Why Brexit Britain needs to upskill its workforce

Simon Kuper in The FT

A British hospital director told me he was hunting for staff to replace foreign doctors and nurses leaving because of Brexit. He hadn’t found many qualified Britons queuing to replace them. In fact, he specified: “Not one!” 

You could interpret this as yet another cautionary tale about Brexit. In an age when the chief global business cliché is the “war for talent”, the UK is fighting a war against talent. But if I were a Brexiter, I’d say: Brexit should be the prompt for Britain finally to start training enough of its own talent. 

Obviously, I’m not arguing that every departing foreigner frees up a job for a Briton. Economists dismiss such reasoning as the “lump of labour fallacy”. Rather, I’m saying that if the UK wants to avoid economic decline, it will need to train far more of its own nurses, construction workers, bankers, architects, etc. For a country whose policy has always been not to educate the working class, that would be a reversal of history. It would come too late for the over-45s (the generation that actually voted for Brexit), but it could transform the futures of young Britons. And it’s doable. 

The British tradition is to educate each class separately, writes historian David Cannadine in Class in Britain. Even in the 18th century, posh males went to public schools and Oxbridge, whereas the poor were taught almost nothing. The purpose of education then, says Cannadine, “was more to teach people their place than to give them opportunities to advance”. His words apply pretty well to today’s country. The alumni of nine expensive “public” schools are now 94 times more likely than the average Briton to reach the elite, according to London School of Economics research. (The conservative Daily Telegraph reported the findings under the headline, factually accurate as far as it went, “Boys’ public school dominance over British elite has ‘diminished significantly’ over time”.) 

The UK — without any more wars of conscription and with few surviving factories or mines — now struggles to find a use for low-skilled people who live in places where they can’t perform personal services for higher castes (see this week’s cover story on Blackpool). 

Before Brexit, the rest of the country didn’t need these people. High-skilled immigrants staffed world-class British sectors such as the City and London’s creative economy. In healthcare, the UK developed a brilliant racket: let a poor country like Romania fund a nurse’s education, then underpay her to look after sick Brits. Low-skilled immigrants eager to work all hours for little money gave the UK cafés, carers and corner shops that seldom closed. Low-skilled Britons could have done these jobs, but mostly didn’t. 

The coming wave of British talent is largely immigrant too: the kids who have made London’s state schools the UK’s best, plus the offspring of Russian, Chinese and other foreign elites who fill the public schools. Many of these people would love to stay and make the UK richer. 

But Brexiters want to cut immigration. The obvious, if tricky solution: equip working-class Brits to do jobs from nursing to banking. “That’s the opportunity,” says Charles Leadbeater, a consultant who has long advised British governments on innovation and education. “I just think it won’t happen. It would require something like a wartime national mobilisation of people and skills. That would require state leadership of the kind most Brexiteers abhor.” 

Leadbeater points out that Tory Brexiter politicians — almost none of whom send their children to state schools — rarely talk about apprenticeship schemes à la Switzerland. Instead, their vision seems to be a low-tax, low-regulation Britain. 

Jonathan Portes, economics professor at King’s College London, adds: “The problem of UK vocational education has been known for at least a century. We’ve always neglected it. When I was involved in government we had a new skills strategy every two years, and none of them worked.” 

Anyway, executing Brexit will distract ministers and civil servants for years to come. “The government has neither the fiscal room nor the mental bandwidth to do much about skills,” says Portes. In fact, in August the UK removed the NHS bursary for people training to be nurses, midwives and speech therapists, among other professions. Students now have to fund their courses themselves, knowing they can expect a low lifetime salary. 

If Britain doesn’t upskill its workers fast, it will lose skilled jobs. It will continue to have the world’s best universities per capita only if it can find enough Britons to replace departing foreign academics. Much the same applies to finance or design. Meanwhile, low-skilled foreign fruit pickers have already melted away since the pound plunged. With few Britons queuing to replace them, much of this year’s produce rotted in the fields. 

So the most likely post-Brexit outcome is a Britain that cannot keep itself in the style to which it has become accustomed. The war against talent will probably leave the UK looking a bit more like today’s English seaside towns, or most of the country in the 1970s: culturally homogeneous, relatively poor and under-serviced. On the upside, housing should be cheaper. For many Brexiters, I suspect the trade-offs will be worth it.

Yes, we must decolonise: our teaching has to go beyond elite white men

Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.

Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian

Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.

Rather than acknowledge that a major university was right to be responsive to student concerns, two British newspapers saw fit to turn an open letter from Cambridge English students into a trumped-up existential crisis for white male writers. By “decolonising” the curriculum this endangered species would now be sacrificed, apparently, like so many hapless Guys on bonfire night, to the burning fires of black and minority ethnic special interest. Nice dramatic scenario, pity about the truth content. 

The real danger is that the substantive issues at stake that concern us all, not just ethnic minorities, become obscured in this facile attempt at stoking a keyboard race war with real-life consequences at a time when hate crimes are on the rise. The young people who wrote this letter, however, have an admirable clarity of vision and a robust faith in knowledge that is inspiring. They are interested in asking challenging questions about themselves and others, and how we see ourselves in relation to each other.

Decolonising the curriculum is, first of all, the acceptance that education, literary or otherwise, needs to enable self-understanding. This is particularly important to people not used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of conventional learning – whether women, gay people, disabled people, the working classes or ethnic minorities. Knowledge and culture is collectively produced and these groups, which intersect in different ways, have as much right as elite white men to understand what their own role has been in forging artistic and intellectual achievements.

However, it is not only about admiring yourself in the mirror – a fact that eludes those shrieking about the nonexistent elimination of straight white men from the curriculum. Real knowledge is not self-puffery, the repeated validation of oneself. In English literature, it involves learning about the lives of others, whether these be Robert Wedderburn, the fiery black Scottish working-class preacher who believed in self-emancipation; the working-class poet Robert Bloomfield; or Una Marson, the suffragist and broadcaster who wrote eloquently about race and the colour-bar in Britain as well as resonant poetry about her native Jamaica.

 Cape Coast Castle, Ghana: ‘Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced.’ Photograph: Alamy

Surely, Sultana’s Dream, the early 20th-century fantasy story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – where men stayed home while only women went out – has a relevance for our understanding of Muslim women’s long and rich history of writing and debate. (Yes, it exists.)

To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.


Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage

A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.

It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.

Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.

Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.

The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.

Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.

Why are most captains inevitably batsmen?

Rob Steen in Cricinfo


James Anderson: one of many who have questioned why more fast bowlers aren't considered for captaincy © Getty Images



James Anderson has nothing to prove to anyone but, one assumes, himself. Nor is he one to mince words. So when he expresses disappointment at not having been considered for the England Test captaincy, then says he doesn't know why more fast bowlers aren't entrusted with leadership, and leaves the question hanging in the air, the point is worth considering. What possible reason can there be to maintain the lazy, prejudiced, time-dishonoured view that batsmen should be the default choice as coin-tossers?

Naturally, the record books tell their own flagrantly biased story: of the 57 men to have captained in 25 or more Tests, 46 have been batsmen first and foremost (including 15 of the 16 who have done so on 50-plus occasions, the exception being MS Dhoni). Even if we include two top-notch allrounders, Imran Khan and Garry Sobers, the number of seam bowlers runs to just six: Imran (48 Tests), Sobers (39), Kapil Dev (34), Darren Sammy (30), Shaun Pollock (26) and Wasim Akram (25). Still, that's twice as many representatives in the chart as the spin fraternity can muster - Daniel Vettori (32), Ray Illingworth (31) and Richie Benaud (28) - never mind the stumpers, who contribute only Dhoni (60) and Mushfiqur Rahim (30). As for those who would classify him as a spinner, Sobers is remembered better by this column for his left-arm swing than his spin, so let's indulge it.

It gets worse. Late last year the Cricketer magazine asked readers to vote for their favourite England captain; of the 23 candidates proffered, only Illingworth did not count run-making as his primary occupation. It's all a matter of class, of course. Back when such distinctions were made, the amateurs were almost invariably batsmen, cravat-wearing types accustomed to being served hittable offerings by lowly, gnarly professionals; chaps to whom authority was a birthright. "In England," noted Mike Brearley in his definitive The Art of Captaincy, a revised edition of which is due out this summer, "charisma and leadership have traditionally been associated with the upper class; with that social strata that gives its members what Kingsley Amis called 'the voice accustomed to command'."

If Anderson is "all for bowlers being captains", Don Bradman offered the counter-argument in The Art of Cricket, reasoning that they would lack objectivity about their own workload. "They tend either to over-bowl themselves or not to bowl enough," reinforced Brearley, "from conceit, modesty or indeed self-protection." On the other hand, he continued, two of the best postwar captains in his view were Benaud and Illingworth, outliers both.



It's all a matter of class, of course. Back when such distinctions were made, the amateurs were almost invariably batsmen, cravat-wearing types accustomed to being served hittable offerings by lowly, gnarly professionals


In his 1980 book Captaincy, Illingworth argued that the allrounder, and especially those who were also twirlers like himself and Benaud, were the best equipped for the job. He also took issue with Bradman in his autobiography Yorkshire and Back:

"Basically, I felt my two strongest points were, first, after playing for quite a time I knew batsmen pretty well and I knew their temperaments so I thought I set good fields; and second, I think I was able to get the best out of people because they trusted me. I knew when to attack and when to defend, which governed field placing, and my handling of the bowling."

Video has aided such knowledge, granted, but there's no substitute for a bowler's instinct.

Benaud also rated Illingworth high above the herd. In his 1984 book, Benaud of Reflection he wrote:

"He was a deep thinker on the game, without having any of the theories which sometimes produce woolly thinking from captains. He was a shrewd psychologist and one who left his team in no doubt as to what he required of them. Above all, though, he made his decisions before the critical moment. It was never a case of thinking for an over or two about whether or not a move should be made. If he had a hunch it would work, and if it seemed remotely within the carefully laid-down plans of the series, then he would do it."

What counted above all, felt Illingworth, under whose charge England enjoyed most of their record 26-match unbeaten run between 1969 and 1971, was honesty. During the summer of 1970, opener Brian Luckhurst asked him, somewhat tentatively, whether he had any chance of being picked for that winter's Ashes tour, having made a fair few runs in the first three Tests of the series against a powerful Rest of the World attack. "You're almost on the boat now," replied Illy. "Now what I liked about that," he recollected, "was that Brian had only played three matches with me, and yet he felt that not only could he ask a question, but he was reasonably sure he'd get an honest answer."

Ah, but what if the truth had been, in the captain's view, that Luckhurst was nowhere near the boat? "I wouldn't have told him, 'You've no bloody chance.' I like to think it is possible to be less brutal than that while being sincere, but I would have told him straight that his chances were slim, or even less than that."



Ray Illingworth (right): "I felt my two strongest points were, first, after playing for quite a time, I knew batsmen pretty well, so I thought I set good fields; and second, I think I was able to get the best out of people" © PA Photos


So, knowledge of batsmen, intelligence, psychological insight and honesty: all assets that Anderson possesses, and has employed in support of his captains. Unlike most fast bowlers, moreover, he fields in the slips - one of the better vantage points, if perhaps overrated. He says he enjoyed leading Lancashire on a pre-season tour but acknowledges that, as a fast bowler of advanced age, promoting him now would have made little sense. And yes, if we're brutally honest, had the vacancy arisen, say, three years ago, it is questionable whether he could have been relied upon to control the flashes of temper that have occasionally plunged him into hot water.

Brearley, for his part, contended that a fast bowler should only ever be made captain as a last resort. "It takes an exceptional character to know when to bowl, to keep bowling with all his energy screwed up into a ball of aggression, and to be sensitive to the needs of the team, both tactically and psychologically. [Bob] Willis in particular always shut himself up into a cocoon of concentration and fury for his bowling." The exception, he allowed, was Mike Procter. "Vintcent van der Bijl, who played under Procter for Natal, speaks of his ability to develop each player's natural game and of the enthusiasm that he brought to every match."

Benaud disagreed with Brearley, hailing Keith Miller, a fast bowling allrounder, as the best captain he played under. "No one under whom I played sized up a situation more quickly and no one was better at summing up a batsman's weaknesses," Benaud wrote. "He had to do this for himself when he was bowling and it was second nature for him to do so as captain."

Unaccountably to many, while his tenure as New South Wales captain kicked off a run of nine consecutive Sheffield Shield titles, the nearest Miller came to leading his country was when he took over from the injured Ian Johnson for the first Test of the 1954-55 Caribbean tour in Jamaica, which saw him handle his attack astutely over both West Indies innings, score a century and grab five wickets.


Brearley, for his part, contended that a fast bowler should only ever be made captain as a last resort

Naturally, it is pure conjecture as to whether Australia would have fared better under him on the 1956 Ashes tour - Johnson, a so-so offspinner but the establishment man, was again preferred. There seems to be no better explanation for Miller being passed over than that the selectors were fearful that, as a free spirit and renowned party animal in an image-obsessed trade, he might project the wrong one. "I never seriously thought I would be the captain," Miller would reflect. "I'm impulsive; what's more, I've never been Bradman's pin-up." Nearly half a century later, Shane Warne suffered similarly.

Anderson's main thrust, nonetheless, was about bowlers in general. So, is it fair to say that selectors and committees are still blinded by tradition? Not remotely as much as they were. That two-thirds of the longest-reigning Test bowler-captains (and both wicketkeeper-captains) have assumed charge in the post-Packer age seems far from coincidental.

As Tests have proliferated and media scrutiny has soared, so appointing the right man has never been more important; shelving reservations based on ritual has become equally crucial, as evinced most recently by the appointments of Rangana Herath (Sri Lanka), Jason Holder (West Indies) and Graeme Cremer (Zimbabwe) - one of whom, Holder, is a remarkably young fast bowler, albeit not a furiously aggressive specimen. Nevertheless, at a time when central contracts have placed pre-international captaincy experience at an ever-scarcer premium, this open-mindedness, such as it is, must gain pace.

Whatever the future may bring, there is only one certainty: there will never be another Brearley, another accomplished strategist, deep thinker and wise leader of men otherwise unworthy of his place. All the more reason, then, for that revised version of The Art of Captaincy to be mandatory bedtime reading for Joe Root.

Until recently, to be anti-establishment you had to be opposed to the establishment. Not anymore.

Mark Steel in The Independent


From the way Donald Trump is trying to place Nigel Farage as British ambassador to America, it seems he must think part of his prize for winning the election is he can appoint whoever he likes to every single job.

Next he’ll demand Boris Johnson is made Prime Minister of Pakistan, Alan Sugar plays in goal for Brazil, and Farage combines his role as ambassador with being an underwear model for Marks & Spencer.

Then he can insist he chooses all official delegates at every summit, so the next G20 will be him and Farage, with a bloke he met in a lap-dancing club in Milan, a woman from Japan who was Miss Tokyo 2012 – until he realises she’s put on four pounds so is hardly suitable to discuss climate change – and his daughter, who can represent Mexico.

He can act like this because he’s anti-establishment which is why he’s such good friends with Farage. And there’s no greater sign of two mates bravely fighting against the symbols of wealth and power, than being photographed smiling in a solid gold lift that one of them owns so he can go up and down his tower. Jeremy Corbyn, look and learn.

This week Farage secured his position as spokesman for the common man by having a party at the Ritz, because he’s determined to stay rooted in the community.

Men of the people always have their parties at the Ritz, so this was Nigel’s way of keeping it real, with a homely affair for old friends and the neighbours, such as the Barclay brothers and Jacob ‘Salt-of-the-Earth’ Rees-Mogg, who must have got time off from an evening shift driving a forklift truck.

It reminds me of my Auntie Joyce’s do when she retired from the Co-op. And what a lovely moment it was when she said: “Ooh, look who’s popped in – it’s Lord Ashcroft who delivers the fruit and veg.”

Also there was Jim “down at the old Bull and Bush” Mellon who is worth £850m and is so down-to-earth he bases himself in the Isle of Man for some reason, probably because he is shy.

It is common for prominent people in independence parties to be based outside the country they wish to be independent, because they’ve been exiled, and the UK Independence Party follows this tradition.

In their case they all seem to be tax exiles but the principle is exactly the same.

So Nigel’s celebration must have been the grassroots event you’d expect, just like your brother-in-law’s 50th birthday upstairs in the pub. We’re all familiar with how these evenings end, with Lord Ashcroft trying to separate the Barclay brothers as they squabble over who had the last of the Twiglets, and journalists from The Times throwing up in the garden after a pint of Malibu and Crème de Menthe.

Someone else who went to the Ritz party was Ukip donor Aaron Banks, who has companies in the Isle of Man but also in Gibraltar. That’s because he’s so passionate about the United Kingdom he doesn’t want its tax officers wasting time counting his payments when they could be doing something more useful, so he gives a tiny bit to places abroad instead, to help Britain out.

As Nigel is so adamant he’s an ordinary chap, he’s transformed the way we see the establishment altogether. Up until recently, to be anti-establishment you had to be in some way at least in part opposed to the establishment. But now that stuffy rule has been destroyed, and in these more creative post-truth times anyone can be anti-establishment as long as they claim to be.

This Christmas, the Queen will start her speech: “This year, I for one have had just about enough of the establishment. It’s all right for some, lauding it with their posh crockery, and buying the latest Swarovski crowns rather than having to make do with hand-me-downs from Queen Victoria. But your la-di-da types can say what they like, and I can moan about immigrants whenever I fancy coz I’m a simple gal living in South London and I know what’s what.”

Then the politicians will try and copy Trump and Farage as it seems to work. Philip Hammond will start a speech about Brexit negotiations: “Yesterday evening I met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who I have to confess I found a particularly cracking piece of arse.” Then all his front bench will groan “Hear, hear, hear” and wave bits of paper.

There will be a scandal as it emerges Michael Gove paid the proper amount of tax, but he’ll make a statement: “I can assure you these are malicious lies and I paid hardly any.” And there will be calls for Hilary Benn’s resignation, when it’s claimed he met his wife at a regional meeting of a Labour Party committee on road policy in rural areas. But he’ll deny this, saying, “I can assure you I met her in proper fashion, groping her in a taxi after giving her second prize in the competition for Miss Weston-Super-Mare 1996.”

Vince Cable will publish election leaflets showing him in a jacuzzi with a ladyboy, but his opponents will accuse him of having it Photoshopped. And the Conservative Party political broadcast will be a hip-hop video in which Jeremy Hunt stands by a swimming pool in a white suit with a gold cane pouring rum over Amber Rudd as she wiggles in a bikini.

Because at last we don’t have to obsessively cater for special interest exotic minorities such as people from abroad and women, and we can give the country back to the ordinary grafting working-class millionaire at the Ritz.

I’m white and working class. I’m sick of Brexiters saying they speak for me

Phil McDuff in The Guardian


Ordinary hard-working people have genuine concerns about immigration, and to ignore immigration is to undemocratically ignore their needs.” Other than the resurgent importance of jam, this is the clearest message we are supposed to take out of Brexit.

So concerned are we that the government’s hands are tied that it must send all the doctors back where they came from. It must crack down on students coming here to get educated in our universities in exchange for money. It must check teenagers’ teeth lest we accidentally extend compassion to a Syrian adult.

Who are “ordinary hard-working people” though? It seems the consensus following Brexit is that they’re the marginalised white working class; the people who have been left behind by modernity, who feel alienated by the “liberal metropolitan elite”. I’m a white man from the north-east, living in strongly Brexit-voting Middlesbrough, so you might expect me to tell you all off for looking down on us from your ivory towers. But the truth is that this outbreak of “the poor proles can’t help it” is both incorrect and patronising.

The working class mostly lack our own voices in the media. Instead, we are reported on. This reporting seems, even now, to believe that the true working-class identity is, as Kelvin MacKenzie put it in the 1980s, “a right old fascist”. Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him).

Migrants and native people of colour are stripped of their right to a working-class identity, and even cast as the enemy of the “real” (ie white) working class. I spoke to Marsha Garratt, a working-class, mixed-race woman who heads up the All In Youth Project, and she was cutting about the “underreporting of positive stories of solidarity between all members of the working class, including ethnic minorities”. Working-class history is migrant history, but we ignore that because it does not match what we believe to be authentic.

Likewise any of us who are white and born here, but refuse to blame migrants for the result of government policies, are cast as the “metropolitan elite” even if we’re earning the same amounts and living in the same towns. Working-class identity becomes necessarily and by definition anti-migrant.


We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf

Once everyone who doesn’t fit is excluded, those who remain are transformed from real people into weaponised stereotypes to be turned against those who resist the advance of jam-obsessed fascism. Even the complexity within people is stripped out as individuals are merged into a howling mass whom you must “understand” or risk losing your tolerant, liberal credentials.

We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf, out of the charity of their hearts. The white middle classes are just as likely to be disturbed by brown faces or foreign accents as the white working classes are, but they are generally educated enough to realise they can’t just come out and say it. Working-class poverty, framed as the result of the strains these new arrivals place on our generous social safety net, provides the cover for them to object to immigration even though they are unharmed by it. 

But our other “genuine concerns” – such as school and hospital funding, benefits and disability payments, the crushing of industries that formed the backbones of our local economies – are ignored or dismissed out of hand. They are cast as luxuries, an irresponsible “tax and spend” approach, or they are turned back on us as evidence of our own fecklessness and lack of ambition. When we say “we need benefits to live because you hollowed out our towns in pursuit of a flawed economic doctrine,” we are castigated for being workshy, and told we only have ourselves to blame. If we alter our complaints to blame foreign people it’s a different story. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all been sold to private landlords,” gets nothing. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all gone to bloody Muslims,” gets on the front page of the tabloids.

Just as we are given identities as good or bad working-class people based on whether we adequately perform our roles as good little workers or whether we insolently insist on being disabled, unemployed or unionised, so our authenticity as working-class people depends on our use for political ends. Are we salt of the earth yeomen, or skiving thickos milking the system, or drains on the already stretched infrastructure? That all depends: are we kicking out immigrants or privatising a clinic today?

If we only matter to politicians when we can be used as to defend old bigotries about hordes of eastern Europeans stealing our women and poisoning our jam, then we don’t matter at all.

The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics

Martin Jacques in The Guardian

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world. 

The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.

But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion.

It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, pictured in 1984, ushered in the era of neoliberalism. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long; the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.

But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population hasstagnated for over 30 years.

A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014.

The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions; the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.

As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.

Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs: “‘Populism’ is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like.” Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.

Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.

Brexit was the marker of a working-class revolt. Photograph: Alamy

The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the “working class” was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.

Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment. The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.


The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics

The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labour movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain. The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.

Indeed, Ukip has been as important – in the form of immigration and Europe – in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party. In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of politics.

The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one ofsecular stagnation.

Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.

A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States, with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of Tony Atkinson and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK, Ha-Joon Chang, for long isolated within the economics profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.

‘Virtually no one foresaw the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’, pictured at rally in north London last week. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognise that we are at the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC’s Todayprogramme, in the rightwing press or the parliamentary Labour party.

Following Ed Miliband’s resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election. The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.

But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman, what is the point of a social democratic party if it doesn’t represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of New Labour.

The rival contenders – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60% of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python’s parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried might and main to remove Corbyn.

Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour, had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.

Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.

Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world, where are they going to turn?

Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence. Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.
‘Put America first’: Donald Trump in Cleveland last month. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere, Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.

He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.

To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: “Put America first”. His appeal, above all, is to the white working class who, until Trump’s (and Bernie Sander’s) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the 1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.

The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by Bernie Sanders, who ran Hillary Clinton extremely close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.

Another plank of Trump’s nationalist appeal – “Make America great again” – is his position on foreign policy. He believes that America’s pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation’s resources. He argues that the country’s alliance system is unfair, with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and Nato’s European members as prime examples.He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.

As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America’s infrastructure. Trump’s position represents a major critique of America as the world’s hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left. He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump’s appeal is to a white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.

A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose 45% tariffs on China, if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era of protectionism.

Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation – unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much else – will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that “we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems”. And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.

Private education is guarded by an electric fence

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian


Employers are told to spot ‘potential not polish’, but polish is about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions – deliberately baffling to outsiders

 

‘As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works.’ Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy


Everyone stop being horrible to posh people! It’s not their fault they have everything. It’s the fault of the schools they went to. I blame the parents. They refuel the class system by sending their offspring to private schools because they are not entirely daft. As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works. It has worked through thick and thin. Its pupils may be both.

That 7% figure of people who are privately educated, and who run just about everything, has stalled. Sometimes, people like me squawk about it but, as I have never learned to talk proper, it’s dismissed as “the politics of envy”, an idiotic phrase that reduces justified politics to a personal grudge. Occasionally, though, one of the gilded boys has a go at levelling the playing field. They do love a playing field.

So here we have cabinet minister Matt Hancock (King’s) suggesting that employers check the socio-economic backgrounds of applicants to stop the 93% of us who did not go to private school being discriminated against. Don’t people put their schools down on their CVs anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to ask applicants if they knew much about skiing and refuse to interview anyone who did?

Still, Hancock’s vapid suggestion was enough to cause Lord Waldegrave, provost of Eton, to have a meltdown and complain that the privately educated could be discriminated against. The poor babies. How they bawl, not when the playing field is level but when anyone ventures near its electric fence.

All this came about as part of Cameron’s “life chances” agenda, some sort of baleful drivel about enhancing social mobility. It is patently obvious that social mobility does not start at a job interview but long before it. When employers are told to spot “potential not polish”, we may ask where on the periodic table this mysterious element “polish” appears.

I have never been able to locate it, that’s for sure. The idea that the existing system can be levelled out by allowing a few escapees from the lower orders into the public school milieu of law, politics, media, academia, judiciary and the City is somewhat cack-handed. For polish is surely about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions, a series of codes and signals that enable small gangs of people to recognise each other as clubbable, employable, breedable.

It is deliberately baffling to outsiders. When I first started working in the media I was astonished at how everyone seemed to know each other from college. Then I began to realise they had been in schools with “houses”, small class sizes and peculiar sports, and shared the assumption that everything that came out of their mouths was innately fascinating.

On a Radio 4 show, I heard a producer bemoan my “polytechnic accent”. At every meeting I would feel unwashed and somewhat dazed, however long I had spent getting ready. Class manifests as acute discomfort. It’s not about thinking a Findus Crispy Pancake is a nice dinner, it is shared assumptions about what matters.

Lynsey Hanley’s book Respectable charts extremely well her journey into the middle class and all the anxiety it produces. But it bears little relationship to my journey, because there are many different working-class cultures.

What is shared, though, is that to be working class in a middle-class environment requires you to learn certain codes, and once you learn a code you can deconstruct it. The condescending nature of all the guff on private school education is part of this code. This system produces the brightest and the best, if the brightest and the best means booming confidence, inflexible thinking and the regurgitation of specific histories. Thus we have a chancellor who, without studying economics, believes himself an expert on it, whatever the figures say, whatever renowned economists say. Private schools sell self-belief.

In working-class culture, self-belief is played out as bravado and different kinds of knowledge are valued. I don’t romanticise it, as it’s stultifying. Everything is about what can be shown: practical skills, big tellies, getting really dressed up. What can’t be shown, that which is abstract, is not to be dwelt on, so I am forever glad I got away.

Social mobility, though, involves living with restraint. One must bite one’s tongue in order not to bite the hand that feeds you. Do not be prejudiced against your superiors. Just accept they got into Oxbridge by dint of their brainiac qualities. It was simply handy that, while you spent your teenage years sitting on a wall, they were competing in debating societies, editing their own magazine or playing the harp.

Here is the mystical polish. Sadly the self-improving element of the working class beloved by the likes of Raymond Williams, enacted though evening classes and further education, has been killed dead. So, instead we have the engineers of social class suggesting they pull a few of us on to the lifeboats. It is no real answer. What is it about private education that I would want for more children? It is confidence. The confidence to ask whether those in charge are actually so much cleverer than the rest of us, the confidence to insist that employing a normal person is not discrimination, and most of all the confidence to know that “power can be taken, but not given”.

Prohibition, Discrimination in Kerala's alcohol policy

Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu

Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the judgment on the validity of Kerala’s liquor policy militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution.

As virtually its last significant act of 2015, on December 29, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on the validity of Kerala’s newest liquor policy, which seeks to prohibit the sale and service of alcohol in all public places, save bars and restaurants in five-star hotels. Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the new law, as is only plainly evident, militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution. In placing five-star hotels on a pedestal, the law takes a classist position, and commits a patent discrimination that is really an affront to the underlying principles of our democracy. Regrettably, though, the Supreme Court’s judgment, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association v. State of Kerala, eschews even the most basic doctrines of constitutionalism, and, in so doing, allows the state to perpetrate a politics of hypocrisy.

Kicking off the excise policy

Since 2007, the Kerala government has sought to tighten its Abkari (excise) policy with a view to making liquor less freely available in the State, ostensibly in the interest of public health. At first, the State sought to amend the policy by permitting new bar licences to be granted only to those hotels that were accorded a rating of three stars or more by the Central government’s Ministry of Tourism. In 2011, these rules were further changed. This time, all hotels that had a rating of anything below four stars were disentitled from having a licence issued to serve alcoholic beverages on their premises. However, those hotels with existing licences were accorded an amnesty, which permitted them to have their licences renewed even if they did not possess a four-star mark.

The Supreme Court held, in a convoluted judgment, in March 2014, that the deletion of three-star hotels from the category of hotels eligible for a liquor licence was, in fact, constitutionally valid. The court provided a rather bizarre rationale for what appeared to be a palpable act of favouritism. Even hotels without a bar licence, it said, were entitled to three-star statuses under the Ministry of Tourism’s rules and regulations.

In August 2014, the Kerala government sought to further intensify its Abkari policy, by making its most drastic change yet, in purportedly trying to enforce complete prohibition. Only hotels classed as five star and above, by the Union government’s Ministry of Tourism, the new policy commanded, would be entitled to maintain a bar licence. To give effect to this rule, the Abkari Act, a pre-constitutional enactment that was extended in 1967 to Kerala, was duly amended, and the State’s excise commissioners issued notices to all hotels of four stars and below, which served liquor, intimating them of the annulment of their respective bar licences.

The new policy was immediately challenged in a series of petitions filed in the Kerala High Court by hotels of various different denominations. In May last year, after a division bench of the High Court had ruled in favour of the State, the hotels filed appeals before the Supreme Court. They raised two primary grounds of challenge, both predicated on fundamental rights guaranteed under Part III of India’s Constitution.

Fundamental rights

First, the hotels submitted that in cancelling their bar licences, and in prohibiting them from serving and selling liquor on their premises, the State had infracted their right, under Article 19(1)(g), to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. Second, they pleaded, in separately categorising hotels of five stars or more, and in permitting those hotels alone to serve liquor in public, the new Abkari policy had made an unreasonable classification, by treating persons on an equal standing unequally, and therefore violated Article 14 of the Constitution.

The first argument was admittedly going to be a difficult one to maintain. The liberty to freely carry on any trade or business is subject to reasonable restrictions that may be imposed by the state in the interest of the general public. The Constitution itself, in Article 47, requires States to make an endeavour towards improving public health, including by bringing about prohibition of the consumption of liquor. Therefore, quite naturally, any policy in purported furtherance of such goals would almost always be viewed as a legitimate limitation on any freedom to do business. In fact, in 1994, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court, in Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, explicitly questioned whether any right to trade in alcoholic beverages even flowed from our Constitution.

“The State can prohibit completely the trade or business in potable liquor since liquor as beverage is res extra commercium,” wrote Justice P.B. Sawant. “The State may also create a monopoly in itself for trade or business in such liquor. The State can further place restrictions and limitations on such trade or business which may be in nature different from those on trade or business in articles res commercium.” Therefore, the court, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case, perhaps, had little choice but to hold the Abkari policy as being in conformity with the right under Article 19(1)(g).

Such a holding, though, ought not to have precluded the court from scrutinising the liquor policy with further rigour. The mere fact that a commodity is res extra commercium — a thing outside commerce — does not give the state absolute power to make laws on the subject in violation of the guarantee of equal treatment. While a law might represent a valid constraint on the freedom to trade, it nonetheless must confirm to other constitutional commands, including Article 14, which assures us that the state shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.

The point of classification

Equality, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is a contested concept. But it is however, in its abstract form, a solemn constitutional pledge that underpins our democracy. The Supreme Court, in some of its earliest decisions, interpreted Article 14 as forbidding altogether any law that seeks to make distinctions based on class, except where reasonable classifications are made in a manner that does no violence to the provision’s core promise. The court also crystallised a basic two-prong test to determine what constitutes such a classification: there must be, it held, an intelligible differentia, which distinguishes persons or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group, and this differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law in question.

Hence, in determining whether Kerala’s Abkari policy violated the right to equality, the question was rather simple: has the State made a reasonable classification in consonance with Article 14 by permitting only five-star hotels and above to serve liquor? When we apply the test previously laid down by the Supreme Court, there is little doubt that the distinction that the policy makes between hotels on the basis of their relative offering of luxuries constitutes a discernible intelligible differentia between two classes of things. But a proper defence of the law also requires the government to additionally show us how this classification of five-star hotels as a separate category bears a sensible nexus with the object of the law at hand. The changes in the liquor policy were ostensibly brought through with the view of promoting prohibition, and thereby improving the standard of public health in the State. Now, ask yourself this: how can this special treatment of five-star hotels possibly help the Kerala government in achieving these objectives?

The Supreme Court, as it happened, made no concerted effort to answer this question. This could be because, however hard we might want to try, it’s difficult to find any cogent connection between classifying five-star hotels separately and the aim of achieving prohibition. The court, therefore simply said, “There can be no gainsaying that the prices/tariff of alcohol in Five Star hotels is usually prohibitively high, which acts as a deterrent to individuals going in for binge or even casual drinking. There is also little scope for cavil that the guests in Five Star hotels are of a mature age; they do not visit these hotels with the sole purpose of consuming alcohol.” Given the palpable inadequacies of such a justification — and also given its validation of a manifestly classist position — the court also used the State government’s excuse of tourism as a further ruse to defend the law. But when a policy exists to promote the prohibition of the consumption of liquor, it’s specious to use an extraneous consideration, in this case, tourism, to defend a classification made in the law, regardless of how intelligible such a classification might be.

Prohibition often has a polarising effect on the polity. But the criticisms of the ineffectuality of such policies apart, Kerala’s new law ought to have been seen for what it is: paternalism, at its best, and, at its worst, an extension of an ingrained form of classism that is demonstrably opposed to the guarantee of equality under our Constitution. The judgment in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case is therefore deeply unsatisfactory, and requires reconsideration.

Cricket: How much does captaincy really matter?

Kartikeya Date in Cricinfo


Mike Brearley was fortunate to have captained England when Botham and Willis were arguably at their best © Getty Images



How often have you heard "captaincy" being applauded by professional observers? "Great captaincy", they say. Or "lacklustre captaincy". Mahendra Singh Dhoni has experience of both types of criticism.

The entire concept is bogus. Have you ever heard of a captain being criticised when his team wins? Or have you heard it said, "We saw some superb captaincy from Clarke today but Australia were just not good enough"? No, when Australia lose, it is the other captain who did well. More consequentially, can you think of a good captain of an inferior team beating a better side purely because of captaincy?

Captaincy seems to be a concept by writers for writers. It exists not because cricket is played but because cricket is written about and argued about. There is a difference between noting the mere existence of a captain as the person who decides bowling changes and field settings, and captaincy as a full-fledged art consequential to the game. It is the latter that is bogus. Every time a captain puts a third slip in and a catch goes there, it doesn't amount to "great captaincy". Since a field is set every over, it's just one choice that worked, among many dozens of choices that didn't.

Historically captaincy has also had social significance. The captain had to be someone from a good background. Who are his parents? What social class does he come from? Which university did he go to? Will he look plausible when dignitaries visit? Until 1952, the captain of England had to be an amateur (someone who could afford to play cricket for fun, not as a job, because he had other sources of income). That year, Len Hutton became the first professional cricketer to captain England, 75 years after England first played a Test. As Osman Samiuddin notes in his history of Pakistan cricket, early Pakistan captains were chosen for their Oxbridge pedigree. Today these colonial markers are no longer fashionable. In their place we have vague notions of "leadership" and other such management-speak.

Mike Brearley (Cambridge University and Middlesex) captained England in 31 of his 39 Tests. He made 1442 runs at 22.88 in 66 innings in Test cricket. He played all his innings in the top seven, most frequently as opener.

Brearley did not get picked for England as a specialist batsman alone after the Centenary Test in Melbourne in March 1977. He is Exhibit A for the pro-captaincy set - the most prominent member of the very small set of players who were not good enough to make a Test team with bat or ball, but were picked primarily as captain.
Brearley's reputation rests on his career as captain in Ashes Tests. He led England to two Ashes wins at home, in 1977 and 1981. He also led England to an Ashes win against a Packer-affected Australia side in Australia. Apart from this, Brearley led England to victory against New Zealand at home, and a Pakistan side (also Packer-depleted) in 1978. Add to this an unconvincing 1-0 win at home against an Indian side that had very little fast bowling (Kapil Dev was still raw in 1979) and the tired remnants of their spin quartet. Sunil Gavaskar nearly brought India level at The Oval in that series, despite Brearley's captaincy.

At first glance, it is an impressive record. But in all those series, England were simply the better side, either because they were playing at home or because their opponents were crippled by defections.



Indian captains have been termed "aggressive" usually when they've had quality bowlers at their disposal © AFP


What happened to England against full-strength opposition in that 1977-81 period? They were thumped 3-0 in three Tests in Australia in 1979-80 under Brearley, lost 1-0 to West Indies at home in 1980 and 2-0 away in 1980-81. Brearley did not make the side in the two series against West Indies. In fact, he never faced the strongest team of his era. Without him, under Ian Botham, England did quite well against West Indies in 1980 when you consider what had happened in 1976 and what was to happen in 1984.

It is not uncommon for England captains to be highly successful in England. England have traditionally been very difficult to beat at home. Brearley's successor Bob Willis won six out of nine Tests in England against much stronger India, Pakistan and New Zealand sides that had Kapil, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee in their prime. England's only loss under Willis came against New Zealand in Leeds in 1983, after Lance Cairns took ten wickets in the match.

Brearley's impact on the English teams he led is questionable. Would they have won just as well with any captain other than Botham in 1981? Was Brearley's value purely that Botham flourished under him? It's clear that under Brearley, Botham was an extraordinary player. He made seven centuries and took 15 five-wicket hauls in 26 such Tests. But his next best efforts came under Bob Willis, in the 1982-84 period. It is plausible to think that Brearley merely had the benefit of having Botham at his best. Perhaps equally importantly, he had Willis at his peak.

The crucial question about Brearley might be: if he was really such a fantastic captain, why did he continue to pick himself in the XI when it was clear that he wasn't good enough to play at Test level? Can you imagine what would happen if a player with an average of 22 was allowed 39 Tests as a specialist batsman today? Why, think of what happened to Botham in 1980. Poor performances against the best team in the world brought its own pressure. Brearley had no such problems.

The idea that the record of captains depends on the quality of their players is generally accepted. But it is curiously discarded when captaincy itself is discussed. There are, for example, rumblings about Virat Kohli being a more "aggressive" captain compared to Dhoni. There is no basis for thinking this. Given turning tracks and opponents who had little experience of batting on them and no high-quality spinners in their ranks to exploit them, Dhoni's India demolished teams with disdain. West Indies, New Zealand and an Australian team in crisis all answered to this description. When Dhoni had quality bowling, he looked a very aggressive captain and India won handsomely. Just as they did under Rahul Dravid. If India have quality bowling under Kohli, he will be remembered as an "aggressive captain".

Much is made of the fact that India's batting didn't do well in England and Australia under Dhoni in the 2011-12 seasons. But we forget that when India won in England in 2007, India's top seven did not make a single century in the series. It was the bowling, led by Zaheer Khan, that made all the difference. Zaheer's series in England ranks alongside those of McGrath, Warne and Murali in the 21st century. The support he got from RP Singh, Anil Kumble, Sreesanth and Ganguly made it one of India's finest overseas performances ever.


Michael Clarke: a "tactically astute" leader, but what do his numbers say in away Tests? © Getty Images


Let's consider Michael Clarke's record. Clarke is widely regarded as the most tactically astute leader of his generation, but that didn't prevent him from losing 13 out of 28 Tests outside Australia. The only place where Australia have won comfortably under him is the West Indies (where the hosts have won only three out of 17 home Test series against major teams in the 21st century, and lost 11).

Look down the list of captains away from home in the 21st century, and you'll find that some of the most highly regarded captains had losing records - Michael Clarke, Mahela Jayawardene, Nasser Hussain.

All this suggests that captaincy is overrated by observers in cricket. If one were to list the essential cricketing skills for a Test and ODI team from the most important to the least, they would be as follows: fast bowling, spin bowling, allrounders, opening batting, middle-order batting, wicketkeeping, catching, ground fielding, overall fitness, captaincy.

A quality team with a nondescript captain would win way more than a bad team with a "good" captain. This is one of the great features of cricket. Despite being an aristocratic sport, on the field, it is a great leveller. To win, you have to bowl well, bat well and field well. At the highest level, tactics are not a mystery. Every club cricketer knows what the best options (or the best three or four options) are for a given team in a given situation.

Kumble once said of his googly, "They pick it, but they still have to play it." That is what makes a top Test team. The ability to play so well that even when the opposition knows exactly what's coming, they have to play very well to cope.

Perhaps it is better to think of captaincy as one thinks of wicketkeeping. A keeper who makes a lot of mistakes or has bad footwork and is repeatedly caught in bad positions is noticed. Similarly, a keeper who has to keep pulling off brilliant diving takes is also noticed. In the first case, the keeper is poor. In the second, the bowling is poor. Similarly, if a captain is being noticed one way or the other, something is wrong with the team.