Trusts keep wealth in the hands of the few. It’s time to stop this tax abuse

Richard Murphy in The Guardian

If there is a name that is synonymous with tax avoidance in the UK, it is that of the Duke of Westminster. The duke in question was, admittedly, the second duke, who in 1936 won an infamous tax case that permitted him to pay his gardeners in a way that avoided a tax liability. He achieved abiding fame as a consequence of the opinion of Lord Tomlin, who in his judgment on that case said: “Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so that the tax attracted under the appropriate act is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.”

That statement has, to a large degree, been both the foundation of and justification for all tax avoidance activity in the UK since. That this activity continues is evidenced by the fact that the sixth duke is said to have left an estate worth £9.9bn upon his death this week to his son and yet, despite the fact that inheritance tax is supposedly payable on all estates on death worth more than £325,000, it has been widely reported that very little tax will be due in this case. It seems that the sixth duke has put the second to shame: his forebear saved a few pounds on his wages bill while the sixth has avoided something approaching £4bn. He may in the process have even outdone the fifth duke, who argued the fourth duke died of a war wound 232 years after he suffered it to escape all charges on the estate in the 1960s.

His likely motives for doing so can be easily summarised: there may be greed involved; a belief that the duke’s heirs are better entitled to this property than anyone else; and a hostility to any claim that the state might make on property that has been apparent in the UK aristocracy since the time of the Crusades.

The English legal concept of a trust is believed to have been developed during that era, when knights departing the country with no certainty of returning wanted to ensure that their land passed to those who they thought to be their rightful heirs without interference from the Crown. Trusts achieved that goal and the concept has remained in existence ever since, representing the continual struggle of those with wealth to subvert the rule of law that may apply to others but that they believe should not apply to them.

Recent political challenges have not ended the resulting abuse. Labour tried to introduce effective tax charges on inheritance in the 1970s, the Conservatives undermined them a decade later, and every subsequent attempt to tackle tax abuse using trusts (and Gordon Brown made many), has by and large left existing arrangements intact, only seeking to prevent abuse in new arrangements. As if to add insult to injury, the 2013 general anti-abuse rule, which was introduced by the coalition government and supposedly negated the decision by Lord Tomlin noted above, cannot be applied retrospectively: anything done by a duke before that date is outside of its scope.

So why has this tax avoidance been allowed to continue? First, it’s because no one in the UK has, since 1980, had the political will to tackle the use and abuse of trusts – even though continental Europe has shown it is perfectly possible to run an economy without them. Second, it’s down to the continuing power of the aristocracy and their chosen professional agents (lawyers, accountants, bankers and wealth managers) who have been willing to compromise themselves in exchange for fees to perpetuate the situation. And third, it’s because the Conservatives, in particular, have been keen to let the situation continue unchanged as they support the largely unfettered inheritance of substantial wealth. 

Another issue is that we know so little about trusts even when they are at least as powerful as companies and are even more commonly used for tax abuse. This is because of a mistaken perception of privacy, which should only be due to individuals and not artificial arrangements created by law, which trusts are. This can be corrected: we need transparency and that means a full register of trusts and their accounts on public record above modest financial limited, as for companies.

What can be done about this? In addition to the points already noted, the obvious solution is to abolish the inheritance tax reliefs that permit this tax avoidance, whether that be for trusts themselves or for those who own private companies and agricultural land. Inheritance tax assumes that the children of the wealthy are the rightful best next generation of managers of these assets and so lets them be passed on to them tax free, perpetuating wealth concentration in the process.

To put it another way, 800 years of claims by an elite to be above the law applicable to everyone else so that wealth can remain in the hands of the few has to be brought to an end. And if now is not the time to do it, I am really not sure when it will be.

Concentration and Mental Toughness in Cricket

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

How we are duped by the wrapper, how we mistake the veneer for the structure underneath.

Alastair Cook's appearance is guileless, his speech polite, his behaviour dignified. Too nice? Check the record. He is the toughest cricketer England have produced for decades.

Yesterday in making 153 not out under intense scrutiny and pressure, he once again underlined his pre-eminent gift: responding to a crisis by entering a state of extended and productive concentration.

There are many widespread misconceptions about concentration. It is not so much a wilful and assertive state of mind ("I am going to concentrate hard now") as a state of freedom that flows from the absence of irrelevant thought ("There is nothing extraneous in my mind, no impediments in the road ahead").

Anyone who achieves mastery of a craft, art or profession has by definition also learned to master concentration. They may still suffer anxiety and concern in prospect and retrospect ("Will my work be good enough?", "Was my work good enough?"). But in the act itself, when the script is still being written, they must achieve a state of clarity.

That's why when you meet a brilliant performer - whatever the field - they almost always have an air of calmness and simplicity. When the game is on, their mind is free and uncluttered.

Cook's calmness is preternatural. I watched him carefully yesterday and on Saturday, studying his manner and habits between balls. The gentle walk out to square leg after each ball; the brushing away of stray dust on the pitch; the nonchalant way of standing at the non-striker's end, legs crossed, one hand on hip; the twiddle of the bat in his hands as the bowler turns, looking down at his bat for the first stride or two, then up towards the bowler. All were totally consistent, unruffled by the changing facts of the scoreboard or the corresponding level of anxiety within English cricket.

Whether Cook was watching Ian Bell edge behind as the ball swung in the anxious morning session, or if he was a contented spectator as Ben Stokes smashed England into a dominant position - neither circumstance made any difference to him. He was the same player throughout. His tempo and body language found perfect equilibrium.

It serves as a good metaphor for Cook the man as well as Cook the player. Very seldom is he knocked off kilter or thrown off balance. People have certainly tried. Consider the context of Cook's innings. Yesterday the Sunday papers suggested that Cook was batting to save his captaincy. (Not true, incidentally, as Andrew Strauss has said Cook will captain in the Ashes, but the temptation to turn genuine drama into a phony last-chance saloon often proves irresistible.) In the short term, the fortnight before the Test was dominated by the Kevin Pietersen saga, whipped up once again into full fury. In the medium term, English cricket has endured a state of near permanent crisis for months - at the top of the English game, Cook's captaincy is almost the only aspect of continuity. Widen the focus to take in the last 18 months. Cook has suffered an Ashes whitewash and then, in the summer of 2014, near universal calls for his removal as captain. All bruising, they were experiences that would have crushed many players. Captaincy exhausts and depletes almost everyone in the end. It shows no sign of hobbling Cook yet.

It has long been obvious that Alastair Cook is the finest concentrator to play for England in the modern era. He is also among the most psychologically resilient. Only now do I realise that those two facts are intimately connected. Indeed, watching Cook over the past weeks has reinforced a link I've struggled to notice before: mental strength, whatever the sphere, relies on the art of concentration.



Captaincy exhausts almost everyone in the end. It shows no sign of hobbling Alastair Cook yet © Getty Images


Concentration (the ability to filter out unnecessary noise) leads to clarity, and clarity preserves mental reserves. Quite simply, you don't waste precious focus on things that don't matter.

When I played with Steve Waugh for Kent in 2002, we had several conversations about his mental approach. One recurrent theme was that Waugh defined "toughness" as emotional stability and psychological consistency rather than outward displays of "spiritedness" or meaningless emotion. A batsman with a clear mind, no matter what is going on around him, is displaying mental toughness. The toughest players win more of those scraps, the battles that happen inside their own minds.

Waugh called it mental toughness because sport is adversarial. But that state of flow and focus has much in common with the writer who can see past the mess in his study and follow the story in his head; with the painter sketching a portrait on a noisy train; with the surgeon who tunes out the sense of panic around him when an operation is going wrong and sees only the path ahead. Concentration is not about seeing more. It is about seeing less.

Pressure, in fact, brings out the best in Cook. In the third innings of Tests, when England face a first-innings deficit, he averages 66.

Just as well. Given the nature of the Test season ahead (Australia, Pakistan, South Africa) there will be many more days when Cook will need to do what he does best: to forget the blurry frustrations in the middle distance and watch the ball onto the middle of the bat.

Failures in Maths Teaching

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

Our generals say India’s spy agency RAW is up to its nasty tricks again. No evidence provided but, okay, we’ll buy the story for now. There are two good reasons. First, it’s safer not to question the wisdom of generals. Second, they speak from deep experience, having long played the spy-versus-spy game across borders.

So let’s provisionally assume that India’s spies have engineered the odd bomb blast here and there, and send occasional gifts to the BLF or other militant Baloch movements.

But RAW’s alleged antics are pinpricks compared to the massive and irreversible brain damage that Pakistan’s schools, colleges, and universities inflict upon their students.

Imagine that some devilish enemy has perfected a super weapon that destroys reasoning power and makes a population stupid. One measure, though not the only one, of judging the lethality of this hypothetical weapon would be lower math scores.

No such scores are actually available, but for over 40 years my colleagues and I have helplessly watched student math abilities shrivel.

Only the wealthy customers of elite private schools and universities, tethered as they are to standards of the external world, have escaped wholesale dumbing down. As for the ordinary 99pc, with the rare exception of super-bright students here or there, some form of mental polio is turning most into math duffers.

Does being poor at math really matter? After all there are plenty of intelligent people everywhere, even brilliant ones, who hate math and therefore are bad at it. But this is only because they had dull and uninspiring teachers who never taught them that math is a beautiful exercise of reason, one step at a time. Once on track, you quickly realise that math is the most magnificent, surprising, and powerful of all human achievements.

The success of the human species over other forms of life on planet Earth depends squarely on mathematics. Without math the pyramids could not have been built, navigation would be impossible, electricity could not have been discovered and put to use, factories and industries would not exist, computers and space exploration would be unimaginable, etc.

Here’s how bad our situation is: in a recent math class, I had rather typical 18-20 year-olds from non-elite schools. They had studied geometry but their teachers had not exposed them to the notion of proof — the step-by-step process in which one starts with a proposition, carefully constructs arguments, and then triumphantly arrives at the conclusion.

Instead, they were taught math as a hodgepodge of recipes. A few they remembered, the rest were forgotten.

I nearly wept to see that barely three to four students out of 60 could prove the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. None could prove that similar triangles have proportional sides. Quite a few had difficulty with fractions, some did not know how to take the square root of four or nine or unless armed with a calculator, and translating even simple real-life situations (like compound interest) into equations was difficult. Twelve-year-old kids in Japan or Europe would have done better.

Their teachers are still worse. Earlier I had the misfortune of teaching math courses to college math teachers. In their late 30s or early 40s, most were staid and stable family men who had come to university, expecting to get a higher degree and hence a higher pay grade.

But for all their years of teaching math, they were blanks. Diluting my nominally ‘advanced math’ course to a beginning level course did not help. My conscience could not allow a single teacher to pass.

Could the use of English — a difficult language for all except ‘O’ and ‘A’ level students — reasonably explain this dreadful situation? I am sympathetic to this point of view and therefore use Urdu exclusively in my physics and math lectures, both in distance learning modules and in real-time teaching (except when a university’s regulations require that I teach in English). But this barely solves 10-20pc of the problem.

So then is the math curriculum at fault? It certainly can be improved but almost the same topics in math and science are listed in Pakistani curricula as would expectedly be covered by a similar cohort internationally. In fact, primary school children in Pakistan are expected to carry a bigger burden than overseas kids.

The impediment to learning proper math is just one — wrong learning goals, wrong attitudes. Mathematics does not require labs, computers, or fancy gadgetry. But it does demand mental capacity and concentration. Nothing is true in math unless established by argumentation based upon a rigorous chain of logic, with each link firmly attached to the preceding one. The teacher who cannot correctly solve a math problem by following the defined logic will suffer loss of face before his students.

Contrast this with the madressah model wherein truth is defined by the teacher and prescribed books. The teacher’s job is to convey the book contents, and the student’s job is to appropriately absorb and memorise. There are no problems to be solved, nor is challenging suppositions or checking logical consistency either encouraged or even tolerated.

Limited to religious learning, such learning attitudes are perfectly fine. But their absorption into secular parts of the education system is disastrous. The hafiz-i-science or hafiz-i-math, which are copiously produced, carry exactly zero worth.

Giving logic a back seat has led to more than diminished math or science skills. The ordinary Pakistani person’s ability to reason out problems of daily life has also diminished. There is an increased national susceptibility to conspiracy theories, decreased ability to tell friend from foe, and more frequent resort to violence rather than argumentation. The quality of Pakistan’s television channels reflects today’s quality of thought.

For too long education reform advocates have been barking up the wrong tree. A bigger education budget, better pay for teachers, more schools and universities, or changing instructional languages will not improve learning outcomes. As long as teachers and students remain shackled to the madressah mindset, they will remain mentally stunted. 

The real challenge lies in figuring out how to set their minds free.

The Measure of Success

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

One of the rare pleasures of playing sport is deep concentration: back in that zone, the number of empty seats becomes an irrelevance © Getty Images

A chance conversation about motivation leads me to reflect on the nature of ambition. What is ambition, properly understood? Must it mean climbing the ladder to the top? Or is it the feeling that your life has a sense of purpose and meaning, even during those days that end in disappointment?

The initial question put to me was simple: "How do you stay motivated in county cricket, even if you never get back in contention for the Test team?" In trying to provide an answer, I ended up trying to work out what matters - in cricket, in writing, or in any career.

In one respect, I was exactly the right person to ask. Not because I always succeeded but because I often failed. Only now, six years after admitting defeat, do I think I am ready explicitly to analyse why. Between being dropped by England (aged 26) and retiring from cricket (at 31), I averaged about 45 in first-class cricket. It's not phoney modesty when I confess that isn't good enough. In your late 20s, as a mature batsman who knows his game, secure in your place and comfortable in your environment, you ought to average more like 55 or 60.

As Michael Vaughan often correctly points out, the biggest difference between Test and first-class cricket is not the balls that are bowled at you but the environment in which the match is played. International cricket has a sense of event - crowd, media, cameras and constant scrutiny - that county cricket often lacks. The mood of a Test match is an intoxicating experience. When all that is suddenly withdrawn, the short-term danger is feeling that other cricket - the cricket that got you there in the first place - is somehow unexciting. This is obviously a huge error, but an understandable one.

When a player is trying to break into international cricket, a county match - an essential step on a lifelong journey - is filled with hope and energy. After he has been dropped, the same county ground can feel lifeless and depressing. You can catch yourself making a fatal miscalculation: I've performed so often in this environment that I can turn it on again when it really matters.

But, sadly, form does not take orders from your surly ego. How quickly you forget that you did not coast to success in the first place, but committed to it wholeheartedly. In failing to do the same now, you are effectively asking yourself to play better than ever while kicking away the foundations.

	From the vantage point of retirement, you realise that the most enviable careers are not always the most successful in objective terms

There is, however, a healthier way of looking at a career (any career). Instead of seeing it as only a ladder that must be climbed - and resenting any reversals along the way - your career can be viewed as a sphere of experience. After all, life is really an accumulated store of experiences. And today - this ground, this match, this innings - offers the only experience available to us. We cannot play in matches taking place on other grounds, however much we want to.

Instead of seeing success only as an outcome - wearing a particular shirt, or playing in front of a certain number of spectators - success can be recast as a search for meaningful experience. How good can I be? How much can I give of myself? Can I enjoy the fact of caring deeply, even when it leads to disappointment? How unsparing can I be in the expectations I place on myself?

Let me use an analogy from my life now, as a writer. I write both books and articles (for different publications and outlets), so my work is published and distributed in a wide range of different formats. Sometimes the life of writer seems glamorous (a shiny new book or a cover story for magazine), other times it all feels very workaday. But the experience that matters - writing the words that I feel to be true, with the most clarity and honesty I can manage - remains entirely unchanged. It is my decision. I can choose to focus on the essence of the experience (the words) or the surface effects (the rewards).

So it is with cricketers and their stage. Instead of expecting the by-products to provide meaning, we can look for it in the experience itself. Whatever the level of the match, your job is the same: to respond to the ball. The method, too, remains unchanged: to achieve the right mixture of readiness and yet relaxation, the balance of hunger and indifference, the optimal blend of narrow focus and yet openness to the day, the middle ground between asserting conscious willpower and yet allowing it to happen.

Get into that space and you will rediscover the primacy of experience and the insignificance of surface effects. One of the rare pleasures of playing sport is deep concentration: back in that zone, the number of empty seats becomes an irrelevance. From the vantage point of retirement, you realise that the most enviable careers are not always the most successful in objective terms.

A career that is fatally hitched to external validation is doomed to disappointment: there will always be someone better than you, performing on a bigger stage, garnering greater reviews. But if they are looking over their shoulder, wondering if the world could give them still more prizes, while you are absorbed entirely in today's experience, then tell me: who is the more successful man?

So what if the pope were a Marxist?

By querying the the absolute autonomy of the marketplace, Pope Francis is hardly making a radical critique. But such 'red scares' have long history

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • theguardian.com, Monday 16 December 2013 18.35 GMT

Pope Francis has been denounced as a Marxist by rightwingers for criticising 'unfettered capitalism'. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis

Some of his best friends are Marxists, Pope Francis announced last week. Well, not quite, but he has insisted that he knows some "Marxists who are good people". While making it clear that "Marxist ideology is wrong", the pontiff claimed he wasn't offended by being denounced as a Marxist by the US shock-jock, Rush Limbaugh. The conservative radio host and other rabid free-market ideologues have taken umbrage at the recent "apostolic exhortation" which criticised "unfettered capitalism" and the "globalisation of indifference" it has created.

The use of "Marxist" as a slur – along with kindred terms such as "socialist" and "communist" – is not a uniquely American phenomenon but is most familiar to us from the era of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 and, later, Joseph McCarthy's committee.

In that context, and during the "red scares" which followed it during the cold war, these were appellations used to identify and punish any criticism of capitalism, however sympathetic or merely reformist. Indeed, any dissent from mainstream dogma was "un-American".

America's first "red scare" took place in the wake of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution. To be a dissident from capitalism in any degree was to be a socialist or a "commie" and, therefore, "anti-American": the net of denunciation was cast wide enough to include immigrants, conscientious objectors, blacks and Jews.

American public culture is saturated with stories of "commie plots" and conspiracies and many, like the Hollywood Ten, the playwright Lillian Hellman, the actor Paul Robeson, and the writer Richard Wright were famously blacklisted for alleged communist connections. Even Martin Luther King has been accused of Marxism, as has John Kerry and, more recently, President Barack Obama was denounced as a "socialist" for bringing less well-off Americans into the ambit of corporate, very much capitalist, healthcare provision.

In Britain, while many Victorian liberals and radicals were careful to distance themselves from socialism, engagement with both Marxism and socialism has been historically less hostile than in the US. Nevertheless, the use of Marxist as an insult also indicating a treasonous lack of patriotism has been stepped up in recent years, featuring most prominently in the attacks on Ralph Miliband as "the man who hated Britain".

It is no accident that such terms are deliberately deployed as pejoratives at a time when an unregulated, rampant capitalism and its ideologues are in the dominant position but also fear growing unpopularity and subsequent challenge. In this context, "Marxism" refers not merely to thinking influenced by Karl Marx's magisterial three volumes laying bare the unavoidable exploitation at the heart of capitalism – it becomes a random, ill-conceived slur to stave off any and all criticism of its operations.

For a mainstream and still fundamentally conservative figure, Pope Francis has indeed gone further than many by poking the sacred cow that is trickle-down economics and querying "the absolute autonomy of the marketplace". These are not radical critiques of capitalism and have been made before by many, including Keynesian economists who would not consider themselves at all anti-capitalist but are more concerned with saving the system from its own ravages.

While Francis now appears to boldly advocate a church that is poor and "for the poor", he isn't about to tear up the Vatican's vast investment portfolio. We can welcoming the opening that his exhortation has provided for a discussion of the economic regime under which we labour and from which a few profit much more than others. Yet, it is also important to recognise that such criticism is of the sort which ultimately seeks to inoculate capitalism from disastrous meltdown by feeding it measured doses of healthy caution.

Perhaps it is time to properly revisit Marx's own insights into the workings of capitalism and ask how these remain relevant to understanding how the global economy functions. The pope's denunciation of the way in which "human beings are themselves considered consumer goods" was much more thoroughly anticipated in Marx's brilliant analysis of the commodity form which saw this process as central to capitalism, not merely an unhappy side effect of poor regulation.

"Exclusion" and "inequality" are similarly not happenstance spin-offs from a "new tyranny"; they are fundamental to a now old economic dynamic which seeks to concentrate the wealth in a few palms by extracting the labour from many hands. Of course capitalism is rife with "moral corruption", but we would also do well to look at how inequality is central to its very material workings.

There can be no moral regeneration that is not also a complete rejection of capitalism's essential immorality. It is futile to keep talking of "including the poor" within the ambit of capitalist opportunity: any good capitalist like our chancellor, George Osborne, understands very well that inequality and impoverishment (codename "austerity") is absolutely central to the creation and concentration of wealth. Anything less is simply to further the politics of illusion.

Let's admit it: Britain is now a developing country

We have iPads and broadband – but also oversubscribed foodbanks. Our economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but a clapped-out motor

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.00 GMT

A foodbank in the Black Country. Photograph: David Jones/PA

Elite economic debate boils down to this: a man in a tie stands at a dispatch box and reads out some numbers for the years ahead, along with a few micro-measures he'll take to improve those projections. His opposite number scoffs at the forecasts and promises his tweaks would be far superior. For a few hours, perhaps even a couple of days, afterwards, commentators discuss What It All Means. Last Thursday's autumn statement from George Osborne was merely the latest enactment of this twice-yearly ritual, and I bet you've already forgotten it.

Compare his forecasts and fossicking with our fundamental problems. Start with last week's Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese counterparts at science, and behind the Macanese at maths. Or look at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness survey of 148 countries, which ranks British roads below Chile's, and our ground-transport system worse than that of Barbados.

Whether Blair or Brown or Cameron, successive prime ministers and their chancellors pretend that progress is largely a matter of trims and tweaks – of capping business rates and funding the A14 to Felixstowe. Yet those Treasury supplementary tables and fan charts are no match for the mass of inconvenient facts provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the WEF or simply by going for a wander. Sift through the evidence and a different picture emerges: Britain's economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but an increasingly clapped-out motor regularly overtaken by Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Taiwan.

Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business? The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep up with Mali.

Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stereotypical bad habits of a developing country.

I began thinking about this last week, while reporting on graphene, the wonder material discovered by Manchester scientists and held up by cabinet ministers as part of our new high-tech future. Graphene is also the point at which Treasury dreaminess is harshly interrupted by the reality of our national de-development.

Briefly, the story goes like this: Osborne funnelled a few tens of millions into research on the substance. It's the kind of public-sector kickstart that might work in a manufacturing economy such as Germany – but which in Britain, with its hollowed-out industry and busted supply chains, has proved the equivalent of pouring money down a hole. One university physicist described how this was part of a familiar pattern of generating innovations for the rest of the world to capitalise on, then sighed: "One day, we'll stop thinking of ourselves as a major economic power, and realise we're more like South Korea in the early 60s." South Korea, by way of comparison, has already put in over 20 times as many graphene patents as the country that discovered it.

How can any nation that came up with the BBC and the NHS be considered in the same breath as India or China? Let me refer you to one of the first lines of The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, in which a wise old man warns International Monetary Fund officials and foreign dignatories: "India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay."

Stop thinking of development as a process that only goes in one direction, or which affects a nation's people equally, and it becomes much easier to see how Britain is going backwards.

Even banana republics have cash: it just ends up in the hands of a very few people – ask the bank managers of Switzerland or the hotel concierges of Paris. In Britain, we have become used to having our resources skimmed off by a small cadre of the international elite, who often don't feel obliged to leave much behind for our tax officials. An Africa specialist could look at the City and recognise in it a 21st-century version of a resource curse: something generating oodles of money for a tiny group of people, often foreign, yet whose demands distort the rest of the economy. Sure, Britain has iPads and broadband – but it also has oversubscribed foodbanks. And the concept of the working poor that has dominated political debate since the crash is also something straight out of development textbooks.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen defined development as "the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency". Yet when it comes to social mobility, Britain now has the worst record of all advanced countries – and will soon be overtaken by the newly rich countries of east Asia.

And it's when wealth is concentrated in too few hands that the forces of law and order get used as a militia for the elite – and peaceful dissent gets stamped upon. That's why police are now a presence on our business-friendly university campuses; it also explains why Theresa May had the front to try to deport Trenton Oldfield for disrupting a student rowing competition (sorry, the Boat Race).

This isn't a sub-Rhodesian moan about Britain going to the dogs. But as my colleague Larry Elliott said in his most recent book, Going South, the sooner we puncture our own complacency at having created a rich economy for the few, and think of ourselves as in dire need of a proper economic development plan, the better.

Otherwise, we're well set to corner the world market in pig semen. The United Kingdom of spoink.

'Standing up to the wicket is what keeping is all about'

Former England keeper Bob Taylor talks about what you need to be world-class behind the stumps

Interview by Scott Oliver in Cricinfo

December 2, 2013

 

	"You've got to try and concentrate until the last ball of the last over has been bowled" © PA Photos  Enlarge

You obviously started in an era long before specialist coaching. Did you ever have a mentor or coach to bounce ideas off?
Not really. I used to talk to George Dawkes, the wicketkeeper at Derbyshire when I started. And I used to learn by talking to other wicketkeepers. If we played Northants, I'd talk to Keith Andrew, whom I idolised; if we played Somerset, I'd talk to Harold Stephenson, and just try and learn by talking to them.

Harold told me: "When you're standing up, try and stand as close as you can, because the closer you are, the less deviation off the bat when the batsman nicks it, the more chance of it hitting your palm rather than the outside of your thumb." Obviously, it still takes a lot of skill. You've got to get your hands outside the line of the ball. But pieces of advice like that - I thought it was wonderful, and it made sense.

One thing that can be difficult when standing up is when a batsman's backlift obscures your view of the ball. How did you cope with that? Did you ever move your feet wider of the stumps? 
Not really, no. In my day, Notts had Basher Hassan and Derek Randall, both of whom, when they picked their bat up, had it right across your line of vision, which, as you say, makes life very difficult. Depending on the height of the bat, you can either look over the top of it or underneath it. I felt that when you look over the top it makes you come up too quick, which can be fatal, so I always used to try to get below the bat, so it kept me down.

What are the other key aspects of good wicketkeeping?
The main things are staying down, anticipation, and above all, concentration. I've read lots and lots of articles and books about wicketkeeping coaching, and not one has mentioned the most important part: concentration. Any successful person, whatever walk of life, the name of the game is consistency: being able to do it day in and day out. They are successful because they are focused, and they concentrate on what they are doing. I'm not blowing my own trumpet here, but nobody but me mentions concentration.

That's the hardest part of wicketkeeping. Because when you're playing on the subcontinent - in India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka - on those pitches, when you've got a good batsman in front of you, the wicketkeeper becomes almost redundant. You can be keeping for five hours and 55 minutes and not see the ball, then in the last over of the day a world-class batsman - a Sunil Gavaskar or Javed Miandad, say - gives you a chance that, if you don't take it, you can guarantee that the following day they're going to get a hundred in their conditions. That's what wicketkeeping's all about. You've got to try and concentrate until the last ball of the last over has been bowled.

What can you do to instil that concentration?
The only practical way I know of getting the wicketkeeper to concentrate is, every time the batsman plays the ball - and, as I say, on a good wicket, a good batsman will play the ball more often than not - you should, in that split-second when a batsman plays it, imagine the ball comes through to you and actually go through the motions of taking it. Every time. It stands to reason that if you've got into those habits, when the batsman goes out of his crease and misses the ball, you're halfway there. Your hands will be in the right place and you're watching the ball all the time.

When wicketkeepers miss stumpings, the two mistakes they make are they get up too soon, so their arms and hands come above their waist, and they anticipate that the batsman is going to hit the ball, and are looking to where they think he's going to hit it. The only way I know to correct that is, when you come up from the crouch position and straighten your knees, keep your hands below your knees so if the ball keeps low you can take it, and if it bounces you can come up in the air with it.

I notice you're already talking about keeping as if it was solely a question of standing up to the stumps.
Standing up to the wicket is what keeping is all about. At first-class level, any competent catcher - a decent slip fielder - can put the gloves on, like Marcus Trescothick, or Graeme Fowler and Graham Gooch when I was playing. They can all keep wicket to a degree. But up to the stumps sorts the men out from the boys. That's where you can see a true wicketkeeper.

	"The only practical way I know of getting the wicketkeeper to concentrate is, every time the batsman plays the ball - you should, in that split second, imagine the ball comes through to you and actually go through the motions of taking it"

You mentioned keeping on flat Asian pitches. Is that a bigger challenge than standing up on a green top in England? 
It's a difficult one. It's about the movement, which you want because it actually helps you concentrate. I said to Ian Healy, who was a terrific keeper, that keeping wicket to Shane Warne must have been a fabulous experience and I'd have loved to have done it. I said to him that it takes ability to keep to someone like Shane Warne, someone who's turning the ball a lot, because you're expecting it to come to you all the time. But to me that's easier than keeping on the subcontinent on flat wickets against top batsmen, when you're almost redundant.

You wouldn't have kept to much mystery spin.
No, but I did keep to Derek Underwood. He was a great bowler.

The most difficult bowler you kept to? 
People often ask me that question. For me, it wasn't anybody in particular. It was when you were standing up to a right-arm over - someone who was normally an away-swing bowler to a right-hander - bowling to a left-handed batsman. It's more natural to go down the leg side to a right-hander, for the simple reason that there are more of them in any team. You get used to it. It becomes natural. So, even though a ball down the leg side to a left-hander means I'm going to my stronger hand, my writing hand, it's still more difficult, less natural. You don't do it as often. It's about your foot movement, not which is your strong hand. I saw Ian Healy stump Mark Butcher down the leg side off Shane Warne. They might have rehearsed it, I don't know, but it still takes some doing.

So you recommend practising that then?
The message I try to get over to boys is that at nets they should try to practise more against left-handers than right-handers, because that helps to build up confidence. And when you're at the top of your game, you enjoy that challenge. It's an opportunity for a stumping. And if you're predominantly right-handed, before the match starts, take ten catches into both hands, diving and what-have-you, then ten into your right hand, then 20 in your left. So that gives you confidence with your weak hand, to take that half-chance when it comes.

It was a bit unfortunate for you that you had Alan Knott around for much of your career, until World Series Cricket came along, really. Was it difficult being a permanent understudy? 
I'd always got confidence in my ability; it's just that there was someone else who was better than me. His batting record speaks for itself. You have to be philosophical about things.

Did you and he discuss the finer points of wicketkeeping, or was there too much rivalry for that?
We did do, and we have done subsequently. Not that we always agreed. I used to coach Jack Russell, Paul Nixon and people like this at Lilleshall, while Knotty coached Alec Stewart down at Lord's. Then Knotty became more full-time with England and I think that's when Jack started to get all his idiosyncrasies. Whether they were standing up or back, Jack and Alec were facing cover for a period, but at the last second they were turning to be square-on. I asked Jack, Alec, and eventually Knotty what the theory was behind this, and he said that, if you're standing up, particularly if the ball bounced, your hips were out of the way.

I said to Knotty, "Well, if the ball bounces, it's an automatic reaction for your hips to turn, anyway. They've got to try and take the ball. I can see where you're coming from, but doesn't it make it harder for a normal wicketkeeper - not a Test wicketkeeper, who's got ability, or a county keeper even - to take the ball down the leg side?" He'd have to over-correct his position. There was no automatic explanation, so I thought it's just a theory that's being passed on. I said to Alec Stewart, "You stand open, but to take the ball you correct your position. Why do it in the first place?" He said: "Because Knotty told me."

	"Next to the captain, the wicketkeeper is the second most important player on the field. You're the inspiration to the rest of the fielders" © PA Photos  Enlarge

What about taking the ball in front of the stumps and knocking the bails off on the back-sweep of the hands?
It's all well and good - I used to do that years ago - but you're very reliant on accurate throws from the outfield, otherwise you can lose where the stumps are.

And why do wicketkeepers take the ball like a matador with his cape, taking their body away from the ball? It's all come from Australia. They take the ball away from the body. I've talked to Rod Marsh, I've talked to Ian Healy, I've talked to Adam Gilchrist, and I can't get a straightforward answer. I've spoken to Bruce French - who's teaching the theory as well - and he can't give me a proper answer, other than: "It inspires the rest of the fielders." I'm sorry, I don't understand.

I coached Frenchy when he started at Nottingham. I said, "Bruce, we've always been taught - particularly standing back - that you get your body behind the line of the ball, so you've got a second line of defence. It encourages you to move your feet". Particularly in this country, where the ball will dip and swerve after it goes past the bat - that's all the more reason why you have to get your body behind the line of the ball.

Which keepers of your era did you rate? 
Outside of me and Knotty, Paul Downton, David Bairstow, Jack Richards and Roger Tolchard were all good keepers.

And of recent times?
I think Dhoni's been fantastic. He's a superstar in India, a multi-millionaire, but to captain, to keep wicket, and bat - it's phenomenal.

I think the best English keepers over the last ten years have undoubtedly been James Foster and Chris Read. Duncan Fletcher did a lot of good for English cricket, I'm sure, but he had his favourites, and I think Geraint Jones was probably one of his favourites. The only thing I can think of [why Read didn't play more] is that he wasn't a good tourist. He was playing second fiddle to Alec Stewart, and I've had enough experience of that.

You've got to be philosophical, and when you're playing against New South Wales or Queensland, you've got to try your best. If I played well then it would push Alan Knott, keep him on his toes, which is the objective of a reserve, and only benefits the team. You've got to do your best - both on and off the field. As 12th man, in a hot climate, you've got to make sure players who are flogging themselves in 90 degrees of heat and 80% humidity are looked after. I don't know, but perhaps Chris Read wasn't doing his duties properly and it upset Duncan Fletcher - I don't know. But he was never really given a chance. And the same with James Foster. And they are both, I think, the top wicketkeepers - and that's in front of Matt Prior, Steven Davies, Craig Keiswetter, whoever.

And finally, your nickname was "Chat", so what about the keeper as the voice on the field? 
I say to schoolboys: if you want to improve, forget about all this sledging. If you're concentrating on sledging the batsmen, then you're not concentrating on the job you're supposed to be doing. Next to the captain, the wicketkeeper is the second most important player on the field. You're the inspiration to the rest of the fielders. You have to be neat and tidy to set the tone. That's what a wicketkeeper should be concentrating on. That and concentration.

It takes more than a stroke of genius to become a true champion

Dominic Lawson in The Independent

When does talent become genius? We all have a view; but when asked to be precise, it's hard not to sink into the hopelessly circular argument that we know what genius is when we see it. Yet anyone who watched Roger Federer's forensic dismantling of Andy Murray in the men's final at Wimbledon would have no problem in identifying the Swiss as a genius, and that simple fact as Murray's nemesis.

Thus a familiar-sounding headline on one report of the match was: "Only one winner when talent meets genius." Familiar sounding, because it repeats what was written the last time the two met in a grand slam final, the 2010 Australian Open: "Federer's genius alone beats Andrew Murray". Murray cried after that one, too. Well, it must be frustrating when you push yourself to the limits and beyond, and the opponent wins with apparently effortless ease.

Except it isn't like that at all. Although we tend to think of genius as something akin to magic, a kind of short-cut to mastery of the elements, it is nothing of the sort. A proper investigation of the careers of the supreme achievers, whether in sport or other fields, reveals that they are based above all on monomaniacal diligence and concentration. Constant struggle, in other words. Seen in this light, we might define genius as talent multiplied by effort. In cricket, this would be true of Sachin Tendulkar; in chess, Bobby Fischer.

I was at a dinner with that supreme raconteur among philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, when he was asked how he would sum up genius. He immediately recalled the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was questioned about how he managed to leap in the way he did. The Russian replied that most people, when they leapt in the air, would come down at once, but: "Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?" That effortless ease defined genius, said Berlin. To watch Federer at his greatest is to see something similar to Nijinsky's description: the movement of his body appears to defy the laws of gravity, as if hovering above the surface of the planet, free of all weight or friction. Yet in logic we know that this cannot be. He is constructed of the same matter as the rest of humanity, with nothing remotely abnormal or other-worldly in his skeleton or musculature.

In a wonderful 2006 essay entitled "Federer as Religious Experience", David Foster Wallace wrote that "Roger Federer appears to be exempt from certain physical laws... a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar, a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Yet this is nothing more than an illusion – one which the performer will be keen to encourage, both to thrill the public and to intimidate his opponents. Nijinsky, for example, must have known very well that his astounding entrechats and grands jetes were the product of thousands upon thousands of hours of excruciating practice, without which his talent could never have evolved beyond dilettantism.

By the same token, the greatest talents of our age appreciate that in a brutally competitive world, to skip a day of such rigorous training is to risk decline and even mediocrity. If you saw the film [Itzhak] Perlman in Russia – about the supreme violinist's 1990 tour of that country – you will probably have been struck by his great discomfiture when asked to perform a piece spontaneously on a visit to the Moscow Conservatory. "But I haven't practiced today," Perlman says; and yet when you watch the Israeli play in concert, he can make even the most appallingly difficult pieces seem like a bit of fun, or as easy as drawing breath. It is, as the saying goes, the art that disguises art.

Perhaps the idea of the effortless genius is partly born of the need to reassure ourselves in our relative laziness: if genius is simply something innate, God-given and unimprovable, then perhaps we can also do as well as we are able without making extraordinary efforts. Unfortunately, this is not so: and we must recognise that what the greatest musicians and sportsmen have which the rest of us lack is not just an aptitude, but a fierceness of desire and a commitment to self-improvement which we can scarcely begin to comprehend. Nowadays, Federer seems a serene spirit, but as a young, up-and-coming player, he was a noted racquet hurler, with no less of an inner rage to succeed than, for example, John McEnroe.

In the purely cerebral sport of chess, the one living player most often described as a genius is the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen – who at 19 became the world's highest-ranked grandmaster. Yet his father Henrik told me that what had first alerted him to Magnus's possibilities was the fact that as a toddler he would spend hours doing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles; the very young Magnus had an astonishing capacity for hard work and concentration– which is, after all, the very essence of learning.

Francis Galton, the slightly creepy founder of eugenics, sought to define genius by reference to an inherited form of intelligence, which he thought could be measured via the analysing of a person's reaction time and sensory acuity: this Galton referred to as "neurophysiological efficiency". You might think that, within sport, the activity most requiring preternaturally quick reactions would be Grand Prix motor-racing. Yet viewers of the BBC1 series Top Gear might recall Jeremy Clarkson engaging in a competitive test of reaction times with Michael Schumacher,: the lumbering Clarkson demonstrated that his reactions in a hand slapping contest were the equal of the then Formula One champion's.

This is actually what one should expect: we all have the same basic reaction times, which are determined by the nervous system rather than the brain – as evidenced by the fact that we all pull our hand away from a flame with identical suddenness. The difference between us and the champions is that they have trained their minds to process information with astonishing speed in situations requiring complex assessment. Watch how Federer reacts in the less than half a second it takes for a first serve from Murray to reach the opposing baseline and you see just what a special talent honed by obsessive determination and hundreds of thousands of hours of practice can achieve.

Conducting the on-court interview after his victory, Sue Barker began: "Genius tennis?" "Yes," Federer replied, deadpan. If only it were so simple; and the fact that it looks so simple is the strangest thing of all.

Dravid and the art of defence

India's No. 3 is a living testament to the belief that you need application and will more than talent to succeed in sport

Sanjay Manjrekar

June 28, 2011

 

	For a defensive batsman, Rahul Dravid is extraordinarily skilled at pulling the short ball © Getty Images

The pitch at Sabina Park was challenging and the Test match was in the balance, but Rahul Dravid would agree that a more experienced bowling attack would have tested him more. Dravid's 151 Tests against the 69 of the West Indian bowlers combined was always going to be a mismatch. But while this was not one of his best hundreds by any stretch of the imagination, it was an important one nevertheless, given the stage his career is at. And it allows us dwell a bit on the Dravid success story as he completes 15 years in international cricket.

To start with, success does not come as easily to Dravid as it seems to do to others: you get the feeling that he has had to work at it a little more.

I believe Dravid can be a more realistic batting role model for young Indian batsmen than a Tendulkar, Sehwag or VVS Laxman, for Dravid is the least gifted on that list. While Tendulkar is a prodigious, rare talent, Dravid's basic talent can be found in many, but what he has made of it is the rare, almost unbelievable, Dravid story. That you don't need to have great talent to become a sportsman is reinforced by Dravid's achievements over the last 15 years. And that he is now an all-time Indian batting great highlights his speciality: his ability to over-achieve. Indeed, he would have probably have performed beyond his talent in any profession of his choosing. Indian cricket is fortunate that he chose it.

For a batsman of his nature and skills, that he ended up playing 339 one-day internationals, and still contributes to his IPL team in Twenty20, shows his strength of mind. It is a mindset that sets almost unreasonably high goals for his talents to achieve and then wills the body on to achieve them.

Dravid is a defensive batsman who has made it in a cricket world that fashions and breeds attacking batsmen. If he had played in the '70s and '80s, life would have been easier for him. Those were times when a leave got nods of approval and admiration from the spectators.

Dravid has played the bulk of his cricket in an era when defensive batting is considered almost a handicap. This is why it is rare to see a defensive batsman come through the modern system. Young batsmen with a defensive batting mindset choose to turn themselves into attacking players, for becoming a defensive player in modern cricket is not considered a smart choice.

Not to say that Dravid has been all defensive, though. He has one shot that is uncommon in a defensive Indian batsman: the pull. It is a superb instinctive stroke against fast bowling, and it is a stroke Dravid has had from the outset; a shot that has bailed him out of many tight situations in Tests.

When I saw him at the start of his career, I must confess Dravid's attitude concerned me. As young cricketers, we were often reminded to not think too much - and also sometimes reprimanded by our coaches and senior team-mates for doing so. Being a thinker in cricket, it is argued, makes you complicate a game that is played best when it is kept simple. I thought Dravid was doing precisely that: thinking too much about his game, his flaws and so on. I once saw him shadow-playing a false shot that had got him out. No problem with that, everyone does it. Just that Dravid was rehearsing the shot at a dinner table in a restaurant! This trait in him made me wonder whether this man, who we all knew by then was going to be the next No. 3 for India, was going to over-think the game and throw it all away. He reminded me a bit of myself.

	He has not committed the folly of being embarrassed about grinding when everyone around him is attacking and bringing the crowd to their feet. Once he is past 50, he resists the temptation to do anything different to quickly get to the next stage of the innings

Somewhere down the line, much to everyone's relief, I think Dravid managed to strike the right balance. He seemed to tone down the focus on his mistakes, and the obsession over his game and his technique, and started obsessing over success instead. Judging from all the success he has had over the years, I would like to think that Dravid, after his initial years, may have lightened up on his game. Perhaps he looks a lot more studious and intense on television to us than he actually is out there.

Dravid has to be the most well-read Indian cricketer I have come across, and it's not just books about cricket or sports he reads. I was surprised to discover that he had read Freedom at Midnight, about the partition of India, when he was 24. Trust me, this is very rare for a cricketer at that age. You won't find a more informed current cricketer than him - one who is well aware of how the world outside cricket operates.

Most of us cricketers develop some understanding of the world only well after we have quit the game. Until then, though experts of the game, we remain naïve about lots of things. I think this awareness of the outside world has helped Dravid put his pursuit of excellence in the game of his choice in perspective. At some point in his career he may have come to accept that cricket is just a sport and not a matter of life and death - even if he seemed prepared to work at it like it was.

Life isn't that easy, as I have said, for a defensive batsman in this age, when saving runs rather than taking wickets is the general approach of teams. A defensive batsman's forte is his ability to defend the good balls and hit the loose ones for four. But with bowlers these days often looking to curb batsmen with very defensive fields, batting becomes a bit of a struggle for players like Dravid.

It is a struggle he is content with, though. He has not committed the folly of being embarrassed about grinding when everyone around him is attacking and bringing the crowd to their feet. He is quite happy batting on 20 when his partner has raced to 60 in the same time. Once he is past 50, he seems to get into this "mental freeze" state, where it does not matter to him if he is stuck on 80 or 90 for an hour; he resists the temptation to do anything different to quickly get to the next stage of the innings. It is a temptation that many defensive batsmen succumb to after hours at the crease, when the patience starts to wear, and there is the temptation to hit over the infield, for example, to get a hundred. Dravid knows this is something that Sehwag can get away with, not him.

He has resisted that impulse and has developed the mind (the mind, again) to enjoy the simple task of meeting ball with bat, even if it does not result in runs, and he does this even when close to a Test hundred. The hundred does come eventually, and after it does, the same discipline continues - in that innings and the next one. A discipline that has now got him 12,215 runs in Test cricket.