Have PT Usha and IOA let down Vinesh Phogat?

 

Indian Elections 2024 - A Personal Note

Girish Menon

As the incumbent Prime Minister Modi heads off to Kanyakumari for some much-needed R&R (or maybe just to escape the election madness), I thought I'd share my two rupees on the 2024 Indian election extravaganza. But before you get too excited, let me warn you – these observations are based on the ramblings of biased commentators who probably couldn't tell the truth from a hole in the ground. So, take it all with a pinch of salt (or maybe a whole shaker).

The Election Commission's Impartiality? What's That?

The Election Commission of India (ECI) was supposed to be the impartial referee in this political boxing match, ensuring a fair fight. But let's be real, when has any referee ever been truly impartial? It's like expecting the umpire at an India-Pakistan cricket match to be completely unbiased. The ruling party was pulling all sorts of shenanigans, and the ECI just turned a blind eye. At least in the IPL, every team gets an equal chance to buy the best players in a glitzy auction. But in this election, it felt like one team was playing with a committed umpire.

---Also read

How accurate are the betting markets of India

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The Olympic Games of Democracy? 

Elections in India are touted as the "Olympic games of democracy," a grand 44 day spectacle where all parties compete on an even playing field, much like the athletes gathering for Paris '24. However, the reality is far from this idealized notion. It's more akin to a rigged game where the ruling party shows up with a souped-up, nitro-boosted sports car, while the opposition parties are stuck with rusty old clunkers, and the track is greased with ill-gotten gains, making it nearly impossible for them to gain traction. The opposition faces disadvantages similar to a woman athlete from Afghanistan competing against a well-trained, well-funded athlete from a developed nation. As Donald Trump aptly put it, the entire exercise is a "rigged game," where the dice were loaded long before the race even began, and I haven't even mentioned the EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. If the opposition wins then it will be nothing short of an Act of God.

The Mandate Debate: A Never-Ending Soap Opera

Ah, the age-old "mandate" debate. It's like a never-ending soap opera, with the winning party claiming they have a mandate to do whatever they want, and the opposition crying foul. It's a classic case of "he said, she said," and in the end, the only ones benefiting are the lawyers raking in the big bucks.

Expert Predictions: A Game of Darts in the Dark

Then we have the "expert" predictions. Sanjay Dikshit, Prashant Kishore, Yogendra Yadav, and Parakala Prabhakar have thrown out numbers ranging from 180 to 400 seats for the BJP in the 542-member Lok Sabha. That's a wider range than my waistline after a weekend of binge-drinking and snacking. Are these experts consulting some mystical crystal ball, or are they just playing a game of darts in the dark, hoping to hit the bullseye by sheer luck? Who knows, maybe they're just trying to keep their political overlords happy by telling them what they want to hear.

My Two Rupees? The BJP as the Loyal Opposition

Personally, I'd love to see the BJP end up as the single largest party with around 200-210 seats, taking on the role of the loyal opposition. They actually represent only a minority of the Indian population (38% in 2019). They've proven themselves to be quite the watchdogs in the past, barking at every perceived injustice (whether real or imagined). But at the same time, I can't help but worry about the plight of the common folk who've had to bear the brunt of their policies implemented over the last decade.  So there you have it, folks – my completely unbiased (wink, wink) take on the 2024 Indian election circus. Just remember, when it comes to politics, it's always better to laugh than to cry (or maybe do both, just to be safe).

Olympic gold is all about doing little things

Anindya Dutta in The Print

The Olympics come around once every four years. Theoretically. During a pandemic, the wait could be five years, and when there is war, well, it could be twelve, or may just have to be skipped. And at the end of those four, five or even twelve years, it all comes down to that hour, that fraction of a minute, or the split second that it takes a propelled bullet to find its 0.5mm-wide mark, at least ten metres away.

Every minute of every Olympian’s life is spent preparing to peak at that exact moment when the opportunity presents itself. And if you do all that perfectly on a perfect day, and your forty-nine other near-perfect opponents don’t, then you win a gold medal. It is that difficult.

Until 2008 in Beijing, India, a country of a billion people, had not won a single gold medal in an individual Olympic event. Then Abhinav Bindra came along. Rohit Brijnath, who co-wrote Bindra’s autobiography A Shot at History, in the book’s preface writes about the time he spent with the shooter:

“I was taken aback by how far he will go to get better, this extremity not merely of pain but of perseverance that he was willing to travel to. Small things. The meticulous way he examines his pellets, the dissatisfaction even with a perfect score, the altering of the soles of his shoes by 1 millimeter, the willingness to try commando training. Anything, everything, that could help him win.”

There is a good reason for this approach. As Bindra explains: “William Tell with his crossbow had to hit the apple, I have to hit the seed inside the core of that apple. All the time, every shot, that’s my job.” He then goes on to explain exactly why the Olympics is so important to him and to every other athlete in the world who aspires to immortality in their sport:


“The pressure of the Olympics is that right then, at that precise two-hour period every four years, I have to be perfect. Or just more perfect than everyone else in the world. This is what the Olympics’ appeal is, for it is the ultimate proof of readiness. There is no higher achievement in my sport, no finer examination of sporting worth, no more excruciating confirmation of skill produced under the suffocation of tension.”

Abhinav Bindra’s road to Beijing had been a long one. At Athens, four years before, the glitter of the disc had seduced, only to deceive. Bindra was third in qualifying, a medal in his sights. Then he was seventh out of eight shooters in the final, dealing with shattered dreams.

Bindra had felt then that in terms of process, he had done everything right. But balancing sound logic and bitter disappointment is a difficult thing. At the age of 20, coming out of the Olympic shooting range, he had contemplated retirement.

Saurabh Chowdhary and Manu Bhaker, India’s talented 19-year old shooters at Tokyo went through the very same experience. They came in with the weight of expectations and a string of tournament victories behind them, followed the process, and yet melted from the heat of the Olympic altar. A deep dive, once they are back home, into what Bindra did in the four years after his own Waterloo at Athens, that turned shattered dreams into a golden disc, might well be worth their while. It could even change the story their own biographers will someday write.

Between 2004 and 2008, Bindra chased perfection. He tried everything to get that half percent improvement that would give him a 600/600 at the Olympic finals. He broke every part of his process into tiny parts and looked at how to make those parts more efficient. He even had laser surgery done to remove his love handles because he felt the love handle had a trampoline effect when his left elbow rested on his left hip. He lost his love handles but it didn’t give him a 600 every time he picked up a rifle. But he did do a few things that made the difference.

Bindra always used a German rifle, made by the Walther company (the fact that they also famously supplied Ian Fleming’s James Bond always appealed to the young marksman’s dry sense of humour). The German gun used German bullets. To his surprise, Bindra found that a particular brand of Chinese bullets were even more accurate when used in the same gun. Unsurprisingly, they happened to be the bullets the world beating Chinese shooters were using. Bindra had to have them.

There was, however, a problem with acquiring the bullets. The Chinese government wouldn’t allow the manufacturer to sell the bullets to foreigners before the Beijing Olympics were over. So Bindra had a friend in Hong Kong order 10,000 rounds for him. Those were the bullets that he brought with him to the shooting range at Beijing.

Television viewers at the recent Tokyo games would have noticed the heart rates of shooters being displayed on their screens, as they took their shots at the target. The Indian marksman had realised this even as he had first prepared for the biggest stage at Athens. But he had not internalised it until his post-Athens analysis of what he could do better.

Perfection in shooting, Bindra now knew, would come from controlling his heart rate through breathing. If he could do this, he would shoot 10’s not 9’s. So, he practised this. Day after day, month after month, he strove to bring himself to what he describes as “a more parasympathetic state, a more placid frame of mind”.

His respiratory rate prior to the Olympics was 14 to 15 cycles per minute, but by the time he got to Beijing it was down to four-five. It made him stable, allowed him to hold his breath, stay calm, and depress the trigger. He won. It has also been India’s only individual gold to date.

There wasn’t one single isolated element that Bindra did better. It was a sum total of little things that added up to be bigger than the parts. He had followed Kaizen, the Japanese method of continuous improvement. Zen philosophy doesn’t believe in perfectness. It does believe however in striving for it as the only way to be better. Abhinav Bindra is living proof of the fact that it works.

 
Will it make the boat go faster?

In 2018, Sir Steve Redgrave, winner of five gold medals across five Olympics, was approached by both the British and Chinese rowing authorities to work as high performance director with their respective teams. Their offer was understandable, given Redgrave’s preeminence and respect in the sport. His acceptance of the Chinese one was perhaps less obvious.

Redgrave’s remark a year later — “The Olympic Games in Tokyo are, of course, an important step in our strategy and China wants to win a gold Olympic medal there,” —was treated by the British establishment as wishful thinking. When China struck Gold at the Women’s Quadruple Sculls event in Tokyo last week, and Great Britain failed to get on the podium, the world sat up and took notice.

China didn’t just win, but the team of Chen Yunxia, Zhang Ling, Lyu Yang and Cui Xiaotong made a world record time of 6:05.13 at the Sea Forest Waterway, more than five seconds ahead of France in second position. It is not unusual that when rowing teams win gold at an Olympic event, their time would be about 10 per cent faster than the previous winners four years before. It is simply stunning to have this margin between the gold and silver medalists in the same race.

A pleased Redgrave had his trademark smile on as he told the press: “[This is] just a stepping stone to Paris.” With those words, the world had just been put on notice that he and the Chinese team are just setting out on their journey to greatness.

Before we look at what the Chinese Quadruple Sculls team did differently, we need to go back a number of years to when British rowing did something unusual in the early 1990’s. They recruited Jürgen Gröbler, a man who had moved from the former East Germany. Behind the Iron Curtain through the 1970s and 80s, Gröbler had trained some of the most successful rowers in the world and created winning teams.

Redgrave’s winning time in the coxed four in 1984 wouldn’t have qualified him for the final of the coxed fours in Seoul in 1988, Gröbler told the British. “His gold-medal winning time in Seoul in the coxless pair wouldn’t have even won him a medal in Barcelona in 1992, and so on and on.” At every four-year turn of the Olympic wheel, the bar was set higher. “You have to find more every time,” Gröbler said. He insisted that in order to win Olympic gold, every crew must increase the intensity of their training by 10 per cent compared to the previous Olympics.

Gröbler first brought in the concept of using data to improve the ‘measurables’. He insisted that it was now possible to summarise your every move against the question: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ Once you were convinced it would, those are the changes that rowers needed to make.

Gröbler worked with a whole host of successful British rowers in his time, but perhaps the most famous were the coxless four that won the gold medal at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Steve Redgrave was a part of that team. When Gröbler asked him to do weight training, Redgrave baulked: “If I wanted to lift weights, I would have chosen to be a weightlifter.”

Slowly, Gröbler convinced him with evidence that Redgrave’s increased power from lifting weights would help make the boat go faster. Eventually, the British legend accepted the argument, and it propelled Redgrave to his fifth gold medal, sporting immortality and a knighthood.

Redgrave may not have had the benefit of Gröbler’s insights when he raced in the first part of his Olympics career, but he did not get his previous four gold medals without developing constantly evolving strategies over the years that had made the boat go faster.

At Tokyo, the sum total of that experience evolved into a strategy for his Chinese wards that was simple in conception, stunning in execution: “When they came together four months ago, they always showed good pace and good middle pace. What they were lacking was to change the pace in the closing stages, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last two months after the qualifying event,” Redgrave said after the race.

Sure enough, it made the boat go faster.

The one percent formula

Until 2002, British cycling had won one Olympic gold medal in 76-years. In 2008, they won 7 of the 10 golds up for grabs in track cycling and repeated the feat four years later in London. Sir David Brailsford, who took over in 2002 and is largely credited with this turnaround, became head of Britain’s first professional cycling team. His boys won the next three of the four Tour de France races that they entered.

So how did the bike go faster?

The approach, it turned out, wasn’t so different from the ‘marginal gains’ Gröbler had adopted for the rowing team more than a decade before. Brailsford decided that everything a cyclist did during the race could be broken down into little parts, and a cyclist needed to do every little part 1 per cent quicker. The sum total of these little efforts would make the bike go fast enough to climb the podium. In essence, like Abhinav Bindra, he was following Kaizen, or continuous improvement.

But this was only one of the three pillars in Brailsford’s quest for a podium finish.

The second was human performance. It was not about cycling but what went before the cyclist got on the bike — the diet, the method of training, the mental conditioning.

And finally, there were the strategies that drove the faster bike and more efficient human to ultimate victory.

An example was cyclists asking themselves what was the power needed off the line to get the start required to achieve a winning time? Once this was answered, they looked at how capable the best cyclists on the team were at generating that power. They identified the gaps between where they were and where they needed to be. If it was a bridgeable gap, they put a plan in place, and if it wasn’t, they replaced the cyclist with one who had the ability to get that start.

The British bikes went faster than that of any other nation— a total of 20 times over the next three Olympics.

 
Go so fast that your opponents forget you exist

If the Chinese rowers made headlines with their win at Tokyo last week, it was nothing compared to the worldwide sensation that a Ph.D. in Mathematics caused in the sport of road race cycling. She won an Olympic Gold apparently without the knowledge of her competitors.

Austrian mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer came into the race unknown and unheralded. She didn’t have a coach or support team. What she had was a strategy, and the lessons of Kaizen. She is neither Chinese nor British, but to get to gold she used the very methods they adopted. And then put a twist on it.

The road race at the Olympics is unlike any other cycling event in the world. There are no race radios, no formal teams to work with to formulate and execute a team strategy. You are on your own, often for tens of kilometres through varied terrain. This is why cyclists have pelotons. Peloton refers to the main group of cyclists who ride closely to each other. The idea is to save energy by staying close to a well-developed group and minimise chances of the drag to 5–10 per cent and make the bike go faster.

There is of course the obvious problem – the best and most experienced riders can keep their opponents in sight and make their move to race away to glory at a time that gives them the most advantage.

A few strong riders will always attempt to break away from the main peloton, trying to build such a commanding lead early in the race that the peloton cannot catch up before the finish. The riders who are in the lead, having broken away from the peloton are referred to as Tête de la Course (French for ‘Head of the Race’).

The mathematician and thinker in Kiesenhofer knew these obvious strategies, and as an outsider to the regulars, she knew she was unlikely to succeed using the same methods. She therefore had to think differently.

The road race in Tokyo is over 147 km from Musashinonomori Park to the Fuji International Speedway and involves a climb of 2,692 meters in the blistering heat of the peak Japanese summer.

The early breakaway was by a five-woman group formed by Kiesenhofer, South Africa’s Carla Oberholzer, Namibia’s Vera Looser, Poland’s Anna Plichta, and Israel’s Omer Shapira. With 50km to go, Dutch racer Demi Vollering attacked up the road, forcing the peloton in front to speed up through the pain of the uphill climb. Another Dutch rider Van Vleuten followed Vollering’s lead and attacked immediately after the gap closed. She then went ahead of the peloton and extended her lead to over a minute.

With 40km to go, what no one realised was that Kiesenhofer was not in the peloton anymore. She was actually ahead of Van Vleuten, riding solo and steadily increasing her lead. This was when her unconventional move kicked in.

One of the strategies that Tour de France cyclists in the French Alps adopt time and again, is speeding ahead of the peloton between 10 to 20km at a time to gain decisive leads. The researcher in Kiesenhofer knew, however, that there have been exceptions, notably France’s Albert Bourlon who made a 253km breakaway in 1947. So it was possible to take longer leads.

But there was a crucial element to consider. The Tour de France is a 3,414km long race. So what the topical individual or groups do at a time is for less than 0.3 per cent of the distance. Even Bourlon achieved it for about 7 per cent of the total distance.

The strategy the Austrian mathematician adopted was bold, imaginative, and utterly unconventional in its execution. With 40km to go, she knew she was ahead of Van Vleuten and out of sight among the mountain bends. So she speeded up. She knew 27 per cent of the race was yet to be run, but if she went far enough ahead and then increased her speed on the downhill stretch to the Fuji International Speedway, she would be too far away to be caught by the time the rest of the field made the move.

The strategy succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The peloton that pursued Van Vleuten had simply forgotten that Kiesenhofer was ahead of them.

As the Dutch winner of the UCI Women’s World Tour in 2018 and the Women’s Road World Cup in 2011 triumphantly crossed the finish line in 3:54.00 arms up in the air and broke into tears, she saw Kiesenhofer standing in front holding the Austrian flag. The mirage of gold had turned into the reality of silver. She would say later: “Yes, I thought I had won. I’m gutted about this, of course. At first I felt really stupid, but then the others (her teammates) also did not know who had won.”

Let’s think about this – not even Kiesenhofer’s teammates knew that she had finished a minute and fifteen seconds ahead of Van Vluten.

The Austrian with a Master’s degree in Mathematics from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in applied mathematics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, had outwitted and physically overwhelmed the greatest road racers of her time. And they hadn’t even realised it.

As human beings strive for the Olympic ideals of faster, stronger, higher, their quest for that crucial edge will continue unabated – the bullet that finishes 0.5mm closer, the oar that comes down just a bit straighter, the bike that goes one per cent faster.

Bindra. Redgrave. Gröbler. Kiesenhofer. These are not geniuses, just human beings in the quest for perfection. They have not reinvented the wheel in their sport, merely made it go faster. Through determination, hard work, self-belief, and an ability to visualise the unimagined, they have lowered the horizons of possibility. In doing that, they have converted their dreams into gold. We can too.

Can we really justify spending £5.5m per Olympic medal at Rio 2016

Janet Street Porter in The Independent


Winning medals in Rio certainly makes us feel good, and the sight of dedicated, super-fit young people celebrating years of hard work is absolutely inspiring and moving. But the big question must be this: are the Rio Olympics anything more than high grade TV entertainment?

Our national success has been at a large financial and, possibly, social cost. UK Sport, which decides how to allocate tax and lottery money, has a ruthless policy. Put bluntly, its remit is to focus on backing winners, to hunt out the rare people who can achieve the remarkable. This highly controversial strategy means that sports which didn’t deliver predicted results at the London Olympics in 2012 – table tennis, swimming and volleyball, for example – had their funding cut.

Two thirds of UK Sport’s money goes to specially selected 14-25 year olds – the winners of the next decade and the 2024 Olympics – and they also fund an elite group of “podium level athletes” with extra cash for living expenses and training.

This policy has brought massive success in Rio, where the UK stands second above China in the medals table, when we were ranked 36th in Atlanta just two decades ago. But the picture on the other side of the television set is far from encouraging.

Slumped on sofas all over the country, we sit glued to the screen with spreading bums and tums and atrophied leg muscles. One in four of us now resemble Neil the Sloth from the Sofaworks advert.

In spite of the government spending millions on public health campaigns, Brits do less than 30 minutes of any exercise (including walking at a normal pace) in a week. Worse, new research reveals that years spent hunched over laptops, tapping on smart phones and playing video games has resulted in a generation of young men having weaker hand grips than 30 years ago. Their muscles are starting to atrophy and shrink.

How to address this lack of motivation in our national psyche, and make exercise part of everyday life? That’s the way it is here in Sweden, where I’m on holiday (I’ve seen very few fat children).

Sport England launched a four-year strategy last May to encourage more grassroots participation in sport, but the task is daunting. The truth is that Olympic success simply doesn’t galvanise ordinary people to take a walk, go for a swim, play a game of tennis or learn to box.

We look on our gold medal winners as gorgeous pinups, who we revere and cherish, but who perform in a way we cannot relate to. They have nutritionists, wear aerodynamic clothing, and are 100 per cent driven. They are not normal shapes, their bodies have adapted to achieve maximum potential through specialised training. Laura Trott, Jason Kenny and their teammates are modern gods, not role models.

The discrepancy between the impressive achievements by Team GB and a lack of motivation in the population at large is increasing. The number of adults playing any sport has dropped since 2012. In the poorest areas like Yorkshire and Humber, 67,000 fewer people are involved in sport. In Doncaster the decline is over 13 per cent, whereas in well-heeled Oxford, it’s up 14 per cent.

Overall, more than 350,000 people have taken to their sofas and given up exercise of any kind in the four years since London 2012.

David Cameron might have given an extra £150m to fund sports in primary schools until 2020, but that sum is pitiful given the way sport has been systematically downgraded by the Department of Education over the last 10 years. Now, the amount of time children spend each week playing sports and participating in PE has dropped to one hour and 42 minutes a week – that’s 25 minutes less than 2010.

To make regular activity part of a normal mindset, you have to start in primary schools. All over the country, ageing swimming pools are being closed by councils anxious to save money on repairs. Most will be in the poorest areas. Local authority cuts have seen playing fields sold off and opening hours of existing facilities curtailed.

It’s been estimated that each medal in Rio has cost £5.5m of public funding. There are some tough questions to be asked about whether financial priorities should be re-aligned to focus on the many, rather than the few.

Britain lecturing the world on morality? That’s rich

Kevin McKenna in The Guardian

To the world’s despots and gangsters: if you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia

 

Panama City has been the centre of the news because of revelations about the law firm Mossack Fonseca. But maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty




As ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:24, Abraham is appealing to God’s good nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s ultimate sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the end, Abraham’s pleas come to naught as he couldn’t even name one good man, let alone 50, and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.

Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that Panama, the Las Vegas of the rich and infamous, is about to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show, if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”

Indeed, I’m sure some enterprising management consultancy could establish a lucrative wee venture engaging with the world’s top gangsters and despots in the following blameless and entirely legal way. I’d suggest they produce a glossy brochure showing how, no matter what crimes against humanity they are ever accused of, not to get too strung up about it all. The brochure would be entitled If you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia. A series of seven seminars and modules would also be offered to tyrants and vagabonds everywhere providing them with something money just can’t buy: solace, geopolitical schadenfreude and a good night’s sleep.

1. Hypocrisy

The UK has recently instigated a programme of benefit cuts, advocating that its poorest citizens all tighten their belts to see them through the choppy waters of economic recession. They are being told that everyone is all in it together and that the government is going to make work pay. There will be a clampdown on workshy benefit cheats. For an extra premium we will provide you with a list of all the companies using places such as Panama to avoid tax and show you how the world’s poorest countries are deprived of £240bn of income by similar practices.

2. Cynicism

Are you sick of western democracies lecturing you about ethnic cleansing and enriching yourselves while your people starve? We’ll show you how every spare scrap of land in London is being sold off to unnamed persons to build blocks of £5m luxury flats that will never be occupied. Attached, please see the DVD of the view from the Docklands train. This is called economic cleansing and is the process of removing undesirable taxpayers to make room for the proceeds of global money-laundering. And destroying the concept of social and affordable housing.

3. Graft

Political and civic leaders all preach the values of financial rectitude and putting away money for a decent pension. But every Saturday and Sunday (and all other nights when there is football on the telly) they permit dozens of unregulated online gambling outlets to prey on working men as they watch their favourite teams in action. “Please gamble responsibly,” they say, and then encourage people, when they are at their most vulnerable, to bet on every possible outcome, every hour of the day on every electrical device. Remember this when they take a dim view of Igor and Sergei, your new business partners.

4. Cheating

If you ever find yourself resentful at another chinless wonder from the British Embassy lecturing you on human rights abuses this one’s for you. In Scotland, almost half the land is owned by 500 individuals. This came about after illegal and often violent land-grabs 300-400 years ago that have been protected by dubious legislation ever since. After 17 years of so-called “left-wing” governments their land reform bill is a toothless joke. Scotland is a rich country with great export goods, good universities and stacks of churches. Tonight, though, 250,000 of its children will go without food and 5,000 don’t know where they’ll be sleeping.

5. Warmongering

Do you ever get hurt when Britain and its allies routinely describe you as being part of the axis of evil? Doesn’t it make you sick when they insist only they can be trusted with nuclear warheads? Perhaps you ought to know that this moral arbiter of what is good for the rest of the world routinely has sold £5.6bn worth of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, aka The Headless State, since the Tories came to power. During that time, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the UK has sold weapons to 24 of the 27 states included on its own list of “countries of humanitarian concern”.

6. Greed

Don’t get too upset when the UK tries to excoriate you for your apparent lack of democracy. Instead, just tell them that you won’t take any lessons in this from a state that pimps its own parliament as a place to purchase influence in the laws of the land and where MPs can be bought. All it takes is a tidy six-figure cheque to Tory central office and you’re in. In fact, for the price of a few lunches at Claridge’s and a two grand a month retainer you can get any number of Tories to ensure no one looks too closely at your new bespoke torture chambers. Everything has a price, and that includes parliament.

7. Indifference

The next time you’re in London to collect your latest batch of Eurofighters take a note of every time you hear British people congratulating themselves on being the most enlightened and civilised country in the known universe. Then ask yourself why they all look the other way when this is all happening. Their passivity can be bought cheaply with a few royal babies; some gold medals at the next Olympic Games and arranging another one of their wars against another third world country.

Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly World Cup and Olympic extravaganzas

 

From the World Cup to the G8, many countries are paying an extortionate price for hosting these pointless displays

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013 19.40 BST

A protester in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Imago / Barcroft Media

On Tuesday evening a loud noise engulfed Parliament Square: a demonstration of flag-waving Brazilians. I asked one of them what he was protesting. It was, he said, the waste of money on the Olympics. I told him he was in the right city but the wrong year.

Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar sum to be later extorted by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Games. Brazil's leftwing leader, Dilma Rousseff, was bequeathed the games by her populist predecessor, Lula da Silva. She has desperately tried to side with the protesters, but she is trapped by the oligarchs of Fifa and the IOC.

Brazil's citizens are being hit with higher bus fares and massive claims on health and welfare budgets. Up to half a million people may take to the streets this weekend to complain of "first world stadiums, third world schools". What is impressive about the demonstrators is that they appear not to be against sport as such, but against the extravagance of their staging. They are talking the language of priorities.

The World Cup is an ongoing scandal run by Fifa's unsackable boss, Sepp Blatter, on the back of ticket and television sales and soccer hysteria. Having bled the Brazilian exchequer of billions for new stadiums, he has the cheek to plead with demonstrators that "they should not use football to make their demands heard". Why not? Blatter uses football to make his demands heard.

The Olympics are likewise sold by the IOC to star-struck national leaders as offering glory for political gain. Their purpose-built stadiums, luxurious facilities, lunatic security and lavish hospitality are senseless, yet are backed by construction and security lobbies and a chorus of chauvinist public relations. If the cost is bankruptcy, as in Montreal and Athens, too bad. The golden caravan can move on to trap some new victim.

The World Cup and the Olympics are television events that could be held at much less expense and ballyhoo in one place. As it is, host nations are deluged with promises of "legacy return" that everyone knows are rubbish. Costs escalate to an extent that would see most managers in handcuffs, but gain bonuses and knighthoods for Olympic organisers.

Sport is not alone in this addiction to the jamboree. The London Olympics last year morphed into politics, as diplomacy, culture and trade were conflated in an outpouring of nonsensical rhetoric about £13bn in contracts. A summit used to be a meeting ad hoc to resolve a crisis in world affairs. It is now a Field of Cloth of Gold, a continuous round of hospitality, rest and recuperation, flattering the vanity of world leaders.

This week's G8 shindig in Northern Ireland was pointless – a night and two days on a bleak Irish lough at a cost to taxpayer of £60m and a deployment of 1,000 policemen per delegate. It was held in Fermanagh to be as far as possible from demonstrators and "real people". The sole outcome was modest progress on tax avoidance, but that cannot have required two days in Fermanagh. Could they not have used Skype?

The survival of the G8 is extraordinary, based on the pretence that the second world war protagonists are still major world powers. When Vladimir Putin refused to attend the 2012 summit in Washington, there were hopes that it might disappear. Putin was back this week, though his face suggested he regrets it.

In his iconoclastic study of postwar summits, David Reynolds remarked that they are based on hope over experience. Most are either pointless or disastrous. Reynolds compared Tony Blair's Iraq meeting with George Bush in January 2003 with Chamberlain and Munich. Their high point was during the cold war, yet it is only since then that summits have become fixed in the political year. David Cameron's diary is crammed with G8s, G20s, UN, EU and Commonwealth conclaves. The elephantine G20 has become a carnival of obsessive security. The 2012 gathering in Toronto was newsworthy only for apolicing bill close to $1bn for two days. It did nothing for the poor but devastated the local economy for a year.

Power craves authenticity. On his way back from the G8 to America, President Obama stood in Berlin at (or near) the Brandenburg Gate where Kennedy delivered his freedom address 50 years ago. A special stadium had to be built for him, and a wall of bullet-proof glass. He gave a hand-picked audience a welter of platitudes and went home.

Technology has moved on since 1963. Obama could have copied Kennedy on Facebook. Yet he had to be in Berlin in person, as he was in Ulster in person. The whole thing could have been staged for television, but television needs some contact with reality. Electronics can create these events and disseminate them. But nothing can replace the chemistry of the live presence.

Futurologists of the internet used to claim that electronics would render obsolete such sporting, political, even musical events. Human avatars would cruise cyberspace and engage with their audiences at the touch of a button. Leaders would communicate with each other from their desks in real time on giant screens. Contact would be digitised. We could experience each other's presence without the need for flesh-and-blood exchange. There would be huge savings in plane tickets.

This ignores the yearning of all people, leaders and led, rich and poor, to feel involved, to participate in some degree in a live experience. Nations want to be visited by political, sporting or artistic celebrities. They want football heroes, racing cars and three tenors on their soil. Leaders crave the status of "hosting" fellow leaders, of standing side-by-side with power. It is not the same on the web.

To this quest for authenticity Brazil's demonstrators offer a corrective. They point to its cost. The addiction to "eventism" can be so potent, so demanding of security and so expensive as to defy restraint. London's £9bn extravaganza was not necessary to host an international athletics show. It should have been the last such display of conspicuous consumption by the rich in the face of the poor. Yet Rio de Janeiro is now saddled with not one extravaganza but two.

So congratulations to Brazilians for saying what Britain last year lacked the guts to say: that sometimes enough is enough. If I were Blatter and his henchmen, I would get out of town fast.

The top 10 jokes from 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival

1) "You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks." –Stewart Francis

2) "Last night me and my girlfriend watched three DVDs back to back. Luckily I was the one facing the telly." – Tim Vine

3) "I was raised as an only child, which really annoyed my sister." – Will Marsh

4) "You know you're working class when your TV is bigger than your book case." – Rob Beckett

5) "I'm good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet … I don't know Y." –Chris Turner

6) "I took part in the sun tanning Olympics - I just got Bronze." – Tim Vine

7) "Pornography is often frowned upon, but that's only because I'm concentrating." – George Ryegold

8) "I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!" –Stewart Francis

9) "I waited an hour for my starter so I complained: 'It's not rocket salad." – Lou Sanders

10) "My mum's so pessimistic, that if there was an Olympics for pessimism … she wouldn't fancy her chances." – Nish Kumar

Olympics: the key to our success can rebuild Britain's economy

We need politicians who understand why we were so successful at the 2012 Games. Cameron and Osborne do not

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 August 2012

Chris Hoy's victory was the product of a finely tuned system of financial and technical support. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

Everyone has marvelled at the success of Team GB, but the best haul of medals in 104 years is no accident. It is the result of rejecting the world of public disengagement and laissez faire that delivered one paltry gold medal in Atlanta just 16 years ago. Instead, British sport embraced a new framework of sustained public investment and organised purpose, developing a new ecosystem to support individual sports with superb coaching at its heart. No stone was left unturned to achieve competitive excellence.

The lesson is simple. If we could do the same for economy and society, rejecting the principles that have made us economic also-rans and which the coalition has put at the centre of its economic policy, Britain could be at the top of the economic league table within 20 years.

The turnaround began in the run-up to Sydney in 2000 as the first substantial proceeds from the lottery began to flow into sport. There was investment in infrastructure – tracks, swimming pools, velodromes – but crucially also in the structures supporting individual sportsmen and women. There were funds for world-class coaches, such as Jim Saltonstall in sailing and Dave Brailsford in cycling, and for nutritionists and sports psychologists. Also for science and technology where appropriate, ensuring we had the best bikes and boats.

Crucially, the money was not distributed through one statist institution pursuing a centrally determined strategy, but through the varying intermediate bodies, from theRoyal Yachting Association to British Cycling. They knew their sport well, could direct the spending where it was most needed, but still had to show – through results – that they deserved the cash. Last but not least was a ruthless approach to picking potential winners and grooming them for success in a world of intensely global competition, all dramatised by the reality that Britain would host the Olympics.

Everything was underpinned not by a raucous jingoism but by a determined pride in what our country now is and to show that we can be the best, a patriotism that allows us to be open to the cream of the world but also to use it for our own purposes. The alchemy is, as we have seen, extraordinarily powerful.

Not only do we need to sustain these principles so they become structurally and culturally embedded for continuing Olympic success, but they should also be applied elsewhere. The problem is that they are born of an ideological hybrid that wrong-foots our political class. They are mostly rooted in liberal social democratic values that understand the importance of public investment, public organisation and institution-building. But they also involve an unashamed recognition that in the end individual application, resolve and will to win are indispensable.

David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson are happy to celebrate the element that is rooted in competition, elitism and individual effort. But they flounder the instant the conversation moves to the role of public investment and the necessity of understanding and sustaining our unique sport ecosystem, just as nearly every Labour politician flounders the other way round.

The number of British politicians who understand this hybridity – and will argue for it – is tiny. Michael Heseltine always has and Peter Mandelson finally got there in the dying days of the New Labour government, a government that should have been all about such hybridity but was racked by the desire to show its "business friendliness" and warmth to the City.

In today's government, only Vince Cable consistently argues for it and is thus nicknamed the "anti-business" secretary by many on the right whose understanding of what drives success in modern economies and societies is close to zero. The big point is that success depends on recognising that both elements count.

So what to do economically? The first part of the alchemy is for the state to trigger substantial public investment in everything that supports enterprise – communications, science, knowledge generation and transfer, housing and education. And to do so with purpose and consistency. It should be running at least £30bn a year higher than the Treasury currently spends, financed either by taxation or borrowing, depending on the particular economic conjuncture. Currently, it should be financed by borrowing at the lowest interest rates for 300 years. A plan B should begin immediately with such an ambition.

But that is only the start. The next step is to reproduce sector by sector the kind of ecosystem that sport has developed. There needs to be specialist knowledge, commitment, long-term finance and coaching for business and a new web of intermediate institutions that can do for companies in life sciences, robotics and new materials what the RYA, British Gymnastics and British Cycling have done for sportsmen and women. For example, the fledgling network of "catapults" designed to transfer technology into varying sectors must become centres of open innovation, coaching and support and scaled up quickly so they can reproduce the Olympic effect for business.

But for any of that to work, engaged owners have to be committed to their companies over time and banks need to behave more as business coaches – not sellers of credit and of useless financial products. They need to become organisations that attempt to co-grow the companies in an active partnership, not organisations that opt for money-laundering, Libor manipulation or mis-selling. This will demand a wholesale recasting of Britain's system of business ownership and finance, informed by the same pride and ambition for Britain as our athletes and Olympic crowds have shown.

There then has to be a commitment to management and performance – a world where achievement is genuinely rewarded and poor performance penalised. The principles are common sense. Wherever applied – from Team GB to the success of the German car industry or American IT industry – they work. Mr Osborne assures us of his complete focus on growth and jobs even as the UK economy remains locked in depression and an escalating balance of payments crisis. But such focus is meaningless unless informed by an understanding of what to do and a determination to do it.

Osborne and Cameron believe in the same ideas – public disengagement, free markets and laissez faire – that brought Olympic failure. Either they change or political leaders who do understand what to do must take their place. Britain could so easily be a world success. But first it has to find politicians who understand the necessity of hybridity. They are not Osborne and Cameron.

Suddenly, it’s all hail multiculturalism

HASAN SUROOR  in The Hindu

• APIn this August 4, 2012 photo, Britain's Mo Farah, left, and compatriot Greg Rutherford pose for photographers after both won gold. Farah won gold in the men's 10,000m and Rutherford in the men's long jump.
• APIn this August 5, 2012 photo, Britain's Mo Farah poses with his gold medal in the men's 10,000m in the Olympic Stadium.
• 

One year after the London riots, the national mood has changed as Britain basks in the glory of the Olympic Games

This week, a year ago, London was burning as anger over the death of a black youth in a police shoot-out spiralled into one of the worst riots in England for a generation.

The violence prompted a torrent of incendiary comment about the impact of “laissez faire” multiculturalism on British values and Britain’s way of life. A year on, as London basks in the warm glow of the Olympic Games, with several immigrants bringing glory for Britain, the mood has swung to the other extreme. There is a mass outbreak of enthusiasm for multiculturalism, famously declared “dead” by the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) not long ago. Suddenly it is seen as up there with other “unique” values that put the “Great” into Great Britain.

Athletes of foreign descent such as Mohamed “Mo” Farah, Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford, Tiffany Porter and Yamilé Aldama — once derided as “plastic Brits” — are being hailed as the new face of Britain’s “vibrant” racial and cultural diversity.

Ennis, daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, has been called “the nation’s new sweetheart,” and Mo Farah, who came to Britain as a nine-year-old refugee from war-ravaged Somalia, a “British legend.” Along with the Australia-born Rutherford, fondly referred to as a “ginger wizard,” they have been dubbed Britain’s “golden trio” for winning gold for their adopted country.

There is a sense that something profound has happened and, as The Times noted in a breathless editorial, “a new Britain is being born out of the best of the old Britain.”

“The prospectus that delivered the Olympics (to London) relied heavily on an account of a tolerant, multicultural Britain and it is as such that the success has followed, both inside the arenas and inside,” it said.

A year ago, Prime Minister David Cameron described Britain as a “broken society” suffering from “moral collapse” and suggested that “state culturalism” was the first step on the slippery slope to extremism. Today, he finds Britain an “inspirational country” that “makes people feel proud to be British.” He has spoken of the “awe-inspiring” performance of the multi-ethnic Team GB, and hailed London as the world’s most diverse city. A senior Conservative MP received a public dressing down for dismissing the opening Olympic ceremony as “multicultural crap.”

Many are mystified by the Prime Minister’s conversion and asking whether he is the same man who had warned that “passive tolerance” of multiculturalism was an invitation to extremism, and argued for a more “muscular” approach. “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” he said at a security conference in Munich last year causing anger among immigrants back home.

Mr. Cameron’s new-found passion is simply a reflection of the national mood: he is saying what he believes people want to hear and will “connect” him to the masses. Partly that mood has been generated by the media, with newspapers making an extra effort to pick out “ethnic” faces to illustrate stories about the “wonderful” Olympic spirit that, among other things, has seen hundreds of Asian and African immigrants work as unpaid volunteers at the Games.

NEW CONVERTS

Even the notoriously xenophobic Sun is singing a refreshingly new tune. “Red, white, blue, black, brown, pink or purple — these Olympic Games have united us all,” it exulted in a report headed “Marvellous Modern Britain Unleashed Upon the World.” And, with the zeal of a new convert, added how the world had seen “the true colours of British greatness with champions of every hue — a mixed-race Yorkshire lass, a Muslim refugee and a ginger.”

“How can your heart not surge with pride when they win for Britain?” it asked.

At the rabidly anti-immigrant Daily Mail, it is a bit more hush-hush with the paper dressing up its celebration of Britain’s diversity as “conservative values in action.”

But it is celebration, nevertheless.

So, what does this sudden burst of love for multiculturalism signify? Is it an acknowledgment, finally, that in a country as diverse as Britain, multiculturalism alone can work, and a signal to the advocates of mono-culturalism to shut up shop?

An honest answer will be “no.” Sceptics warn against reading “too much” into what they believe is simply a passing phase — part of a general “feel-good” mood generated by the success of the Games and achievements of British athletes, especially those from ethnic groups. Those who know a thing or two about the fickle British temperament, mirroring its fickle weather, predict that “normal business” — i.e. moaning and carping — should resume once the Games get over this weekend.

The economy is getting worse by the day and cracks in the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have widened while the country has been distracted by the Games.

“Just wait for the news to get out and see how quickly the euphoria evaporates,” warns an observer. But then who knows? The country may have changed this summer, and it could be the start of a deeper engagement with what the Sun andMail patronisingly used to dismiss as “multi-culti” Britain.

Time to explode the myth that the private sector is always better

Steve Richards in The Independent

The deeply embedded assumption that a slick, efficient, agile, selfless private sector delivers high-quality services for the public is being challenged once more in darkly comic circumstances. Those inadvertent egalitarians from the security firm G4S have failed to recruit enough security officers so it seems anyone will be able to wander in to watch the 100 metres final. Or at least that would have been the case if the public sector had not come to the rescue in the form of the army.

What an emblematic story of changing times. From the late 1970s until 2008, the fashionable orthodoxy insisted that the public sector alone was the problem. Advocates of the orthodoxy took a knock or two when the banking crisis cast light on parts of the pampered, sheltered and partially corrupt financial sector. Now we get a glimpse of incompetence and greed in another part of the private sector. As light is shed wider and deeper, we keep our fingers crossed that the public sector can rescue the Olympics from chaos.

The pattern is familiar but has been obscured until the arrival of this accessibly vivid example, an Olympic Games staged in a city paranoid about security without many security officers. For decades, private companies were hired on lucrative contracts for projects that the state could never allow to fail. If the companies delivered what was required, they earned a fortune. If they failed, the taxpayer found the money to meet the losses and those responsible for the cock-up often moved on to new highly paid jobs.

The lesson should have been learnt when Labour's disastrous Public Private Partnership for the London Underground collapsed, as this was another highly accessible example of lawyers, accountants and private companies making a fortune and failing to deliver. The Underground could never close, so all involved knew that in the event of failure, the Government or the Mayor of London would be forced to intervene. Boris Johnson described the arrangement at the time as "a colossal waste of money".

He was right, but that has not stopped his colleagues in Government looking to contract out to the private sector at every available opportunity. Andrew Lansley had hoped to make the NHS a great new playground for companies seeking an easy profit. He still might do so. Expect Michael Gove's so-called free schools to become profit-making enterprises if the Conservatives win the next election, and perhaps the academies, too. Maybe there will be a G4S-sponsored school.

G4S already runs prisons and some of the police operations that are being increasingly contracted out to private companies. The welfare-to-work contract secured by another company, much hailed by gullible ministers when the deal was announced as an example of efficiency and effectiveness, is already under critical scrutiny.

A fortnight ago, I argued that we are living through a slow British revolution partly as a result of the financial crisis and the exposure of reckless, unaccountable leadership from the City. The era of light regulation that allowed some bankers without much obvious talent to make a fortune is over. Now, slowly, the assumption held from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron that the delivery of public services should lie with the private sector is being overturned, too.

As is always the case in British revolutions, the change is being driven by startling events and not by political leadership. The Coalition still burns with an ideological zeal formed in the 1980s, the Conservative wing at one with Orange Book Liberal Democrats in their indiscriminate hunger for a smaller state and their undying faith in the private sector.

At the top of both parties, there are crusading advocates of an outdated vision that places too much faith in the likes of G4S and not enough in the potential dependability of a more efficient and accountable public sector.

This is not to argue that the public sector is perfect. Parts of it are complacently inefficient and paralysed by a sense of undeserved entitlement. The Coalition deserves some credit for seeking to increase transparency and accountability in an often over-managed and wasteful sector. In the case of the Olympics debacle and other equivalent deals, part of the culpability lies with government departments that negotiate on behalf of the taxpayer.

Last week, The Independent revealed that there had been no penalty clause in the G4S contract. On Tuesday, its unimpressive chief executive told the Home Affairs Committee that the company still expected to collect £57m for its contribution to the Olympic Games, an expectation that brings to mind once more that damning, ubiquitous phrase from the old Britain: "rewards for failure".

Who draws up these contracts? Which ministers sign them off? Why is their instinct always to outsource when there is now a mountain of evidence that failure follows?

Instead of focusing on the arduously unglamorous task of making the public sector more efficient and adaptable, ministers, like their New Labour predecessors, prefer still the deceptive swagger of the incompetent entrepreneur. The gullibility is more extraordinary now we finally get to know more about these supposed geniuses. Senior bankers earning millions stutter hesitantly when questioned by unthreatening MPs on select committees, incapable of articulating a case. Nick Buckles from G4S was so thrown by the Home Affairs Committee that he lapsed into a debate about whether the few security guards he had managed to hire spoke "fluent English", claiming not to know what such a term might mean. One of the great revelations since Britain's slow revolution began in 2008 is how many unimpressive mediocrities had risen in the unquestioning, unaccountable darkness that, until recently, acted as a protective layer for parts of the private sector.

But in the end look who is ultimately held to account. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, was called to the Commons twice this week to answer questions about what went wrong. She will be back in September. A government can outsource but it will still be held responsible, quite rightly, for the delivery of public services.

So political survival should motivate ministers in future to draw up much tighter deals with companies and to focus more on improving the public sector rather than expensively by-passing it. The voters have had enough of these abuses and yet, trapped by the past, some ministers show an ideological inclination to be abused for a little longer.