The Challenges to Justice in India

‘Sir’ Nick Clegg? A true sign of how Britain’s elite rewards failure

Owen Jones in The Guardian







The establishment is a safety net for the shameful and the shameless. Once you’re in, you’re in: and even if you played a prominent role in plunging your country into crisis, and inflicting injustice on your fellow citizens, there are still baubles to be had.

Former chancellor George Osborne got his own newspaper, and ex-deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is reportedly to be made a knight of the realm. It has become fashionable in certain liberal circles to rehabilitate both as courageous warriors against the calamity of Brexit. But here are surely two architects of our crisis-stricken nation.

Nick Clegg to be knighted in New Year honours, say reports



Let’s start with Clegg. For those wonks who sifted through his speeches before he led his Lib Dem party into the coalition in 2010, there was ample evidence that Clegg would prove an amenable ally to a slash-and-burn Conservative government. Three years before Osborne began wielding his scalpel, Clegg promised to “define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government”. Months before the banks plunged Britain into national calamity, he railed against “nationalised education, nationalised health, and nationalised welfare”.

But in order to get elected, the Lib Dems made cast-iron pledges to scrap tuition fees, and had students queuing around the block on polling day. “Students can make the difference in countless seats in this election,” said Clegg, which they did; and hiking fees to £7,000 (let alone £9,000) would be a “disaster” because “you can’t build a future on debt”. The Lib Dem’s flagship political broadcast was titled “Say goodbye to broken promises”, in which Clegg bemoaned the dishonesty of the political elite.
Clegg said after the election that he had no choice but to go back on his word: a national economic disaster loomed, national interest trumps party politics, amassing power and all its trappings through brazen dishonesty was actually an act of sacrifice! As former Liberal leader David Steel put it, Clegg could have met Gordon Brown first “instead of leaving talks with Labour to his acolytes later”, and used the prospect of a Lib-Lab coalition to extract “far better from the Tories”. But he didn’t.

Clegg claimed that new information about Britain’s economic plight from Bank of England governor Mervyn King was critical to his U-turn. But King himself said he had told Clegg nothing the Lib Dem leader didn’t already know.

So here is the truth. Clegg formed an austerity coalition because his socially liberal anti-state worldview was fundamentally in accordance with that of Tory leader David Cameron. “If we keep doing this we won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debate!” as he was accidentally recorded cooing to Cameron in 2011.

So everything that then happened is on him, as much as anyone else. The longest squeeze in wages for generations; the ideologically driven privatisation of the NHS; a bedroom tax that disproportionately compelled disabled people to pay for the housing crisis; the humiliating and degrading work assessments forced on disabled people in a failed attempt to balance the nation’s books on their shoulders; the surging homelessness.


A man who uses human misery as a chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life


But this is nothing compared with the indulgence of George Osborne, just because a dinner party friend has given him a newspaper to play out a vengeful grudge against Theresa May based far more on personal affront than political principle, like a toy catapult handed to a spiteful toddler. The bedroom tax, the £12bn pledged in social security cuts; the benefit cap; the systematic demonisation of benefit claimants. As Nick Clegg – once the voters had thrown him out of government – said himself, Osborne’s behaviour was “very unattractive, very cynical”; for him, welfare “was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn’t really matter what the human consequences were”, it was just a means to boost his party’s popularity.

This is grotesque behaviour, like a child who takes a magnifying glass to ants. A man who uses human misery as a political chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life.

“Ah, but Osborne and Clegg oppose Brexit!” is a common comment. But no one who ever utters this has been a victim of the bedroom tax. Yes, this Tory Brexit is a national disaster. But the details of Britain’s relationship with a trading bloc is a secondary issue for those who spend their waking hours worrying over paying their food and energy bills.

In any case, if you want to understand why Brexit happened, look no further than these two individuals. Is it any wonder that, in a referendum on the status quo, so many opted for the Big Red Button?

These individuals are far from alone in being protected by the establishment, of course. Tony Blair is one of the most unpopular individuals, let alone politicians, in the country; but the man who helped lay Iraq to waste and works for torturing and murderous dictatorships is treated by much of the media as an oracle of wisdom.

If we are to have an honours system that is more than a sordid backslapping exercise, there are far more deserving recipients than Clegg, such as Maria Brabiner, a Mancunian bedroom tax victim who fought back. Surely those who struggle against injustice should be honoured, not those who impose it.

But let me offer some praise. Both Osborne and Clegg were in many ways also architects of the Corbyn project. They played critical roles in creating the army of the disillusioned who flocked to join the Labour party, and then in their millions voted against a bankrupt status quo. Thanks to them the self-serving, mutual appreciation society – otherwise known as the British establishment – may soon find its time is running out.

The Specious Logic of a TV Cricket Expert

by Girish Menon

As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts. 

---Also by this writer 

Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?

On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old

----

In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.

Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.

From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.

However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.

Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:

I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.

Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.

Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.

Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup. 

I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.

The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.

Bankers are the dictators of the West

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?