anderson, a few top-quality players. But generally, such wins will come very much against the norm while England prioritise their white-ball development at the expense of their red-ball team. Until they can develop more spin and fast bowlers, until they stop hiding behind wins on home surfaces, they will remain also-rans in Test cricket.
Some will say this tour went wrong in September. And it is true England lost a key player - and just a bit of their energy and equilibrium - when Stokes was arrested that night in Bristol. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair (and the proper authorities can decide that) there are lessons to be learned about the level of sacrifice inherent in the life of an international sportsperson. There might well be some justification for some of Stokes' actions that night. But should he have been there in the first place?
But it went wrong long before that. It went wrong when the ECB continued their exclusive relationship with a subscription broadcaster long after it had become clear it was damaging the long-term health of the game. As a result, cricket lost relevance in the public consciousness. The talent pool on which the game relies has grown shallow and is absurdly over-reliant upon the private schools, Asian and ex-pat communities.
It went wrong when the Championship was shoved into the margins of the season, when counties were incentivised for fielding teams of young, England-qualified players, when the ECB stopped believing in their own domestic competitions and allowed them to be diluted and devalued.
While the suspicion lingers that Root caught the bug that laid him low on the final day of the series while eating jelly and ice-cream at a kid's birthday party (it was his son's birthday on the fourth day of the game), that will do nothing to derail the narrative that he lacks the maturity or gravitas of a leader, even though there is no evidence for that save his boyish face.
To see Root in the field, coaxing and cajoling his side into another effort, was to see a born leader. To see him behind the scenes, handling each crisis with calm good humour and ensuring this tour did not sink to the levels of the 2013-14 debacle, was to see a young man with strength, energy and integrity. He simply wasn't dealt a handful of aces. He's not the problem here.
And nor is Trevor Bayliss. Sure, he's not a technical coach. And nor is he a selector in the sense that he has the knowledge of county cricket to offer much there. His job, in essence, is to keep the first-team environment positive and focussed. And he's good at that. It's not his fault that England can't produce pace or spin bowlers. He's not an alchemist.
No, the trouble is much higher up the pyramid than that. The problem is the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, trying to kid us that English cricket is in good health, and Andrew Strauss who has achieved little in his time as director of England cricket other than settling a couple of old scores: getting rid of Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen. If teams are judged by their success in global events - as Strauss has always said - it is worth remembering they did worse in the 2017 Champions Trophy than the 2013 Champions Trophy.
Blaming Stokes or Bayliss or Root for this loss will solve nothing. It's more fundamental change - and an acknowledgement of their problems - that England require. And a nice cup of tea. Obviously.
There's a pattern of behaviour prevalent in England which dictates that, in times of extreme stress or emotion, we should do almost anything but acknowledge the truth.
So we sit around the hospital beds of the dying, telling them they'll soon be back on their feet. We tell doctors we hardly drink, never smoke and go the gym almost every night. We go to funerals and tell each other the wife-beating alcoholic had a heart of gold. Her bottom never looks big in that and there's almost nothing - not nuclear war or zombie apocalypse - that can't be overcome with a nice cup of tea.
It is, in some ways, a wonderful quality. It was that stoic refusal to acknowledge reality that enabled a previous generation to win a war that, in cricket terms, had them following on in gloomy light and on a pitch showing signs of uneven bounce. And the band on Titanic - just like the Barmy Army - played all the way down.
But there are moments when it is also an incredibly irritating characteristic. And damaging. So, just as you really should get that mole checked out, just as that lump probably won't go away, England really should acknowledge that this Ashes series really wasn't close.
There were moments - flashes might be a better word - when it looked as if England could compete. When James Vince reached 83 in Brisbane; when Australia were reduced to 76 for 4 in the same match; when Jonny Bairstow and Dawid Malan took England to 368 for 4 in Perth. On these occasions, it appeared England were working their way into a good position.
But they only made 302 in that first innings in Brisbane. They trailed by 215 on first innings in Adelaide (even though Australia declared their own first innings with eight wickets down). Only three men passed 25 in England's first innings in Perth, and only two men in the top seven managed more than 22 on the flattest Melbourne pitch you ever will wish you hadn't seen.
This was a team trying to snatch a goal on the break. This was Frank Bruno catching Mike Tyson with his left hook; Greg Thomas dislodging Viv Richards' cap; England's openers enjoying a good start (they were 101 without loss) against West Indies at Lord's in 1984; Graham Dilley reducing them to 54 for 5 at Lord's in 1988. Looking back now, they were far from reflective of the general balance of power. They were the cat hissing at the dog; the condemned man cursing his firing squad. To suggest they represent squandered opportunities is largely delusional.
So, while it's true that Steve Smith was a difference between the teams, he wasn't the only difference. The same could equally be said about Nathan Lyon and the Australian pace attack. So that's the batting, pace bowling and spin bowling covered, then. England were out-gunned from the start. They haven't squandered moments of great promise. They've occasionally caught sight of them in the distance when the clouds parted for a moment. But, actually, now they look again, it may have been a cow.
You can't really blame players for buying into the narrative - a narrative repeated several times by Joe Root and most recently by James Anderson - that the series was decided by a few key moments. It comes with the territory in top-level sport that the protagonists have to maintain high levels of self-belief. They have to believe they can win. It's part of the make-up of a champion.
But you would hope that none of those in positions of power fall for such nonsense. You would hope they reflect on this Ashes series - a series in which Australia scored in excess of 600 twice, won by an innings twice (despite losing the toss on both occasions), had the three highest run-scorers and four highest wicket-takers - and understand that it was a rout.
Nor should it be dismissed as an aberration. England have now lost nine of their most recent 11 overseas Tests. Sure, playing in Australia and India is tough. But England didn't win in the Caribbean, either. Or Bangladesh. Or New Zealand, the UAE or Sri Lanka. Living off their success against South Africa in 2015 - excellent result though it was - is a car driving on fumes.
It'll keep happening, too. Sure, they may snatch the odd series - perhaps in New Zealand in a couple of months, perhaps in the Caribbean at the start of 2019 - because they have, in Ben Stokes and Root and Anderson, a few top-quality players. But generally, such wins will come very much against the norm while England prioritise their white-ball development at the expense of their red-ball team. Until they can develop more spin and fast bowlers, until they stop hiding behind wins on home surfaces, they will remain also-rans in Test cricket.
Some will say this tour went wrong in September. And it is true England lost a key player - and just a bit of their energy and equilibrium - when Stokes was arrested that night in Bristol. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair (and the proper authorities can decide that) there are lessons to be learned about the level of sacrifice inherent in the life of an international sportsperson. There might well be some justification for some of Stokes' actions that night. But should he have been there in the first place?
But it went wrong long before that. It went wrong when the ECB continued their exclusive relationship with a subscription broadcaster long after it had become clear it was damaging the long-term health of the game. As a result, cricket lost relevance in the public consciousness. The talent pool on which the game relies has grown shallow and is absurdly over-reliant upon the private schools, Asian and ex-pat communities.
It went wrong when the Championship was shoved into the margins of the season, when counties were incentivised for fielding teams of young, England-qualified players, when the ECB stopped believing in their own domestic competitions and allowed them to be diluted and devalued.
While the suspicion lingers that Root caught the bug that laid him low on the final day of the series while eating jelly and ice-cream at a kid's birthday party (it was his son's birthday on the fourth day of the game), that will do nothing to derail the narrative that he lacks the maturity or gravitas of a leader, even though there is no evidence for that save his boyish face.
To see Root in the field, coaxing and cajoling his side into another effort, was to see a born leader. To see him behind the scenes, handling each crisis with calm good humour and ensuring this tour did not sink to the levels of the 2013-14 debacle, was to see a young man with strength, energy and integrity. He simply wasn't dealt a handful of aces. He's not the problem here.
And nor is Trevor Bayliss. Sure, he's not a technical coach. And nor is he a selector in the sense that he has the knowledge of county cricket to offer much there. His job, in essence, is to keep the first-team environment positive and focussed. And he's good at that. It's not his fault that England can't produce pace or spin bowlers. He's not an alchemist.
No, the trouble is much higher up the pyramid than that. The problem is the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, trying to kid us that English cricket is in good health, and Andrew Strauss who has achieved little in his time as director of England cricket other than settling a couple of old scores: getting rid of Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen. If teams are judged by their success in global events - as Strauss has always said - it is worth remembering they did worse in the 2017 Champions Trophy than the 2013 Champions Trophy.
Blaming Stokes or Bayliss or Root for this loss will solve nothing. It's more fundamental change - and an acknowledgement of their problems - that England require. And a nice cup of tea. Obviously.
Thursday 21 December 2017
Why does county cricket always get the blame for England’s failings?
Andy Bull in The Guardian
A stock of explanations and excuses is a valuable bit of any cricketer’s kit and should be kept ready, stashed by bat, box, and pads. “The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t pick it up in this light. My foot slipped. Somebody was moving behind the sightscreen.”
England, who, after all, have had no shortage of practice at this, have used some particularly ripe examples over the years. Ian Botham blamed the rain that ruined their chances in a group match against Pakistan at the 1992 World Cup on the team chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby “You’re useless, you are,” Botham told him, “It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of Islam.”
That was when Ted Dexter was the chair of selectors. Dexter, who once explained away his late arrival for pre-season at Sussex by saying “I was fascinated by an adorable girl”, had a fine line in alibis himself. When England were thrashed in Caluctta in 1993, he announced he was going “to commission a report into pollution levels in Indian cities” (India’s environment minister replied that Dexter should “commission a report into the effect of pollution levels on the trajectories of India’s spinners” instead). And when England lost the Ashes in 1989 Dexter offered the deathless: “Venus may be in the wrong juxtaposition to somewhere else.”
Dexter had a rare flair for the form, though. These days (if not always) a lot of the explanations, excuses, and arguments about what went wrong are starting to sound tired and familiar. As if English cricket was turning circles while it tries to find the way ahead. On the one hand there are the pundits offering old bromides about a weak county game that fails to produce the particular cricketers the national team needs, and on the other, there are county fans who bounce the blame back on to the ECB’s mismanagement of the sport and their coaching set-up at junior and elite levels.
This winter the focus is on fast bowlers, because England’s batsmen have been skinned by three of them. Steve Finn touched on the issues when he was doing some charity work for Chance to Shine last week. He picked out the pitches, which are “a bit of a pancake because people are scared of losing games”, and the workload, “when you play 12 months a year it can suck the pace out of you”, but defended the ECB’s national performance centre in Loughborough, where the coaches cannot seem to decide whether they should be teaching quick bowlers to stay fit or get fast.
The telling detail was what Finn had to say about the ECB’s recent changes to the playing conditions. Last winter it was not the lack of quick bowlers everyone was worrying about but the shortage of spinners, because England had been thrashed in India. The ECB had taken a step to fix exactly that problem earlier in the year, when they decided that in the championship visiting captains would have the choice of whether or not to bowl first. This was supposed to encourage counties to produce pitches that would bring spinners into the game as it wore on. And it worked.
The flip side, Finn explained, is that “we are trying to develop spinners in this country with the toss rules and not making pitches biased towards fast bowlers but I do think the slowness of the wickets discourages people from bowling fast.” Point being that in the attempt to fix one problem, the ECB has exacerbated another. Which is a pattern it is repeating on a larger scale.
The last big ballyhoo in English cricket was after the team’s abject 2015 World Cup. Paul Downton lost his job as the managing director and Andrew Strauss took over with instructions to improve England’s limited-overs cricket before the 2019 tournament. Concurrently, the board was concocting plans to bring in a new T20 league. It’s been designed to address two other long-standing criticisms of the way it has run the sport, which were that having invented T20, the ECB’s version of it had long since been overtaken by others around the world and that youth interest and participation in the sport had dropped off a cliff while it was stuck behind Sky’s paywall.
Most of the key decisions since have been made to serve those ends. Trevor Bayliss was hired, in the large part, because he had such a strong record as a limited-overs coach. Then, the number of County Championship matches was cut and the schedules rearranged so teams could play limited-overs cricket on hard, fresh pitches at the height of summer, the one-day final could take centre stage again, and the players would have to do less chopping and changing between formats.
Problem being that when the ECB shifted one piece of this jigsaw into place it left a muddle in the other corner. The championship has been marginalised, shunted into the far ends of the season, when conditions are more likely to suit the very kind of bowling that suffered in Australia, and at domestic level, the counties and their players are being encouraged to prioritise limited-overs cricket.
So the ECB have over-corrected, and ended up off course in the other direction. But then, you would need to be a hell of a plate spinner to come up with a system that serves the national team in all three formats, keeps the counties solvent, satisfies diehard fans and seduces a new audience too. The ECB would do well to find a chaplain to blame.
A stock of explanations and excuses is a valuable bit of any cricketer’s kit and should be kept ready, stashed by bat, box, and pads. “The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t pick it up in this light. My foot slipped. Somebody was moving behind the sightscreen.”
England, who, after all, have had no shortage of practice at this, have used some particularly ripe examples over the years. Ian Botham blamed the rain that ruined their chances in a group match against Pakistan at the 1992 World Cup on the team chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby “You’re useless, you are,” Botham told him, “It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of Islam.”
That was when Ted Dexter was the chair of selectors. Dexter, who once explained away his late arrival for pre-season at Sussex by saying “I was fascinated by an adorable girl”, had a fine line in alibis himself. When England were thrashed in Caluctta in 1993, he announced he was going “to commission a report into pollution levels in Indian cities” (India’s environment minister replied that Dexter should “commission a report into the effect of pollution levels on the trajectories of India’s spinners” instead). And when England lost the Ashes in 1989 Dexter offered the deathless: “Venus may be in the wrong juxtaposition to somewhere else.”
Dexter had a rare flair for the form, though. These days (if not always) a lot of the explanations, excuses, and arguments about what went wrong are starting to sound tired and familiar. As if English cricket was turning circles while it tries to find the way ahead. On the one hand there are the pundits offering old bromides about a weak county game that fails to produce the particular cricketers the national team needs, and on the other, there are county fans who bounce the blame back on to the ECB’s mismanagement of the sport and their coaching set-up at junior and elite levels.
This winter the focus is on fast bowlers, because England’s batsmen have been skinned by three of them. Steve Finn touched on the issues when he was doing some charity work for Chance to Shine last week. He picked out the pitches, which are “a bit of a pancake because people are scared of losing games”, and the workload, “when you play 12 months a year it can suck the pace out of you”, but defended the ECB’s national performance centre in Loughborough, where the coaches cannot seem to decide whether they should be teaching quick bowlers to stay fit or get fast.
The telling detail was what Finn had to say about the ECB’s recent changes to the playing conditions. Last winter it was not the lack of quick bowlers everyone was worrying about but the shortage of spinners, because England had been thrashed in India. The ECB had taken a step to fix exactly that problem earlier in the year, when they decided that in the championship visiting captains would have the choice of whether or not to bowl first. This was supposed to encourage counties to produce pitches that would bring spinners into the game as it wore on. And it worked.
The flip side, Finn explained, is that “we are trying to develop spinners in this country with the toss rules and not making pitches biased towards fast bowlers but I do think the slowness of the wickets discourages people from bowling fast.” Point being that in the attempt to fix one problem, the ECB has exacerbated another. Which is a pattern it is repeating on a larger scale.
The last big ballyhoo in English cricket was after the team’s abject 2015 World Cup. Paul Downton lost his job as the managing director and Andrew Strauss took over with instructions to improve England’s limited-overs cricket before the 2019 tournament. Concurrently, the board was concocting plans to bring in a new T20 league. It’s been designed to address two other long-standing criticisms of the way it has run the sport, which were that having invented T20, the ECB’s version of it had long since been overtaken by others around the world and that youth interest and participation in the sport had dropped off a cliff while it was stuck behind Sky’s paywall.
Most of the key decisions since have been made to serve those ends. Trevor Bayliss was hired, in the large part, because he had such a strong record as a limited-overs coach. Then, the number of County Championship matches was cut and the schedules rearranged so teams could play limited-overs cricket on hard, fresh pitches at the height of summer, the one-day final could take centre stage again, and the players would have to do less chopping and changing between formats.
Problem being that when the ECB shifted one piece of this jigsaw into place it left a muddle in the other corner. The championship has been marginalised, shunted into the far ends of the season, when conditions are more likely to suit the very kind of bowling that suffered in Australia, and at domestic level, the counties and their players are being encouraged to prioritise limited-overs cricket.
So the ECB have over-corrected, and ended up off course in the other direction. But then, you would need to be a hell of a plate spinner to come up with a system that serves the national team in all three formats, keeps the counties solvent, satisfies diehard fans and seduces a new audience too. The ECB would do well to find a chaplain to blame.
Wednesday 4 October 2017
On Ben Stokes - Do sportsmen have a responsibility to the sport?
Suresh Menon in The Hindu
One of the more amusing sights in cricket recently has been that of England trying desperately to work out a formula to simultaneously discipline Ben Stokes and retain him for the Ashes series. To be fair, such contortion is not unique. India once toured the West Indies with Navjot Singh Sidhu just after the player had been involved in a road rage case that led to a death.
Both times, the argument was one we hear politicians make all the time: Let the law takes its course. It is an abdication of responsibility by cricket boards fully aware of the obligation to uphold the image of the sport.
Cricketers, especially those who are talented, and therefore have been indulged, tend to enjoy what George Orwell has called the “benefit of the clergy”. Their star value is often a buffer against the kind of response others might have received. Given that the team leaves for Australia at the end of this month, it is unlikely that Stokes will tour anyway, yet the ECB’s reaction has been strange.
Neither Stokes nor Alex Hales, his partner at the brawl in Bristol which saw Stokes deliver what the police call ABH (Actual Bodily Harm), was dropped immediately from the squad. This is a pointer to the way cricket boards think.
An enquiry by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) would not have taken more than a few hours. Given the cctv footage, the players’ own versions, and the testimony of the victims, it is unlikely that there could be any ambiguity about what happened. Yet the ECB has chosen to bring in its independent Cricket Discipline Commission only after the police have completed their inquiries.
Top sportsmen tend to be national heroes, unlike, say, top chartered accountants or geography teachers, and they have a responsibility to ensure they do not bring the sport into disrepute. It is a tough call, and not everybody agrees that your best all rounder should also be your most ideally-behaved human being. But that is the way it is. After all, sport is an artificial construct; rules around it might seem to be unrealistic too.
Stokes brought “the game into disrepute” — the reason Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff were banned in the past — and he should not be in the team. The ECB’s response cannot be anything other than a ban. Yet, it is pussy-footing around the problem in the hope that there is a miracle. Perhaps the victims will not press charges. Perhaps the police might decide that the cctv images are inconclusive.
Clearly player behaviour is not the issue here. There are two other considerations. One was articulated by former Aussie captain Ian Chappell: Without Stokes, England stood no chance in the Ashes. The other, of equal if not greater concern to the ECB, is the impact of Stokes’s absence on sponsorship and advertising. Already the brewers Greene King has said it is withdrawing an advertisement featuring England players.
Scratch the surface on most moral issues, and you will hit the financial reasons that underlie them.
Stokes, it has been calculated, could lose up to two million pounds in endorsements, for “bringing the product into disrepute”, as written into the contracts. It will be interesting to see how the IPL deals with this — Stokes is the highest-paid foreign player in the tournament.
And yet — here is another sporting irony — there is the question of aggression itself. Stokes (like Botham and Flintoff and a host of others) accomplishes what he does on the field partly because of his fierce competitive nature and raw aggression.
Just as some players are intensely selfish, their selfishness being a reason for their success and therefore their team’s success, some players bring to the table sheer aggression.
Mike Atherton has suggested that Stokes should learn from Ricky Ponting who was constantly getting into trouble in bars early in his career. Ponting learnt to channelise that aggression and finished his career as one of the Aussie greats. A more recent example is David Warner, who paid for punching Joe Root in a bar some years ago, but seems to have settled down as both batsman and person.
Stokes will be missed at the Ashes. He has reduced England’s chances, even if Moeen Ali for one thinks that might not be the case.
Still, Stokes is only 26 and has many years to go. It is not too late to work on diverting all that aggression creatively. Doubtless he has been told this every time he has got into trouble. He is a rare talent, yet it would be a travesty if it all ended with a rap on the knuckles. England must live — however temporarily —without him.
One of the more amusing sights in cricket recently has been that of England trying desperately to work out a formula to simultaneously discipline Ben Stokes and retain him for the Ashes series. To be fair, such contortion is not unique. India once toured the West Indies with Navjot Singh Sidhu just after the player had been involved in a road rage case that led to a death.
Both times, the argument was one we hear politicians make all the time: Let the law takes its course. It is an abdication of responsibility by cricket boards fully aware of the obligation to uphold the image of the sport.
Cricketers, especially those who are talented, and therefore have been indulged, tend to enjoy what George Orwell has called the “benefit of the clergy”. Their star value is often a buffer against the kind of response others might have received. Given that the team leaves for Australia at the end of this month, it is unlikely that Stokes will tour anyway, yet the ECB’s reaction has been strange.
Neither Stokes nor Alex Hales, his partner at the brawl in Bristol which saw Stokes deliver what the police call ABH (Actual Bodily Harm), was dropped immediately from the squad. This is a pointer to the way cricket boards think.
An enquiry by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) would not have taken more than a few hours. Given the cctv footage, the players’ own versions, and the testimony of the victims, it is unlikely that there could be any ambiguity about what happened. Yet the ECB has chosen to bring in its independent Cricket Discipline Commission only after the police have completed their inquiries.
Top sportsmen tend to be national heroes, unlike, say, top chartered accountants or geography teachers, and they have a responsibility to ensure they do not bring the sport into disrepute. It is a tough call, and not everybody agrees that your best all rounder should also be your most ideally-behaved human being. But that is the way it is. After all, sport is an artificial construct; rules around it might seem to be unrealistic too.
Stokes brought “the game into disrepute” — the reason Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff were banned in the past — and he should not be in the team. The ECB’s response cannot be anything other than a ban. Yet, it is pussy-footing around the problem in the hope that there is a miracle. Perhaps the victims will not press charges. Perhaps the police might decide that the cctv images are inconclusive.
Clearly player behaviour is not the issue here. There are two other considerations. One was articulated by former Aussie captain Ian Chappell: Without Stokes, England stood no chance in the Ashes. The other, of equal if not greater concern to the ECB, is the impact of Stokes’s absence on sponsorship and advertising. Already the brewers Greene King has said it is withdrawing an advertisement featuring England players.
Scratch the surface on most moral issues, and you will hit the financial reasons that underlie them.
Stokes, it has been calculated, could lose up to two million pounds in endorsements, for “bringing the product into disrepute”, as written into the contracts. It will be interesting to see how the IPL deals with this — Stokes is the highest-paid foreign player in the tournament.
And yet — here is another sporting irony — there is the question of aggression itself. Stokes (like Botham and Flintoff and a host of others) accomplishes what he does on the field partly because of his fierce competitive nature and raw aggression.
Just as some players are intensely selfish, their selfishness being a reason for their success and therefore their team’s success, some players bring to the table sheer aggression.
Mike Atherton has suggested that Stokes should learn from Ricky Ponting who was constantly getting into trouble in bars early in his career. Ponting learnt to channelise that aggression and finished his career as one of the Aussie greats. A more recent example is David Warner, who paid for punching Joe Root in a bar some years ago, but seems to have settled down as both batsman and person.
Stokes will be missed at the Ashes. He has reduced England’s chances, even if Moeen Ali for one thinks that might not be the case.
Still, Stokes is only 26 and has many years to go. It is not too late to work on diverting all that aggression creatively. Doubtless he has been told this every time he has got into trouble. He is a rare talent, yet it would be a travesty if it all ended with a rap on the knuckles. England must live — however temporarily —without him.
Tuesday 14 February 2017
Thursday 29 September 2016
Stop Brexit and save the EU
Anatole Kaletsky in The Guardian
The EU face five crises that could destroy it, and Brexit could be the detonator. But only modest changes could stop an implosion
German business leader issues warning over post-Brexit trade with UK
Second, the interaction of the refugee and euro crises demands new fiscal rules. Dealing with immigrants is expensive and should ideally be funded by mutually guaranteed EU bonds. Alternatively, Mediterranean countries must be offered budgetary leeway, in exchange for assuming frontline responsibility for immigration controls.
Third, the need for immigration reform, combined with “illiberal democracy” in central Europe, calls for changes in EU spending priorities and foreign policy. Poland and other countries will accept restrictions on their citizens’ mobility only if offered additional structural funds and stronger security cooperation. Such incentives, in turn, could provide more levers to ensure respect for human rights.
Finally, restoring the EU’s democratic legitimacy means ending the institutional tensions between the eurozone and the broader union. The EU authorities must acknowledge that many member countries will never join the euro, which means abandoning their rhetoric about a “two-speed Europe,” with all heading – whether at high or low speed – toward the “ever closer union” that a single currency implies. Instead, the EU must reshape itself into two concentric circles: an inner core committed to deeper integration, and an outer ring whose voters have no interest in a single currency and a shared fiscal space.
Such reforms may seem impossible, but EU disintegration seemed impossible before the Brexit vote. In revolutionary periods, the impossible can become inevitable in a matter of months. This week, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy called unexpectedly for a new European treaty and a second British referendum on its EU membership. In Europe, a revolutionary period has begun.
The EU face five crises that could destroy it, and Brexit could be the detonator. But only modest changes could stop an implosion
Copies of German magazine Der Spiegel featuring the headline “Please don’t go!” Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Never let a crisis go to waste” has always been one of the European Union’s guiding principles. What about five simultaneous crises? Today, the EU faces what Frans Timmermans, the European commission vice-president, describes as a “multi-crisis”: Brexit, refugee flows, fiscal austerity, geopolitical threats from east and south, and “illiberal democracy” in central Europe. Rather than wasting its crises, the EU could be laid to waste by them.
If so, Brexit will be the detonator for that demolition. By legitimising the concept of an EU breakup, and so turning a fantasy among political extremists into a realistic option of mainstream politics throughout Europe, Brexit threatens to trigger an irresistible disintegration process. It will also transform economics, by paralysing the European Central Bank in the next euro crisis. The ECB can always defeat market speculation, but it is powerless against breakup pressures from voters.
The EU urgently needs to put the genie of disintegration back in its bottle. That means persuading Britain to change its mind about Europe, which, according to conventional wisdom on both sides of the English Channel, is impossible. But many “impossible” things are happening in politics nowadays.
The referendum majority on 23 June was much narrower than that in Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, or the negative votes on EU treaties in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands, all of which were subsequently reversed. More important, the 52% who voted for Brexit were sharply divided in their aims, with some prepared to accept economic sacrifice for a “hard Brexit” - total separation from Europe - and others hoping for a “soft Brexit” that would minimise the impact on the UK economy.
According to post-referendum polling, three-quarters of leave voters expect Britain’s economy either to strengthen or to be unaffected by Brexit, and 80% believe the government will have more money to spend on public services as a result of their vote. Brexit voters are so optimistic because they were told - most prominently by the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson - that Britain could have its cake and eat it, a new deal that would preserve all of the economic benefits of EU membership with none of the obligations or costs.
When these expectations are disappointed, public opinion will change. Already,66% of voters say that maintaining market access is more important than restricting immigration if Britain is unable have both. This directly contradicts the prime minister Theresa May’s stated priorities, and probably explains why she refuses to talk about her Brexit strategy.
Because public expectations of an economically innocuous soft Brexit will be impossible to reconcile with the rejection of all EU obligations demanded by the Conservative party’s hard Brexit faction, May cannot win. Whichever course she chooses, she will antagonise half her party and a large proportion of Brexit supporters, not to mention the 48% of voters who want to stay in the EU.
Once this backlash starts, plenty of ambitious Conservative politicians whom May purged from government will be eager to exploit it. George Osborne, immediately sacked as chancellor when May took office, has already thrown down the gauntlet, challenging her democratic mandate: “Brexit won a majority. Hard Brexit did not.” Even the weakness of Britain’s opposition parties works against May, allowing opponents to plot against her, secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to lose power.
All this implies that British politics will become very fluid as economic conditions deteriorate and voters start to change their minds. The EU should encourage such second thoughts, which means that it must stop treating Brexit as inevitable and instead offer the possibility of a compromise that would meet British voters’ concerns, but only on the condition that Britain remains in the EU.
The obvious way to accomplish this would be to conclude an EU-wide agreement on greater national control over immigration and other symbolic issues related to national sovereignty. Such an agreement need not be seen as a concession to British blackmail if it were extended to all EU countries and presented as a response to public opinion throughout the union.
By making a virtue of its response to democratic pressures, the EU could regain Europe-wide support. To send a positive message to voters European leaders will, however, have to rediscover the knack for pragmatic compromise and inter-governmental bargaining that used to be the hallmark of EU diplomacy.
For starters, defusing both Brexit and the refugee crisis will require some modest changes in immigration and welfare rules. Such reforms, which would be popular in almost all member countries, need not conflict with the EU’s founding principles if they preserve the right to work throughout Europe, but return some control over non-economic migration and welfare payments to national governments.
“Never let a crisis go to waste” has always been one of the European Union’s guiding principles. What about five simultaneous crises? Today, the EU faces what Frans Timmermans, the European commission vice-president, describes as a “multi-crisis”: Brexit, refugee flows, fiscal austerity, geopolitical threats from east and south, and “illiberal democracy” in central Europe. Rather than wasting its crises, the EU could be laid to waste by them.
If so, Brexit will be the detonator for that demolition. By legitimising the concept of an EU breakup, and so turning a fantasy among political extremists into a realistic option of mainstream politics throughout Europe, Brexit threatens to trigger an irresistible disintegration process. It will also transform economics, by paralysing the European Central Bank in the next euro crisis. The ECB can always defeat market speculation, but it is powerless against breakup pressures from voters.
The EU urgently needs to put the genie of disintegration back in its bottle. That means persuading Britain to change its mind about Europe, which, according to conventional wisdom on both sides of the English Channel, is impossible. But many “impossible” things are happening in politics nowadays.
The referendum majority on 23 June was much narrower than that in Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, or the negative votes on EU treaties in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands, all of which were subsequently reversed. More important, the 52% who voted for Brexit were sharply divided in their aims, with some prepared to accept economic sacrifice for a “hard Brexit” - total separation from Europe - and others hoping for a “soft Brexit” that would minimise the impact on the UK economy.
According to post-referendum polling, three-quarters of leave voters expect Britain’s economy either to strengthen or to be unaffected by Brexit, and 80% believe the government will have more money to spend on public services as a result of their vote. Brexit voters are so optimistic because they were told - most prominently by the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson - that Britain could have its cake and eat it, a new deal that would preserve all of the economic benefits of EU membership with none of the obligations or costs.
When these expectations are disappointed, public opinion will change. Already,66% of voters say that maintaining market access is more important than restricting immigration if Britain is unable have both. This directly contradicts the prime minister Theresa May’s stated priorities, and probably explains why she refuses to talk about her Brexit strategy.
Because public expectations of an economically innocuous soft Brexit will be impossible to reconcile with the rejection of all EU obligations demanded by the Conservative party’s hard Brexit faction, May cannot win. Whichever course she chooses, she will antagonise half her party and a large proportion of Brexit supporters, not to mention the 48% of voters who want to stay in the EU.
Once this backlash starts, plenty of ambitious Conservative politicians whom May purged from government will be eager to exploit it. George Osborne, immediately sacked as chancellor when May took office, has already thrown down the gauntlet, challenging her democratic mandate: “Brexit won a majority. Hard Brexit did not.” Even the weakness of Britain’s opposition parties works against May, allowing opponents to plot against her, secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to lose power.
All this implies that British politics will become very fluid as economic conditions deteriorate and voters start to change their minds. The EU should encourage such second thoughts, which means that it must stop treating Brexit as inevitable and instead offer the possibility of a compromise that would meet British voters’ concerns, but only on the condition that Britain remains in the EU.
The obvious way to accomplish this would be to conclude an EU-wide agreement on greater national control over immigration and other symbolic issues related to national sovereignty. Such an agreement need not be seen as a concession to British blackmail if it were extended to all EU countries and presented as a response to public opinion throughout the union.
By making a virtue of its response to democratic pressures, the EU could regain Europe-wide support. To send a positive message to voters European leaders will, however, have to rediscover the knack for pragmatic compromise and inter-governmental bargaining that used to be the hallmark of EU diplomacy.
For starters, defusing both Brexit and the refugee crisis will require some modest changes in immigration and welfare rules. Such reforms, which would be popular in almost all member countries, need not conflict with the EU’s founding principles if they preserve the right to work throughout Europe, but return some control over non-economic migration and welfare payments to national governments.
German business leader issues warning over post-Brexit trade with UK
Second, the interaction of the refugee and euro crises demands new fiscal rules. Dealing with immigrants is expensive and should ideally be funded by mutually guaranteed EU bonds. Alternatively, Mediterranean countries must be offered budgetary leeway, in exchange for assuming frontline responsibility for immigration controls.
Third, the need for immigration reform, combined with “illiberal democracy” in central Europe, calls for changes in EU spending priorities and foreign policy. Poland and other countries will accept restrictions on their citizens’ mobility only if offered additional structural funds and stronger security cooperation. Such incentives, in turn, could provide more levers to ensure respect for human rights.
Finally, restoring the EU’s democratic legitimacy means ending the institutional tensions between the eurozone and the broader union. The EU authorities must acknowledge that many member countries will never join the euro, which means abandoning their rhetoric about a “two-speed Europe,” with all heading – whether at high or low speed – toward the “ever closer union” that a single currency implies. Instead, the EU must reshape itself into two concentric circles: an inner core committed to deeper integration, and an outer ring whose voters have no interest in a single currency and a shared fiscal space.
Such reforms may seem impossible, but EU disintegration seemed impossible before the Brexit vote. In revolutionary periods, the impossible can become inevitable in a matter of months. This week, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy called unexpectedly for a new European treaty and a second British referendum on its EU membership. In Europe, a revolutionary period has begun.
Tuesday 5 April 2016
Why we must save the EU
Yannis Varoufakis in The Guardian
The first German word I ever learned was Siemens. It was emblazoned on our sturdy 1950s fridge, our washing machine, the vacuum cleaner – on almost every appliance in my family’s home in Athens. The reason for my parents’ peculiar loyalty to the German brand was my uncle Panayiotis, who was Siemens’ general manager in Greece from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s.
A Germanophile electrical engineer and a fluent speaker of Goethe’s language, Panayiotis had convinced his younger sister – my mother – to take up the study of German; she even planned to spend a year in Hamburg to take up a Goethe Institute scholarship in the summer of 1967.
Alas, on 21 April 1967, my mother’s plans were laid in ruins, along with our imperfect Greek democracy. For in the early hours of that morning, at the command of four army colonels, tanks rolled on to the streets of Athens and other major cities, and our country was soon enveloped in a thick cloud of neo-fascist gloom. It was also the day when Uncle Panayiotis’s world fell apart.
Unlike my dad, who in the late 1940s had paid for his leftist politics with several years in concentration camps, Panayiotis was what today would be referred to as a neoliberal. Fiercely anti-communist, and suspicious of social democracy, he supported the American intervention in the Greek civil war in 1946 (on the side of my father’s jailers). He backed the German Free Democratic party and the Greek Progressive party, which purveyed a blend of free-market economics with unconditional support for Greece’s oppressive US-led state security machine.
His political views, and his position as the head of Siemens’ operations in Greece, made Panayiotis a typical member of Greece’s postwar ruling class. When state security forces or their stooges roughed up leftwing protesters, or even killed a brilliant member of parliament, Grigoris Lambrakis, in 1963, Panayiotis would grudgingly approve, convinced that these were unpleasant but necessary actions. My ears are still ringing with the rowdy exchanges he often had with Dad, over what he considered “reasonable measures to defend democracy from its sworn enemies” – reasonable measures that my father had experienced first-hand, and from which he would never fully recover.
The heavy footprint of US agencies in Greek politics, even going so far as to engineer the dismissal of a popular centrist prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, in 1965, seemed to Panayiotis an acceptable trade-off: Greece had given up some sovereignty to western powers in exchange for freedom from a menacing eastern bloc lurking a short driving distance north of Athens. However, on that bleak April day in 1967, Panayiotis’s life was turned upside down.
He simply could not tolerate that “his” people (as he referred to the rightist army officers who had staged the coup and, more importantly, their American handlers) should dissolve parliament, suspend the constitution, and intern potential dissidents (including rightwing democrats) in football stadia, police stations and concentration camps. He had no great sympathy with the deposed centrist prime minister that the putschists and their US puppeteers were trying to keep out of government – but his worldview was torn asunder, leading him to a sudden spurt of almost comical radicalisation.
A few months after the military regime took power, Panayiotis joined an underground group called Democratic Defence, which consisted largely of other establishment liberals like himself – university professors, lawyers, and even a future prime minister. They planted a series of bombs around Athens, taking care to ensure there were no injuries, in order to demonstrate that the military regime was not in full control, despite its clampdown.
For a few years after the coup, Panayiotis appeared – even to his own mother – as yet another professional keeping his head down, minding his own business. No one had an inkling of his double life: corporate man during the day, subversive bomber by night. We were mostly relieved, meanwhile, that Dad had not disappeared again into some concentration camp.
My enduring memory of those years, in fact, is the crackling sound of a radio hidden under a red blanket in the middle of the living room in our Athens home. Every night at around nine, mum and dad would huddle together under the blanket – and upon hearing the muffled jingle announcing the beginning of the programme, followed by the voice of a German announcer, my own six-year-old imagination would travel from Athens to central Europe, a mythical place I had not visited yet except for the tantalising glimpses offered by an illustrated Brothers Grimm book I had in my bedroom.
Deutsche Welle, the German international radio station that my parents were listening to, became their most precious ally against the crushing power of state propaganda at home: a window looking out to faraway democratic Europe. At the end of each of its hour-long special broadcasts on Greece, my parents and I would sit around the dining table while they mulled over the latest news.
I didn’t fully understand what they were discussing, but this neither bored nor upset me. For I was gripped by a sense of excitement at the strangeness of our predicament: that, to find out what was happening in our very own Athens, we had to travel, through the airwaves, and veiled by a red blanket, to a place called Germany.
The reason for the red blanket was a grumpy old neighbour called Gregoris. Gregoris was known for his connections with the secret police and his penchant for spying on my parents; in particular my Dad, whose leftwing past made him an excellent target for an ambitious snitch. Strange as it may sound today, tuning in to Deutsche Welle broadcasts became one of a long list of activities punishable by anything from harassment to torture. So, having noticed Gregoris snooping around inside our backyard, my parents took no risks. Thus the red blanket became our defence from Gregoris’s prying ears.
A few years later, it was from Deutsche Welle that we learned what Panayiotis and his colleagues had been up to – when the radio announced that they had all been arrested. Dad would joke for years to come about the pathetic inability of these bourgeois liberals to organise an underground resistance group: only a few hours after one of the Democratic Defence members was accidentally caught, the rest were also rounded up. All the police had to do was read the first man’s diary – where he had meticulously listed his comrades’ names and addresses, in some cases including a description of each subversive “assignment”. Torture, court martial and long prison sentences – in some cases the death sentence – followed.
A year after Panayiotis’s capture, the military police guarding him decided to relax his isolation regime by allowing me, a harmless 10-year-old, to visit him once a week. Our already close bond grew stronger with boy-talk that allowed him a degree of escapism. He told me about machines I had never seen (computers, he called them), asked about the latest movies, described his favourite cars.
In anticipation of my visits, he would use matchsticks and other materials that prison guards would let him keep to build model planes for me. Often, he would hide inside his elegant artefacts a message for my aunt, my mother, on occasion even for his colleagues at Siemens. For my part, I was proud of my new skill of disassembling his models with minimal damage, retrieving the message, and putting them back together.
Long after Panayiotis’s death, I discovered the last of these: a matchstick model of a Stuka dive-bomber in my old family home’s attic. Torn between leaving it intact and looking inside, I decided to take it apart. And there it was. His last missive was not addressed to anyone in particular.
It was a single word: “kyriarchia”. Sovereignty.
A tank outside the parliament building in Athens during the military coup in 1967. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
It was almost 50 years after those childhood evenings under the red blanket that I made my first official visit to Berlin as finance minister of Greece, in February 2015. My first port of call was, of course, the federal finance ministry, to meet the legendary Dr Wolfgang Schäuble. To him, and his minions, I was a nuisance. Our leftwing government had just been elected, defeating a sister party of the Christian Democrats – New Democracy – on an electoral platform that was, to say the least, a form of inconvenience for Schäuble and Chancellor Angela Merkel, and their plans for keeping the eurozone in order.
Our success was, indeed, Berlin’s greatest fear. Were we to succeed in negotiating a new deal for Greece that ended the interminable recession gripping the nation, the Greek leftist “disease” would almost certainly spread to Portugal, Spain and Ireland, all of which had general elections looming.
Before I arrived in Berlin, and only three days after I had assumed office as minister, I received my first high-ranking visitor in my Athens office: Schäuble’s self-appointed envoy, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers. Within seconds of meeting, he asked me whether I intended to implement fully and unwaveringly the economic programme that previous Greek governments had been forced by Berlin, Brussels and Frankfurt – the seat of the European Central Bank (ECB) – to adopt.
Given that our government had won a mandate to renegotiate the very logic of that disastrous programme (which had led to the loss of one third of national income and increased unemployment by 20%), his question was never going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For my part, I attempted a diplomatic reply that would be my standard line of argument for the months to follow: “Given that the existing economic programme has been an indisputable failure, I propose that we sit down together, the new Greek government and our European partners, and rethink the whole programme without prejudice or fear, designing together economic policies that may help Greece recover.”
My modest plea for a modicum of national sovereignty over the economic policies imposed on a nation languishing in the depths of a great depression was met with astonishing brutality. “This will not work!”, was Dijsselbloem’s opening line. In less than a minute he had laid his cards on the table: if I were to insist on any substantial renegotiation of the programme, the ECB would close down our banks by the end of February 2015 – a month after we had been elected.
The Greek finance ministry’s office overlooks Syntagma Square and the House of Parliament – the very stage on which, in April 1967, the tanks had crushed our democracy. As Dijsselbloem spoke, I caught myself looking over his shoulder out to the broad square teeming with people and thinking to myself: “This is interesting. In 1967 it was the tanks, now they are trying to do the same with the banks.”
The meeting with Dijsselbloem ended with a tumultuous press conference in which the Eurogroup’s president lost his cool when he heard me say that our government was not planning to work with the cabal of technicians the troika of lenders habitually sent to Athens to impose upon the elected government policies destined to fail. The die had been cast and the battle for reclaiming part of our lost sovereignty was only beginning. Berlin, where I was to meet the troika’s real master, beckoned.
As the car that was driving me from Berlin’s Tegel airport approached the old headquarters of Goering’s air ministry – now the home of the federal ministry of finance – I wondered whether my host, Schäuble, could even begin to imagine that I was arriving in Berlin with my head full of childhood memories in which Germany featured as an important friend.
Once inside the building, my aides and I were ushered briskly into a large lift. The lift door opened up into a long, cold corridor at the end of which awaited the great man in his famous wheelchair. As I approached, my extended hand was refused and, instead of a handshake, he ushered me purposefully into his office.
While my relationship with Schäuble warmed in the months that followed, the shunned hand symbolised a great deal that is wrong with Europe. It was symbolic proof that the half-century that had passed since my red blanket days, and those prison visits to Siemens’ man in Athens, had changed Europe to no end.
I have no idea what role Siemens played in securing my uncle’s release some time in 1972, two years before the regime’s collapse. What I do know is that my parents were convinced that the German company had played a decisive role. For that reason, every time I saw the word “Siemens” around our home, I felt a warm glow. It is the same kind of warmth I still feel when I hear the words Deutsche Welle. Indeed, back then, in the exciting, bleak years of my childhood, Germany featured in my imagination as a dear friend, a land of democrats that, under Chancellor Willy Brandt, did what was humanly possible to help Greeks rid ourselves of our ugly dictatorship.
Returning home to Athens from my first official visit to Berlin, I was struck by the irony. A continent that had been uniting under different languages and cultures was now divided by a common currency, the euro, and the awful centrifugal forces that it had unleashed throughout Europe.
A week after our first bilateral meeting in Berlin, Schäuble and I were to meet again across the long, rectangular table of the Eurogroup, the eurozone’s decision-making body, comprising the common currency’s finance ministers, plus the representatives of the troika – the ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund. After I had recited our government’s plea for a substantial renegotiation of the so-called “Greek economic programme”, which had the troika’s fingerprints all over it, Dr Schäuble astounded me with a reply that should send shivers up the spine of every democrat: “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a member state!” he said categorically.
During a break from that 10-hour Eurogroup meeting, in which I had struggled to reclaim some economic sovereignty on behalf of my battered parliament and our suffering people, another finance minister attempted to soothe me by saying: “Yanis, you must understand that no country can be sovereign today. Especially not a small and bankrupt one like yours.”
This line of argument is probably the most pernicious fallacy to have afflicted public debate in our modern liberal democracies. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that it may be the greatest threat to liberal democracy itself. Its true meaning is that sovereignty is passé unless you are the United States, China or, maybe, Putin’s Russia. In which case you might as well append your country to a transnational alliance of states where your parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp, and all authority is vested in the larger states.
Interestingly, this argument is not reserved for small, bankrupt countries such as Greece, trapped in a badly designed common currency area. This same noxious dictum is today being peddled in the UK – supposedly as a clinching argument in favour of the remain campaign. As a supporter of Britain remaining in the EU, nothing upsets me more than the enlistment to the “yes” cause of an argument that is as toxic as it is woolly.
The problem begins once the distinction between sovereignty and power is blurred. Sovereignty is about who decides legitimately on behalf of a people – whereas power is the capacity to impose these decisions on the outside world. Iceland is a tiny country. But to claim that Iceland’s sovereignty is illusory because it is too small to have much power is like arguing that a poor person with no political clout might as well give up her right to vote.
To put it slightly differently, small sovereign nations such as Iceland have choices to make within the broader constraints created for them by nature and by the rest of humanity. However limited these choices might be, Iceland’s citizens retain absolute authority to hold their elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached (within the nation’s external constraints), and to strike down every piece of legislation those elected officials have decided upon in the past.
An alliance of states, which is what the EU is, can of course come to mutually beneficial arrangements, such as a defensive military alliance against a common aggressor, coordination between police forces, open borders, an agreement to common industry standards, or the creation of a free-trade zone. But it can never legitimately strike down or overrule the sovereignty of one of its member states on the basis of the limited power it has been granted by the sovereign states that have agreed to participate in the alliance. There is no collective European sovereignty from which Brussels could draw the legitimate political authority to do so.
One may retort that the European Union’s democratic credentials are beyond reproach. The European Council comprises heads of governments, while Ecofin and the Eurogroup are the councils of finance ministers (of the whole EU and of the eurozone respectively). All these representatives are, of course, democratically elected. Moreover, there is the European parliament, elected by the citizens of the member states, which has the power to send proposed legislation back to the Brussels bureaucracy. But these arguments demonstrate how badly European appreciation of the founding principles of liberal democracy has been degraded. The critical error of such a defence is once more to confuse political authority with power.
A parliament is sovereign, even if its country is not particularly powerful, when it can dismiss the executive for having failed to fulfil the tasks assigned to it within the constraints of whatever power the executive and the parliament possess. Nothing like this exists in the EU today.
For while the members of the European Council and the Eurogroup of finance ministers are elected politicians, answerable, theoretically, to their respective national parliaments, the Council and the Eurogroup are themselves not answerable to any parliament, nor indeed to any voting citizens whatsoever.
Moreover, the Eurogroup, where most of Europe’s important economic decisions are taken, is a body that does not even exist in European law, that keeps no minutes of its procedures and insists its deliberations are confidential – that is, not to be shared with the citizens of Europe. It operates on the basis – in the words of Thucydides – that “strong do as they please while the weak suffer what they must”. It is a set-up designed to preclude any sovereignty derived from the people of Europe.
While opposing Schäuble’s logic on Greece in the Eurogroup and elsewhere, at the back of my mind there were two thoughts. First, as the finance minister of a bankrupt state, whose citizens demanded an end to a great depression that had been caused by a denial of our bankruptcy – the imposition of new unpayable loans, so payments could be made on old unpayable loans – I had a political and moral duty to say no to more “extend-and-pretend” loan agreements. My second thought was the lesson of Sophocles’s Antigone, who taught us that good women and men have a duty to contradict rules lacking political and moral legitimacy.
Political authority is the cement that keeps legislation together, and the sovereignty of the body politic that engenders the legislation is its foundation. Saying no to Schäuble and the troika was an essential defence of our right to sovereignty. Not just as Greeks but as Europeans.
How ironic that this should also have been the last missive I received from Siemens’ long forgotten man in Athens.
Supporters of a no vote in Greece’s referendum on its bailout, outside the Greek parliament in Athens last summer. Photograph: Nicolas Koutsokostas/Demotix/Corbis
Coming into the highest level of European decision-making from the academic world, where argument and reason are the norm, the most striking realisation was the absence of any meaningful debate. If this was not bad enough, there was an even more painful realisation: that this absence is considered natural – indeed, considered a virtue, and one that newcomers like myself should embrace, or face the consequences.
Prearranged communiques, prefabricated votes, a solid coalition of finance ministers around Schäuble that was impenetrable to rational debate; this was the order to the day and, more often, of the long, long night. Not once did I get the feeling that my interlocutors were at all interested in Greece’s economic recovery while we were discussing the economic policies that should be implemented in my country.
From the day I assumed office I strove to put together sensible, moderate proposals that would create common ground between my government, the troika of Greece’s lenders and Schäuble’s people. The idea was to go to Brussels, put to them our own blueprint for Greece’s recovery and then discuss with them their own ideas and objections to ours.
My own Athens-based team worked hard on this, together with experts from abroad, including Jeff Sachs of Columbia University, Thomas Meyer, a former chief economist at Deutsche Bank, Daniel Cohen and Matthieu Pigasse, leading lights of the French investment bank Lazard, the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, and my personal friend Lord Lamont – not exactly a group of leftist recalcitrants.
Soon we had a fully-fledged plan, whose final version I co-authored with Jeff Sachs. It consisted of three chapters. One proposed smart debt operations that would make Greece’s public debt manageable again, while guaranteeing maximum returns to our creditors. The second chapter put forward a medium-term fiscal consolidation policy that would ensure the Greek government would never get into deficit again, while limiting our budget surplus targets to levels low enough to be credible and consistent with recovery. Finally, the third chapter outlined deep reforms to public and tax administration, product markets, and the restructure of a broken banking system as well as the creation a development bank to manage public assets at an arm’s length from politicians.
I am often asked: Why were these proposals of your ministry rejected? They were not. The Eurogroup and the troika did not have to reject them because they never allowed me to put them on the table. When I began speaking about them, they would look at me as if I were singing the Swedish national anthem. And behind the scenes they were exerting pressure on the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to repress these proposals, insinuating that there would be no agreement unless we stuck to the troika’s failed programme.
What was really going on, of course, was that the troika could simply ignore our proposals, tell the world that I had nothing credible to offer them, let the negotiations fail, impose an indefinite bank holiday, and then force the prime minister to acquiesce on everything – including a massive new loan that is at least double the size Greece would have required under our proposals.
Tragically, despite our prime minister’s acceptance of the troika’s terms of surrender, and the loss of another year during which Greece’s great depression is deepening, the same process is unfolding now. Only a few days ago WikiLeaks revealed the troubling transcript of a telephone conversation involving the International Monetary Fund’s participants in the Greek drama. Listening to their discussion confirms that nothing has changed since I resigned last July.
Once I put it to Schäuble that we, as the elected representatives of a continent in crisis, can not defer to unelected bureaucrats; we have a duty to find common ground on the policies that affect people’s lives through direct dialogue. He replied that, in his perspective, what matters most is the respect of the existing “rules”. And since the rules can only be enforced by technocrats, I should talk to them.
Whenever I attempted to discuss rules that were clearly impossible to enforce, the standard reply was: “But these are the rules!” Once, while I was pushing hard for the argument, resulting from our team’s policy work, that primary budget surplus targets of 4.5% of Greece’s national income were impossible, and undesirable even from the creditors’ perspective, Schäuble looked at me and asked me, perhaps for the first and last time, an economic question. “So, what would you like that target to be?” At last, I rejoiced, a chance to have a serious discussion.
In an attempt to be as reasonable as possible, I replied: “For the target of the government budget primary surplus to be credible and realistic, it needs to be consistent with our overall policy mix. The budget surplus number, when added to the difference between savings and investment, must equal Greece’s current account balance. Which means that we can strive for a higher budget primary surplus if we also put in place a credible strategy for boosting investment and delivering more credit to exporters.
“So, before I can answer your question, Wolfgang, on what the primary surplus target ought to be, it is crucial that we link this number to our policies on non-performing bank loans (that impede credit to exporters) and investment flows (which are reduced when we set the primary budget surplus target too high, scaring investors off with the implicit threat of higher future taxes). What I can tell you at this point is that the optimal target cannot be more than 1.5%. But let’s have our people study this together.”
Schäuble’s response to my point, addressing the rest of the Eurogroup while avoiding my eyes, was remarkable: “The previous government has committed Greece to 4.5% primary surpluses. And a commitment is a commitment!”
A few hours later, the media was full of leaks from the Eurogroup, claiming that “the Greek finance minister infuriated his colleagues in the Eurogroup by subjecting them to an economics lecture”.
Wolfgang Schäuble and Yanis Varoufakis before a finance ministers’ meeting in Brussels in 2015 Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
There is a reason why I began this piece with the story of my Uncle Panayiotis. That reason is a question asked by a journalist towards the end of the press conference after my first meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin.
The question was about Siemens and a scandal that had broken out some years earlier, when an investigation initiated in the US found evidence that a certain Michalis Christoforakos, a successor of Panayiotis, was actively pushing bribes into the hands of Greek politicians to secure government contracts on behalf of Siemens. Soon after the Greek authorities began investigating the matter, the gentleman absconded to Germany, where the courts prevented his extradition to Athens.
“Did you, minister,” asked the journalist, “impress upon your German colleague” – that would be Wolfgang Schäuble – “the German state’s obligation to help the Greek government snuff out corruption by extraditing Mr Christoforakos to Greece?” I tried to honour the question with a reasonable answer. “I am sure,” I said, “that the German authorities will understand the importance of assisting our troubled state in its struggle against corruption in Greece. I trust that my colleagues in Germany understand the importance of not being seen to have double standards anywhere in Europe.” Looking terribly put out, Schäuble mumbled that this was not a matter for his finance ministry.
On the aeroplane back to Athens, my mind travelled to the late 1970s. After his release from prison, Panayiotis returned to the helm of Siemens Greece. He was happy in that job, as he kept telling me, and proud of his work. Until he stopped being proud of it – so much so that he resigned in anger.
I remember asking him why he had resigned. His answer still resonates. He told me that he was facing pressure from his superiors in Germany to pay bribes to Greek politicians to ensure that Siemens would maintain its dominant position in Greece, getting the lion’s share of contracts related to the lucrative digitisation of the Greek telephone network.
There is a touching faith in the European north that Europe comprises ants and grasshoppers – and that all the frugal and cautious ants live in the north, while the spendthrift grasshoppers have congregated mysteriously in the south. The reality is much more muddled. A mighty network of corrupt practices has been laid over all of our countries – and the collapse of democratic checks and balances, due in part to our receding sovereignty, has helped hide it from public view.
As legitimate political authority retreats, we fall in the lap of brute force, inertia and demonisation of the weak. Indeed, by the end of June of 2015, the ECB had shut our banks, our government was divided, I resigned my ministry, and my prime minister capitulated to the troika.
The crushing of the Athens spring was a serious blow for an already wounded Greece. But it was also a wholesale defeat for the idea of a united, humanist, democratic Europe.
Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic “No!”
Here is why: if Britain and Greece were not already in the EU, they should most certainly stay out. But, once inside, it is crucial to consider the consequences of a decision to leave. Whether we like it or not, the European Union is our environment – and it has become a terribly unstable environment, which will disintegrate even if a small, depressed country like Greece leaves, let alone a major economy like Britain. Should the Greeks or the Brits care about the disintegration of an infuriating EU? Yes, of course we should care. And we should care very much because the disintegration of this frustrating alliance will create a vortex that will consume us all – a postmodern replay of the 1930s.
It is a major error to assume, whether you are a remain or a leave supporter, that the EU is something constant “out there” that you may or may not want to be part of. The EU’s very existence depends on Britain staying in. Greece and Britain are facing the same three options. The first two are represented aptly by the two warring factions within the Tory party: deference to Brussels and exit. They are equally calamitous options. Both lead to the same dystopian future: a Europe fit only for those who flourish in times of a great Depression – the xenophobes, the ultra-nationalists, the enemies of democratic sovereignty. The third option is the only one worth going for: staying in the EU to form a cross-border alliance of democrats, which Europeans failed to manage in the 1930s, but which our generation must now attempt to prevent history repeating itself.
This is precisely what some of us are working towards in creating DiEM25 – the Democracy in Europe Movement, with a view to conjuring up a democratic surge across Europe, a common European identity, an authentic European sovereignty, an internationalist bulwark against both submission to Brussels and hyper-nationalist reaction.
Is this not utopian? Of course it is! But not more so than the notion that the current EU can survive its anti-democratic hubris, and the gross incompetence fuelled by its unaccountability. Or the idea that British or Greek democracy can be revived in the bosom of a nation-state whose sovereignty will never be restored within a single market controlled by Brussels.
Just like in the early 1930s, Britain and Greece cannot escape Europe by building a mental or legislative wall behind which to hide. Either we band together to democratise – or we suffer the consequences of a pan-European nightmare that no border can keep out.
The first German word I ever learned was Siemens. It was emblazoned on our sturdy 1950s fridge, our washing machine, the vacuum cleaner – on almost every appliance in my family’s home in Athens. The reason for my parents’ peculiar loyalty to the German brand was my uncle Panayiotis, who was Siemens’ general manager in Greece from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s.
A Germanophile electrical engineer and a fluent speaker of Goethe’s language, Panayiotis had convinced his younger sister – my mother – to take up the study of German; she even planned to spend a year in Hamburg to take up a Goethe Institute scholarship in the summer of 1967.
Alas, on 21 April 1967, my mother’s plans were laid in ruins, along with our imperfect Greek democracy. For in the early hours of that morning, at the command of four army colonels, tanks rolled on to the streets of Athens and other major cities, and our country was soon enveloped in a thick cloud of neo-fascist gloom. It was also the day when Uncle Panayiotis’s world fell apart.
Unlike my dad, who in the late 1940s had paid for his leftist politics with several years in concentration camps, Panayiotis was what today would be referred to as a neoliberal. Fiercely anti-communist, and suspicious of social democracy, he supported the American intervention in the Greek civil war in 1946 (on the side of my father’s jailers). He backed the German Free Democratic party and the Greek Progressive party, which purveyed a blend of free-market economics with unconditional support for Greece’s oppressive US-led state security machine.
His political views, and his position as the head of Siemens’ operations in Greece, made Panayiotis a typical member of Greece’s postwar ruling class. When state security forces or their stooges roughed up leftwing protesters, or even killed a brilliant member of parliament, Grigoris Lambrakis, in 1963, Panayiotis would grudgingly approve, convinced that these were unpleasant but necessary actions. My ears are still ringing with the rowdy exchanges he often had with Dad, over what he considered “reasonable measures to defend democracy from its sworn enemies” – reasonable measures that my father had experienced first-hand, and from which he would never fully recover.
The heavy footprint of US agencies in Greek politics, even going so far as to engineer the dismissal of a popular centrist prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, in 1965, seemed to Panayiotis an acceptable trade-off: Greece had given up some sovereignty to western powers in exchange for freedom from a menacing eastern bloc lurking a short driving distance north of Athens. However, on that bleak April day in 1967, Panayiotis’s life was turned upside down.
He simply could not tolerate that “his” people (as he referred to the rightist army officers who had staged the coup and, more importantly, their American handlers) should dissolve parliament, suspend the constitution, and intern potential dissidents (including rightwing democrats) in football stadia, police stations and concentration camps. He had no great sympathy with the deposed centrist prime minister that the putschists and their US puppeteers were trying to keep out of government – but his worldview was torn asunder, leading him to a sudden spurt of almost comical radicalisation.
A few months after the military regime took power, Panayiotis joined an underground group called Democratic Defence, which consisted largely of other establishment liberals like himself – university professors, lawyers, and even a future prime minister. They planted a series of bombs around Athens, taking care to ensure there were no injuries, in order to demonstrate that the military regime was not in full control, despite its clampdown.
For a few years after the coup, Panayiotis appeared – even to his own mother – as yet another professional keeping his head down, minding his own business. No one had an inkling of his double life: corporate man during the day, subversive bomber by night. We were mostly relieved, meanwhile, that Dad had not disappeared again into some concentration camp.
My enduring memory of those years, in fact, is the crackling sound of a radio hidden under a red blanket in the middle of the living room in our Athens home. Every night at around nine, mum and dad would huddle together under the blanket – and upon hearing the muffled jingle announcing the beginning of the programme, followed by the voice of a German announcer, my own six-year-old imagination would travel from Athens to central Europe, a mythical place I had not visited yet except for the tantalising glimpses offered by an illustrated Brothers Grimm book I had in my bedroom.
Deutsche Welle, the German international radio station that my parents were listening to, became their most precious ally against the crushing power of state propaganda at home: a window looking out to faraway democratic Europe. At the end of each of its hour-long special broadcasts on Greece, my parents and I would sit around the dining table while they mulled over the latest news.
I didn’t fully understand what they were discussing, but this neither bored nor upset me. For I was gripped by a sense of excitement at the strangeness of our predicament: that, to find out what was happening in our very own Athens, we had to travel, through the airwaves, and veiled by a red blanket, to a place called Germany.
The reason for the red blanket was a grumpy old neighbour called Gregoris. Gregoris was known for his connections with the secret police and his penchant for spying on my parents; in particular my Dad, whose leftwing past made him an excellent target for an ambitious snitch. Strange as it may sound today, tuning in to Deutsche Welle broadcasts became one of a long list of activities punishable by anything from harassment to torture. So, having noticed Gregoris snooping around inside our backyard, my parents took no risks. Thus the red blanket became our defence from Gregoris’s prying ears.
A few years later, it was from Deutsche Welle that we learned what Panayiotis and his colleagues had been up to – when the radio announced that they had all been arrested. Dad would joke for years to come about the pathetic inability of these bourgeois liberals to organise an underground resistance group: only a few hours after one of the Democratic Defence members was accidentally caught, the rest were also rounded up. All the police had to do was read the first man’s diary – where he had meticulously listed his comrades’ names and addresses, in some cases including a description of each subversive “assignment”. Torture, court martial and long prison sentences – in some cases the death sentence – followed.
A year after Panayiotis’s capture, the military police guarding him decided to relax his isolation regime by allowing me, a harmless 10-year-old, to visit him once a week. Our already close bond grew stronger with boy-talk that allowed him a degree of escapism. He told me about machines I had never seen (computers, he called them), asked about the latest movies, described his favourite cars.
In anticipation of my visits, he would use matchsticks and other materials that prison guards would let him keep to build model planes for me. Often, he would hide inside his elegant artefacts a message for my aunt, my mother, on occasion even for his colleagues at Siemens. For my part, I was proud of my new skill of disassembling his models with minimal damage, retrieving the message, and putting them back together.
Long after Panayiotis’s death, I discovered the last of these: a matchstick model of a Stuka dive-bomber in my old family home’s attic. Torn between leaving it intact and looking inside, I decided to take it apart. And there it was. His last missive was not addressed to anyone in particular.
It was a single word: “kyriarchia”. Sovereignty.
A tank outside the parliament building in Athens during the military coup in 1967. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
It was almost 50 years after those childhood evenings under the red blanket that I made my first official visit to Berlin as finance minister of Greece, in February 2015. My first port of call was, of course, the federal finance ministry, to meet the legendary Dr Wolfgang Schäuble. To him, and his minions, I was a nuisance. Our leftwing government had just been elected, defeating a sister party of the Christian Democrats – New Democracy – on an electoral platform that was, to say the least, a form of inconvenience for Schäuble and Chancellor Angela Merkel, and their plans for keeping the eurozone in order.
Our success was, indeed, Berlin’s greatest fear. Were we to succeed in negotiating a new deal for Greece that ended the interminable recession gripping the nation, the Greek leftist “disease” would almost certainly spread to Portugal, Spain and Ireland, all of which had general elections looming.
Before I arrived in Berlin, and only three days after I had assumed office as minister, I received my first high-ranking visitor in my Athens office: Schäuble’s self-appointed envoy, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers. Within seconds of meeting, he asked me whether I intended to implement fully and unwaveringly the economic programme that previous Greek governments had been forced by Berlin, Brussels and Frankfurt – the seat of the European Central Bank (ECB) – to adopt.
Given that our government had won a mandate to renegotiate the very logic of that disastrous programme (which had led to the loss of one third of national income and increased unemployment by 20%), his question was never going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For my part, I attempted a diplomatic reply that would be my standard line of argument for the months to follow: “Given that the existing economic programme has been an indisputable failure, I propose that we sit down together, the new Greek government and our European partners, and rethink the whole programme without prejudice or fear, designing together economic policies that may help Greece recover.”
My modest plea for a modicum of national sovereignty over the economic policies imposed on a nation languishing in the depths of a great depression was met with astonishing brutality. “This will not work!”, was Dijsselbloem’s opening line. In less than a minute he had laid his cards on the table: if I were to insist on any substantial renegotiation of the programme, the ECB would close down our banks by the end of February 2015 – a month after we had been elected.
The Greek finance ministry’s office overlooks Syntagma Square and the House of Parliament – the very stage on which, in April 1967, the tanks had crushed our democracy. As Dijsselbloem spoke, I caught myself looking over his shoulder out to the broad square teeming with people and thinking to myself: “This is interesting. In 1967 it was the tanks, now they are trying to do the same with the banks.”
The meeting with Dijsselbloem ended with a tumultuous press conference in which the Eurogroup’s president lost his cool when he heard me say that our government was not planning to work with the cabal of technicians the troika of lenders habitually sent to Athens to impose upon the elected government policies destined to fail. The die had been cast and the battle for reclaiming part of our lost sovereignty was only beginning. Berlin, where I was to meet the troika’s real master, beckoned.
As the car that was driving me from Berlin’s Tegel airport approached the old headquarters of Goering’s air ministry – now the home of the federal ministry of finance – I wondered whether my host, Schäuble, could even begin to imagine that I was arriving in Berlin with my head full of childhood memories in which Germany featured as an important friend.
Once inside the building, my aides and I were ushered briskly into a large lift. The lift door opened up into a long, cold corridor at the end of which awaited the great man in his famous wheelchair. As I approached, my extended hand was refused and, instead of a handshake, he ushered me purposefully into his office.
While my relationship with Schäuble warmed in the months that followed, the shunned hand symbolised a great deal that is wrong with Europe. It was symbolic proof that the half-century that had passed since my red blanket days, and those prison visits to Siemens’ man in Athens, had changed Europe to no end.
I have no idea what role Siemens played in securing my uncle’s release some time in 1972, two years before the regime’s collapse. What I do know is that my parents were convinced that the German company had played a decisive role. For that reason, every time I saw the word “Siemens” around our home, I felt a warm glow. It is the same kind of warmth I still feel when I hear the words Deutsche Welle. Indeed, back then, in the exciting, bleak years of my childhood, Germany featured in my imagination as a dear friend, a land of democrats that, under Chancellor Willy Brandt, did what was humanly possible to help Greeks rid ourselves of our ugly dictatorship.
Returning home to Athens from my first official visit to Berlin, I was struck by the irony. A continent that had been uniting under different languages and cultures was now divided by a common currency, the euro, and the awful centrifugal forces that it had unleashed throughout Europe.
A week after our first bilateral meeting in Berlin, Schäuble and I were to meet again across the long, rectangular table of the Eurogroup, the eurozone’s decision-making body, comprising the common currency’s finance ministers, plus the representatives of the troika – the ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund. After I had recited our government’s plea for a substantial renegotiation of the so-called “Greek economic programme”, which had the troika’s fingerprints all over it, Dr Schäuble astounded me with a reply that should send shivers up the spine of every democrat: “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a member state!” he said categorically.
During a break from that 10-hour Eurogroup meeting, in which I had struggled to reclaim some economic sovereignty on behalf of my battered parliament and our suffering people, another finance minister attempted to soothe me by saying: “Yanis, you must understand that no country can be sovereign today. Especially not a small and bankrupt one like yours.”
This line of argument is probably the most pernicious fallacy to have afflicted public debate in our modern liberal democracies. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that it may be the greatest threat to liberal democracy itself. Its true meaning is that sovereignty is passé unless you are the United States, China or, maybe, Putin’s Russia. In which case you might as well append your country to a transnational alliance of states where your parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp, and all authority is vested in the larger states.
Interestingly, this argument is not reserved for small, bankrupt countries such as Greece, trapped in a badly designed common currency area. This same noxious dictum is today being peddled in the UK – supposedly as a clinching argument in favour of the remain campaign. As a supporter of Britain remaining in the EU, nothing upsets me more than the enlistment to the “yes” cause of an argument that is as toxic as it is woolly.
The problem begins once the distinction between sovereignty and power is blurred. Sovereignty is about who decides legitimately on behalf of a people – whereas power is the capacity to impose these decisions on the outside world. Iceland is a tiny country. But to claim that Iceland’s sovereignty is illusory because it is too small to have much power is like arguing that a poor person with no political clout might as well give up her right to vote.
To put it slightly differently, small sovereign nations such as Iceland have choices to make within the broader constraints created for them by nature and by the rest of humanity. However limited these choices might be, Iceland’s citizens retain absolute authority to hold their elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached (within the nation’s external constraints), and to strike down every piece of legislation those elected officials have decided upon in the past.
An alliance of states, which is what the EU is, can of course come to mutually beneficial arrangements, such as a defensive military alliance against a common aggressor, coordination between police forces, open borders, an agreement to common industry standards, or the creation of a free-trade zone. But it can never legitimately strike down or overrule the sovereignty of one of its member states on the basis of the limited power it has been granted by the sovereign states that have agreed to participate in the alliance. There is no collective European sovereignty from which Brussels could draw the legitimate political authority to do so.
One may retort that the European Union’s democratic credentials are beyond reproach. The European Council comprises heads of governments, while Ecofin and the Eurogroup are the councils of finance ministers (of the whole EU and of the eurozone respectively). All these representatives are, of course, democratically elected. Moreover, there is the European parliament, elected by the citizens of the member states, which has the power to send proposed legislation back to the Brussels bureaucracy. But these arguments demonstrate how badly European appreciation of the founding principles of liberal democracy has been degraded. The critical error of such a defence is once more to confuse political authority with power.
A parliament is sovereign, even if its country is not particularly powerful, when it can dismiss the executive for having failed to fulfil the tasks assigned to it within the constraints of whatever power the executive and the parliament possess. Nothing like this exists in the EU today.
For while the members of the European Council and the Eurogroup of finance ministers are elected politicians, answerable, theoretically, to their respective national parliaments, the Council and the Eurogroup are themselves not answerable to any parliament, nor indeed to any voting citizens whatsoever.
Moreover, the Eurogroup, where most of Europe’s important economic decisions are taken, is a body that does not even exist in European law, that keeps no minutes of its procedures and insists its deliberations are confidential – that is, not to be shared with the citizens of Europe. It operates on the basis – in the words of Thucydides – that “strong do as they please while the weak suffer what they must”. It is a set-up designed to preclude any sovereignty derived from the people of Europe.
While opposing Schäuble’s logic on Greece in the Eurogroup and elsewhere, at the back of my mind there were two thoughts. First, as the finance minister of a bankrupt state, whose citizens demanded an end to a great depression that had been caused by a denial of our bankruptcy – the imposition of new unpayable loans, so payments could be made on old unpayable loans – I had a political and moral duty to say no to more “extend-and-pretend” loan agreements. My second thought was the lesson of Sophocles’s Antigone, who taught us that good women and men have a duty to contradict rules lacking political and moral legitimacy.
Political authority is the cement that keeps legislation together, and the sovereignty of the body politic that engenders the legislation is its foundation. Saying no to Schäuble and the troika was an essential defence of our right to sovereignty. Not just as Greeks but as Europeans.
How ironic that this should also have been the last missive I received from Siemens’ long forgotten man in Athens.
Supporters of a no vote in Greece’s referendum on its bailout, outside the Greek parliament in Athens last summer. Photograph: Nicolas Koutsokostas/Demotix/Corbis
Coming into the highest level of European decision-making from the academic world, where argument and reason are the norm, the most striking realisation was the absence of any meaningful debate. If this was not bad enough, there was an even more painful realisation: that this absence is considered natural – indeed, considered a virtue, and one that newcomers like myself should embrace, or face the consequences.
Prearranged communiques, prefabricated votes, a solid coalition of finance ministers around Schäuble that was impenetrable to rational debate; this was the order to the day and, more often, of the long, long night. Not once did I get the feeling that my interlocutors were at all interested in Greece’s economic recovery while we were discussing the economic policies that should be implemented in my country.
From the day I assumed office I strove to put together sensible, moderate proposals that would create common ground between my government, the troika of Greece’s lenders and Schäuble’s people. The idea was to go to Brussels, put to them our own blueprint for Greece’s recovery and then discuss with them their own ideas and objections to ours.
My own Athens-based team worked hard on this, together with experts from abroad, including Jeff Sachs of Columbia University, Thomas Meyer, a former chief economist at Deutsche Bank, Daniel Cohen and Matthieu Pigasse, leading lights of the French investment bank Lazard, the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, and my personal friend Lord Lamont – not exactly a group of leftist recalcitrants.
Soon we had a fully-fledged plan, whose final version I co-authored with Jeff Sachs. It consisted of three chapters. One proposed smart debt operations that would make Greece’s public debt manageable again, while guaranteeing maximum returns to our creditors. The second chapter put forward a medium-term fiscal consolidation policy that would ensure the Greek government would never get into deficit again, while limiting our budget surplus targets to levels low enough to be credible and consistent with recovery. Finally, the third chapter outlined deep reforms to public and tax administration, product markets, and the restructure of a broken banking system as well as the creation a development bank to manage public assets at an arm’s length from politicians.
I am often asked: Why were these proposals of your ministry rejected? They were not. The Eurogroup and the troika did not have to reject them because they never allowed me to put them on the table. When I began speaking about them, they would look at me as if I were singing the Swedish national anthem. And behind the scenes they were exerting pressure on the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to repress these proposals, insinuating that there would be no agreement unless we stuck to the troika’s failed programme.
What was really going on, of course, was that the troika could simply ignore our proposals, tell the world that I had nothing credible to offer them, let the negotiations fail, impose an indefinite bank holiday, and then force the prime minister to acquiesce on everything – including a massive new loan that is at least double the size Greece would have required under our proposals.
Tragically, despite our prime minister’s acceptance of the troika’s terms of surrender, and the loss of another year during which Greece’s great depression is deepening, the same process is unfolding now. Only a few days ago WikiLeaks revealed the troubling transcript of a telephone conversation involving the International Monetary Fund’s participants in the Greek drama. Listening to their discussion confirms that nothing has changed since I resigned last July.
Once I put it to Schäuble that we, as the elected representatives of a continent in crisis, can not defer to unelected bureaucrats; we have a duty to find common ground on the policies that affect people’s lives through direct dialogue. He replied that, in his perspective, what matters most is the respect of the existing “rules”. And since the rules can only be enforced by technocrats, I should talk to them.
Whenever I attempted to discuss rules that were clearly impossible to enforce, the standard reply was: “But these are the rules!” Once, while I was pushing hard for the argument, resulting from our team’s policy work, that primary budget surplus targets of 4.5% of Greece’s national income were impossible, and undesirable even from the creditors’ perspective, Schäuble looked at me and asked me, perhaps for the first and last time, an economic question. “So, what would you like that target to be?” At last, I rejoiced, a chance to have a serious discussion.
In an attempt to be as reasonable as possible, I replied: “For the target of the government budget primary surplus to be credible and realistic, it needs to be consistent with our overall policy mix. The budget surplus number, when added to the difference between savings and investment, must equal Greece’s current account balance. Which means that we can strive for a higher budget primary surplus if we also put in place a credible strategy for boosting investment and delivering more credit to exporters.
“So, before I can answer your question, Wolfgang, on what the primary surplus target ought to be, it is crucial that we link this number to our policies on non-performing bank loans (that impede credit to exporters) and investment flows (which are reduced when we set the primary budget surplus target too high, scaring investors off with the implicit threat of higher future taxes). What I can tell you at this point is that the optimal target cannot be more than 1.5%. But let’s have our people study this together.”
Schäuble’s response to my point, addressing the rest of the Eurogroup while avoiding my eyes, was remarkable: “The previous government has committed Greece to 4.5% primary surpluses. And a commitment is a commitment!”
A few hours later, the media was full of leaks from the Eurogroup, claiming that “the Greek finance minister infuriated his colleagues in the Eurogroup by subjecting them to an economics lecture”.
Wolfgang Schäuble and Yanis Varoufakis before a finance ministers’ meeting in Brussels in 2015 Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
There is a reason why I began this piece with the story of my Uncle Panayiotis. That reason is a question asked by a journalist towards the end of the press conference after my first meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin.
The question was about Siemens and a scandal that had broken out some years earlier, when an investigation initiated in the US found evidence that a certain Michalis Christoforakos, a successor of Panayiotis, was actively pushing bribes into the hands of Greek politicians to secure government contracts on behalf of Siemens. Soon after the Greek authorities began investigating the matter, the gentleman absconded to Germany, where the courts prevented his extradition to Athens.
“Did you, minister,” asked the journalist, “impress upon your German colleague” – that would be Wolfgang Schäuble – “the German state’s obligation to help the Greek government snuff out corruption by extraditing Mr Christoforakos to Greece?” I tried to honour the question with a reasonable answer. “I am sure,” I said, “that the German authorities will understand the importance of assisting our troubled state in its struggle against corruption in Greece. I trust that my colleagues in Germany understand the importance of not being seen to have double standards anywhere in Europe.” Looking terribly put out, Schäuble mumbled that this was not a matter for his finance ministry.
On the aeroplane back to Athens, my mind travelled to the late 1970s. After his release from prison, Panayiotis returned to the helm of Siemens Greece. He was happy in that job, as he kept telling me, and proud of his work. Until he stopped being proud of it – so much so that he resigned in anger.
I remember asking him why he had resigned. His answer still resonates. He told me that he was facing pressure from his superiors in Germany to pay bribes to Greek politicians to ensure that Siemens would maintain its dominant position in Greece, getting the lion’s share of contracts related to the lucrative digitisation of the Greek telephone network.
There is a touching faith in the European north that Europe comprises ants and grasshoppers – and that all the frugal and cautious ants live in the north, while the spendthrift grasshoppers have congregated mysteriously in the south. The reality is much more muddled. A mighty network of corrupt practices has been laid over all of our countries – and the collapse of democratic checks and balances, due in part to our receding sovereignty, has helped hide it from public view.
As legitimate political authority retreats, we fall in the lap of brute force, inertia and demonisation of the weak. Indeed, by the end of June of 2015, the ECB had shut our banks, our government was divided, I resigned my ministry, and my prime minister capitulated to the troika.
The crushing of the Athens spring was a serious blow for an already wounded Greece. But it was also a wholesale defeat for the idea of a united, humanist, democratic Europe.
Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic “No!”
Here is why: if Britain and Greece were not already in the EU, they should most certainly stay out. But, once inside, it is crucial to consider the consequences of a decision to leave. Whether we like it or not, the European Union is our environment – and it has become a terribly unstable environment, which will disintegrate even if a small, depressed country like Greece leaves, let alone a major economy like Britain. Should the Greeks or the Brits care about the disintegration of an infuriating EU? Yes, of course we should care. And we should care very much because the disintegration of this frustrating alliance will create a vortex that will consume us all – a postmodern replay of the 1930s.
It is a major error to assume, whether you are a remain or a leave supporter, that the EU is something constant “out there” that you may or may not want to be part of. The EU’s very existence depends on Britain staying in. Greece and Britain are facing the same three options. The first two are represented aptly by the two warring factions within the Tory party: deference to Brussels and exit. They are equally calamitous options. Both lead to the same dystopian future: a Europe fit only for those who flourish in times of a great Depression – the xenophobes, the ultra-nationalists, the enemies of democratic sovereignty. The third option is the only one worth going for: staying in the EU to form a cross-border alliance of democrats, which Europeans failed to manage in the 1930s, but which our generation must now attempt to prevent history repeating itself.
This is precisely what some of us are working towards in creating DiEM25 – the Democracy in Europe Movement, with a view to conjuring up a democratic surge across Europe, a common European identity, an authentic European sovereignty, an internationalist bulwark against both submission to Brussels and hyper-nationalist reaction.
Is this not utopian? Of course it is! But not more so than the notion that the current EU can survive its anti-democratic hubris, and the gross incompetence fuelled by its unaccountability. Or the idea that British or Greek democracy can be revived in the bosom of a nation-state whose sovereignty will never be restored within a single market controlled by Brussels.
Just like in the early 1930s, Britain and Greece cannot escape Europe by building a mental or legislative wall behind which to hide. Either we band together to democratise – or we suffer the consequences of a pan-European nightmare that no border can keep out.
Saturday 5 March 2016
Sunday 16 August 2015
England's Ashes Win - Despite, not Because
Maxie Allen in The Full Toss
England would not have won the Ashes had Kevin Pietersen not been sacked without explanation. Alastair Cook is the greatest captain in test history. Paul Downton is a national hero of rare prescience and foresight.
I need exaggerate only a little to make the point. History is being re-written. Scores are being settled. A sickly river of errant and retaliatory bilge is slithering its way through the media crickosphere.
Why does it matter? At the risk of coming over all Ed Smith, allow me to quote George Orwell:
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Newspapers write contemporary history. They set the agenda and become the accepted version of events. The press influence people whose opinions affect cricket followers – from the wider public, to politicians, sponsors, and sports administrators.
Who is the head of UK Sport more likely to read? Mike Selvey, or Being Outside Cricket?
The hacks have power, but some of them are distorting reality to serve a bizarre agenda.
Let’s get one thing straight. England did not win the Ashes because a masterplan came gloriously to fruition. England’s triumph over Australia did not reveal the decision-making of February 2014 to be an act of visionary, methodical genius.
England won despite what happened, not because of it.
Let’s remember the precise sequence of events. First, Peter Moores was hired with a mandate to re-build the England side. He was chosen even though he was the only candidate who’d already failed in the role, and to almost universal opposition. He promised more of the same micro-managing, data-driven, strait-jacket approach which by then had already been discredited under Andy Flower.
How did he get on? Moores took England backwards, not forwards: losing to Sri Lanka, crashing out of the World Cup at the group stage, and drawing with West Indies, a record only offset by the series win over a woeful India.
It was meant to have been Peter Moores who masterminded England’s Ashes campaign. At the last minute the ECB had no choice but bow to the inevitable, prompting a panicked sacking and replacement process. In dismissing Moores, Andrew Strauss managed to avoid doing the really stupid thing – not sacking him – but it was hardly act of remarkably prescient cricketing genius.
And what of the new materials around whom the side was re fabricated? Sam Robson and Gary Ballance have both since been dropped, as have Chris Jordan and Liam Plunkett. Chris Woakes, for reasons both of form and injury, has also fallen off the radar. Jos Buttler has yet to make a century and has scored only 79 runs at 13 in this Ashes series.
The ECB’s stated plan, eighteen months ago, was to build the New England around Alastair Cook. Since then he has scored two centuries in seventeen tests, the output of a supporting actor, not the lead. In the 2015 Ashes so far, Cook has made 223 runs in seven innings, at 31.85. In terms of England averages for the series, he stands sixth.
Has Cook’s captaincy improved England’s form? He’s now more prepared to try quirky tactics – if England are on top. He will declare, nine down, shortly before lunch – if England are already leading by more than 300. As Unhappy Hippy remarked on Twitter, “Cook’s captaincy capably managed matches we should win”.
If Cook has changed his approach, he waited until at least a year after the tour of Australia to do it. If Cook is made of the right stuff, why has he progressed at barely a glacial pace? In nearly three years at the helm, Cook has now led England captain in 37 tests. Only five men have ever captained England on more occasions.
Would England not have beaten Australia without Cook’s captaincy? What did he do in this series which turned sessions in England’s favour? Was this a case of his intrinsic virtues carrying the day, as they were inevitably destined to? Or an extension of the Collingwood Principle – that if anyone captains long enough, refusing to resign, they will eventually enjoy a series when things go their way?
The jury remains out on the most important dimension of Cook’s captaincy. He has always been prepared to rotate the bowlers – any idiot can do that – and try an offbeat field placing. Cook’s real weakness is his impotence in the face of adversity. When the batsmen are on top – as Australia’s were at Lord’s, or when England lose control in the field – as they did last year against Sri Lanka at Headingley and India – Cook retreats into his shell instead of taking the game by the scruff of the neck. These situations are the true test of a captain’s mettle, and Cook invariably fails – shrugging his shoulders at slip and ceding control to Anderson and Broad.
By retaining Cook as captain, were the ECB sagacious and far-sighted, or did they just get lucky? When they reaffirmed him, time and again, after each disappointing result, what were the qualities they saw in him which have now become evident this summer? And how did they influence the result?
Have England been better off without Kevin Pietersen? His replacements – in this series, Ballance and Bairstow (it is telling that a change was needed) – have scored 177 runs in six innings. Would Pietersen have scored fewer?
It is impossible to say with any confidence whether his absence helped foster a better team spirit, and if so, whether this atmosphere contributed significantly to England’s Ashes victory. Any assertion on this front is pure guesswork.
But no evidence has ever been presented that, when he played for England, Pietersen’s involvement proved detrimental to the team’s output. He was a member of England sides which won four Ashes series, beat India away, became world number one, and won the World T20. There is also ample testimony from younger players about Pietersen’s provision to them of support, advice, and help in the nets.
So if you return to England’s 2014 masterplan, and trace the narrative threads through to their victory at Trent Bridge, what do you end up with?
And why regard this Ashes series as the ‘end of history’? It is an arbitrary choice, which insults England’s other opponents. Why not draw the line at the West Indies tour in April, and take final conclusions from that result? Or extend the story to include the upcoming visits to UAE and South Africa. If England fare badly overseas this winter, where does that leave the narrative?
In beating Australia, England bowled extremely well, and batted well enough. Joe Root’s runs and Stuart Broad’s wickets were by far the most important individual contributions. Of the other players who materially affected the outcome, only Moeen Ali was an addition to the team since the Difficult Winter. You could add Mark Wood, at a push. Steve Finn, Ben Stokes, and Jonny Bairstow, all pre-date Paul Downton’s Brave New World.
England benefited greatly both from Australia’s appalling batting, and home advantage. All but one of the last eight Ashes series have been won by the hosts.
Another factor was England’s fresher and more liberated approach – their cricketers seemingly encouraged to play their natural games, on instinct, without hindrance from laptops and hypotheses. This cultural change is probably attributable to the influence of Paul Farbrace, acting coach during the New Zealand series, and Trevor Bayliss. Yet it had not been the advance plan for either man to take charge of the team. Had Peter Moores remained in post, as the ECB had intended, what would have happened?
None of this devalues the performance of the England players who scored the runs and took the wickets which beat Australia. Quite the opposite. They defied expectations. They outplayed their rivals. They won the Ashes. To those players – and to a minor extent their new coaches – is the credit due. To lay it at anyone else’s door is to denigrate their achievement.
Try telling that to what Mike Selvey might call the “vocal minority” of professional cricket writers hellbent on distorting reality to settle scores. Some are motivated by the redemption of their friends. What was regarded ‘below the line’ as the legitimate holding to account of people in power, they saw as the vulgar abuse of “good men”.
More acutely, for some, this their opportunity for revenge on what Ed Smith calls ‘the mob’. We had the temerity to challenge their judgment. We had the impudence to suggest that people who had neither played three test matches, nor once sat next to Kevin Pietersen on a plane, but had spent their whole lives following England, might still be able to form a valid opinion on cricket.
In both cases, we neglected to respect our elders and betters. And this is payback time. In yet another journalistic first for the English cricket media, this is a cue for an attack on their own readers.
If some in the press are exploiting the Ashes result to vindicate their actions, this is small fry compared to what the ECB will do, and what their supporters will say. In theory, everything the board has done, and everything the board will go on to do, can be justified by what happened this summer. The reclamation of the urn proves the soundness of their rationale, the goodness of their governance, and the righteousness of their moral code.
As Dave Ticker put it, on Twitter: "Giles Clarke selling out to Stanford doesn't look so silly now England have won the Ashes, does it."
Persecute, bully and betray England’s highest ever run-scorer? We won the Ashes. Extort spectators and test-hosting counties? We won the Ashes. Lock cricket behind a TV paywall? We won the Ashes. Hand the Sky windfall to the counties and bill Sport England for the grass-roots funding? We won the Ashes. Ruin the World Cup? We won the Ashes. Turn international cricket into a protection racket for the Big Three? We won the Ashes.
Dare not question our judgement. We know what’s best for you. Please move along.
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