"This is not your fucking back yard" Virat Kohli

 

It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn’s was one of them

Seumas Milne in The Guardian


If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.

The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.

Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations

 But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.

But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.

The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.

At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.

But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.

It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.

But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.

The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.

That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.

That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.

Britain - The Mafia State

George Monbiot in Outlook India

Be reasonable in response to the unreasonable: this is what voters in the Labour election are told. Accommodate, moderate, triangulate, for the alternative is to isolate yourself from reality. You might be inclined to agree. If so, please take a look at the reality to which you must submit.

To an extent unknown since before the First World War, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It's not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It's that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bail-outs, quantitative easing and delays in interest rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that, as Larry Elliott puts it, financial markets are "one of the last bastions of socialism left on earth."

Public services, infrastructure, the very fabric of the nation: these too are being converted into risk-free investments. Social cleansing is transforming inner London into an exclusive economic zone for property speculation. From a dozen directions, government policy converges on this objective. The benefits cap and the bedroom tax drive the poor out of their homes. The forced sale of high-value council houses creates a new asset pool. An uncapped and scarcely regulated private rental market turns these assets into gold. The freeze on council tax banding since 1991, the lifting of the inheritance tax threshold and £14 billion a year in breaks for private landlords all help to guarantee stupendous returns.

And for those who wish simply to sit on their assets, the government can help here too, by ensuring that there are no penalties for leaving buildings empty. As a result, great tracts of housing are removed from occupation. Agricultural land has proved an even better punt for City money: with the help of capital gains, inheritance and income tax exemptions, as well as farm subsidies, its price has quadrupled in 12 years.

Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK."

It's hardly surprising, given the degree of oversight. Private Eye has produced a map of British land owned by companies registered in offshore tax havens. The holdings amount to 1.2 million acres, including much of our prime real estate. Among those it names as beneficiaries are a cast of Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, British aristocrats and newspaper proprietors. These are the people for whom government policy works, and the less regulated the system that enriches them, the happier they are.

The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege — Don't Forget the Remembrancer — will be launched very soon). The City has one foot in the water: it is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK's Crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain's financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a long succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drugs gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever-so-civilised mafia state.

At next month's Conservative party conference, corporate executives will pay £2,500 to sit with a minister. Doubtless, because we are assured that there is no link between funding and policy, they will spend the day discussing the weather and the films they have seen. If we noticed such arrangements overseas, we might be inclined to regard them as corruption. But that can't be the case here, not least because the invitation explains that "fees associated with business day & dinner are considered a commercial transaction and therefore do not constitute a political donation."

The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchers at Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly "equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row". Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.

Governed either by or on behalf of the people who fleece us, we cannot be surprised to discover that all public services are being re-engineered for the benefit of private capital. Nor should we be surprised when governments help to negotiate, without public consent, treaties such as TTIP and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), which undermine the sovereignty of both parliament and the law. Aesop's observation that "we hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office" remains true in spirit, though hanging has been replaced by community payback.

Wherever you sniff in British public life, something stinks: I could fill this newspaper with examples. But, while every pore oozes corruption, our task, we are told, is merely to trim the nails of the body politic.

To fail to confront this system is to collaborate with it. Who on the left would wish to stand on the sidelines as this carve-up continues? Who would vote for anything but sweeping change?

MCC: the greatest anachronism of English cricket

by Maxie Allen in The Full Toss • March 16, 2012

There’s been an outbreak of egg-and-bacon-striped handbags at dawn. Sir John Major’s resignation from the Main Committee of the MCC, in a row about redevelopment plans at Lord’s, has triggered a furious war of words in St John’s Wood.

Put simply, the former prime minister took umbrage at the process by which the MCC decided to downgrade the project. He then claimed that Phillip Hodson, the club’s president, publicly misrepresented his reasons for resigning, and in response Sir John wrote an open letter to set the record straight, in scathing terms.

The saga has been all over the cricket press, and even beyond, in recent weeks – underlining the anomalously prominent role the MCC continues to maintain within the eccentric geography of English cricket.

To this observer it’s both puzzling and slightly troubling that the people who run cricket, and the mainstream media who report on it, remain so reverentially fascinated by an organisation whose function has so little resonance for the vast majority of people who follow the game in this country.

Virtually anything the Marylebone Cricket Club do or say is news – and more importantly, cricket’s opinion-formers and decision-makers attach great weight to its actions and utterances. Whenever Jonathan Agnew interviews an MCC bigwig during the TMS tea-break – which is often – you’d think from the style and manner of the questioning that he had the prime minister or Archbishop of Canterbury in the chair.

Too many people at the apex of cricket’s hierarchy buy unthinkingly into the mythology of the MCC. Their belief in it borders on the religious. A divine provenance and mystique are ascribed to everything symbolised by the red and yellow iconography.  The club’s leaders are regarded as high priests, their significance beyond question.

The reality is rather more prosaic. The MCC is a private club, and nothing more. It exists to cater for the wishes of its 18,000 members, which are twofold: to run Lord’s to their comfort and satisfaction, and to promote their influence within cricket both in England and abroad. The MCC retains several powerful roles in the game – of which more in a moment.

You can’t just walk up to the Grace Gates and join the MCC. Membership is an exclusive business. To be accepted, you must secure the endorsement of four existing members, of whom one must hold a senior rank, and then wait for twenty years. Only four hundred new members are admitted each year. But if you’re a VIP, or have influential friends in the right places, you can usually contrive to jump the queue.

Much of the MCC’s clout derives from its ownership of Lord’s, which the club incessantly proclaims to be ‘the home of cricket’. This assertion involves a distorting simplification of cricket’s early history. Lord’s was certainly one of the most important grounds in the development of cricket from rural pastime to national sport, but far from the only one. The vast majority of pioneering cricketers never played there – partly because only some of them were based in London.

Neither the first test match in England, not the first test match of all, were played at Lord’s. The latter distinction belongs to the MCG, which to my mind entitles it to an equal claim for history’s bragging rights.

The obsession with the status of Lord’s is rather unfair to England’s other long-established test grounds, all of whom have a rich heritage. If you were to list the most epic events of our nation’s test and county history, you’d find that only a few of them took place at Lord’s. Headingley provided the stage for the 1981 miracle, for Bradman in 1930, and many others beside. The Oval is where test series usually reach their climax. In 2005, Edgbaston witnessed the greatest match of all time.

Lord’s is only relevant if you are within easy reach of London. And personally, as a spectator, the place leaves me cold. I just don’t feel the magic. Lord’s is too corporate, too lacking in atmosphere, and too full of people who are there purely for the social scene, not to watch the cricket.

Nevertheless, Lord’s gives the MCC influence, which is manifested in two main ways. Firstly, the club has a permanent seat on the fourteen-member ECB Board – the most senior decision-making tier of English cricket. In other words, a private club – both unaccountable to, and exclusive from, the general cricketing public – has a direct say in the way our game is run. No other organisation of its kind enjoys this privilege. The MCC is not elected to this position – neither you nor I have any say in the matter – which it is free to use in furtherance of its own interests.

It was widely reported that, in April 2007, MCC’s then chief executive Keith Bradshaw played a leading part in the removal of Duncan Fletcher as England coach. If so, why? What business was it of his?

The MCC is cricket’s version of a hereditary peer – less an accident of history, but a convenient political arrangement between the elite powerbrokers of the English game. The reasoning goes like this: because once upon a time the MCC used to run everything, well, it wouldn’t really do to keep them out completely, would it? Especially as they’re such damn good chaps.

Why should the MCC alone enjoy so special a status, and no other of the thousands of cricket clubs in England? What’s so virtuous about it, compared to the club you or I belong to – which is almost certainly easier to join and more accessible.

What’s even more eccentric about the MCC’s place on the ECB board is that the entire county game only has three representatives. In the ECB’s reckoning, therefore, one private cricket club (which competes in no first-class competitions) deserves to have one-third of the power allocated to all eighteen counties and their supporters in their entirety.

The second stratum of MCC’s power lies in its role as custodian of the Laws of Cricket. The club decides – for the whole world – how the game shall be played, and what the rules are. From Dhaka to Bridgetown, every cricketer across the globe must conform to a code laid down in St John’s Wood, and – sorry to keep repeating this point, but it’s integral – by a private organisation in which they have no say.

Admittedly, the ICC is now also  involved in any revisions to the Laws, but the MCC have the final say, and own the copyright.

You could make a strong argument for the wisdom of delegating such a sensitive matter as cricket’s Laws to – in the form of MCC – a disinterested body with no sectional interests but the werewithal to muster huge expertise. That’s far better, the argument goes, than leaving it to the squabbling politicians of the ICC, who will act only in the selfish interests of their own nations.

But that said, the arrangement still feels peculiar, in an uncomfortable way. The ICC, and its constituent national boards, may be deeply flawed, but they are at least notionally accountable, and in some senses democratic. You could join a county club tomorrow and in theory rise up the ranks to ECB chairman. The ICC and the boards could be reformed without changing the concept underpinning their existence. None of these are true of the MCC.

Why does this one private club – and no others – enjoy such remarkable privileges? The answer lies in an interpretation of English cricket history which although blindly accepted by the establishment – and fed to us, almost as propaganda – is rather misleading.

History, as they often say, is written by the winners, and this is certainly true in cricket. From the early nineteenth century the MCC used its power, wealth and connections to take control of the game of cricket – first in England, and then the world. No one asked the club to do this, nor did they consult the public or hold a ballot. They simply, and unilaterally, assumed power, in the manner of an autocrat, and inspired by a similar sense of entitlement to that which built the British empire.

This private club, with its exclusive membership, ran test and domestic English cricket, almost on its own, until 1968. Then the Test and County Cricket Board was formed, in which the MCC maintained a hefty role until the creation of the ECB in 1997. The England team continued to play in MCC colours when overseas until the 1990s. Internationally, the MCC oversaw the ICC until as recently as 1993.

All through these near two centuries of quasi-monarchical rule, the MCC believed it was their divine right to govern. They knew best. Their role was entirely self-appointed, with the collusion of England’s social and political elite. At no stage did they claim to represent the general cricketing public, nor allow the public to participate in their processes.

The considerable authority the MCC still enjoys today derives not from its inherent virtues, or any popular mandate, but from its history. Because it has always had a leadership role, it will always be entitled to one.

The other bulwark of the MCC’s authority is predicated on the widespread assumption that the club virtually invented cricket, single-handedly. It was certainly one of the most influential clubs in the evolution of the game, and its codification in Victorian times, but far from the only one, and by no means the first. Neither did the MCC pioneer cricket’s Laws – their own first version was the fifth in all.

Hundreds of cricket clubs, across huge swathes of England, all contributed to the development of cricket into its modern form. The cast of cricket’s history is varied and complex – from the gambling aristocrats, to the wily promoters, the public schools, and the nascent county sides who invented the professional game as we know it now. Tens of thousands of individuals were involved, almost of all whom never went to Lord’s or had anything to thank the MCC for.

And that’s before you even start considering the countless Indians, West Indians, South Africans and especially Australians who all helped shape the dynamics, traditions and culture of our sport.

And yet it was the egg-and-bacon wearers who took all the credit. They appointed themselves leaders, and succeeded in doing so – due to the wealth, power and social connections of their membership. And because the winners write the history, the history says that MCC gave us cricket. It is this mythology which underpins their retention of power in the twenty first century.

Just to get things into perspective – I’m not suggesting we gather outside the Grace Gates at dawn, brandishing flaming torches. This is not an exhortation to storm the MCC’s ramparts and tear down the rose-red pavilion brick by brick until we secure the overthrow of these villainous tyrants.

In many ways the MCC is a force for good. It funds coaching and access schemes, gives aspiring young players opportunities on the ground staff, promotes the Spirit Of Cricket initiative, organises tours to remote cricketing nations, and engages in many charitable enterprises.

Their members may wear hideous ties and blazers, and usually conform to their snobbish and fusty stereotype, but no harm comes of that. As a private club, the MCC can act as it pleases, and do whatever it wants with Lord’s, which is its property.

But the MCC should have no say or involvement whatsoever in the running of English cricket. The club’s powers were never justifiable in the first place, and certainly not in the year 2012. The club must lose its place on the ECB Board. That is beyond argument.

As for the Laws, the MCC should bring their expertise to bear as consultants. But surely now the ultimate decisions should rest with the ICC.

Unpalatable though it may seem to hand over something so precious to so Byzantine an organisation, it is no longer fair or logical to expect every cricketer from Mumbai to Harare to dance to a St John’s Wood tune. This is an age in which Ireland and Afghanistan are playing serious cricket, and even China are laying the foundations. The process must be transparent, global, and participatory.

Cricket is both the beneficiary and victim of its history. No other game has a richer or more fascinating heritage, and ours has bequeathed a value system, international context, cherished rivalries, and an endless source of intrigue and delight.

But history is to be selected from with care – you maintain the traditions which still have value and relevance, and update or discard those which don’t. The role of the MCC is the apotheosis of this principle within cricket. For this private and morally remote club to still wield power in 2012 is as anachronistic as two stumps, a curved bat, and underarm bowling.

After 800 years, the barons are back in control of Britain

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 20.30 BST

King John, surrounded by English barons, ratifying the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Image

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus – pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been destroyed once; the day after my visit they were destroyed again. But the repeated destruction, removals and arrests have not deterred them. As one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If we go to prison we'll just come back … I'm not saying that this is the only way. But at least we're creating an opportunity for young people to step out of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land – even disused land – is guarded as fiercely as the rest of the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest (the document appended to the Magna Carta in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The relationship between land and democracy is a strong one, which is not widely understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power of the kind familiar to King John and his barons still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons, most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those who fund the major parties and establish the limits of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt. This spring, the government dropped a clause into an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning class is still well-represented, approved the measure. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as housing benefit payments are being cut back. I remember a political postcard from the early 1990s titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede are trying to revive a different tradition, largely forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to make "the Earth a common treasury for all … not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation". The tradition of resistance, the assertion of independence from the laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten property, long pre-date and long post-date the Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into the town, I found the pavements packed with people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas, forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was carried down the road. The sense of common purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half of what we need is here already. Now how do we recruit it to the fight for democracy?