Shane Watson: 'In teams that focus on results instead of processes, players start playing for themselves'

Shane Watson in Cricinfo

There are environments where the leaders talk about how big this game is, how important this game is, and say, "If we lose this game we are out." I have been in plenty of these team environments. There are also environments where leaders talk about how performance in this game will dictate selection, and that underperformance might lead to players getting dropped. I have heard from leaders of a number of teams that I have played in say things like, "Spots are up for grabs in the game" or "If you don't perform, you will get dropped."

So guess what people are thinking in those environments? "Don't lose. I really need to perform today. I need to score runs. We need to win. Don't get out. Don't bowl badly. Don't stuff up, otherwise I might be gone." All of these focus on results and fear of failure.

These environments can work for a shorter period of time, where fear of failure can drive individuals to be ready to lock in for one very important game. But these environments are not sustainable at all as stress and anxiety builds up to a point where the whole team implodes and I have been a part of these environments on a few occasions too. The telltale signs are that everyone starts to only play for themselves, for their individual spots, and as long as they do enough to get picked for the next game, they are happy. This always leads to an incredibly toxic team environment where the enjoyment factor of playing the game that you love evaporates and it turns into every person for themselves. We should be doing all that we can to do the opposite of this, as the best and most successful team environments always have a fun and enjoyment aspect to them as a very important undercurrent to all that they do.

Other environments I have been a part of are ones where there is a clear focus on the process and leaders ask the players to just bring the best version of themselves every time and to do it over and over again. They reiterate that if we all do this, we give ourselves the best chance of coming out on top. This is exactly what a championship mindset looks like!

This is what made Ricky Ponting such a good captain. He always said to the team in the lead-up to big games that the team whose individuals do the basics better and for longer will be the team that will come out on top. It focused our minds on the process, on doing the basics, controlling the A factors.

Paddy Upton for Rajasthan Royals built a process-driven environment that took all of the anxiety and stress out of a very pressurised tournament where performance and results were so important. The other team environment where this was done incredibly well was at Chennai Super Kings in the IPL under captain MS Dhoni and coach Stephen Fleming. I never heard either of them say, "We need to win this game today", or "If you don't score runs today or take wickets, you will be getting dropped."

My second year with CSK really stuck with me. There was no chopping and changing in selection. In other teams I had been with, players were turned over constantly. If a player didn't perform for a couple of games, selectors would think he wasn't good enough and would replace him immediately. This meant that everyone started looking over their shoulders and thinking, "Gosh, if I don't perform in a couple of games, then I could be gone too."

No matter who we are, we are always going to have times in our lives where we are in a "results-focused" environment. By understanding the mental-skills framework in this book, we know that this is the opposite of where we want to be mentally for us to be at our best both individually and collectively. We need to listen to what is being said by the leaders in this environment and we need to redirect their words ourselves to say, "I am not going to let their results focus influence the correct mindset I need for me to be at my best." This can be much easier said than done when players are being chopped and changed from one game to the next without any rhyme or reason, apart from someone not performing in one game. But understanding this will be a powerful tool for you to use throughout your life to ensure a negative environment doesn't infiltrate your thinking and pull you out of your high-performance mindset.

I've been a victim of a negative team environment. After the retirement of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey, the Australian team drifted significantly. Pressure to perform began to affect confidence and consistency. Players, myself included, began to look over our shoulders. I didn't have knowledge of the mental skills I needed to redirect my thoughts to the right things at the right times to consistently bring the best version of myself into every performance, instead of being overcome with fear and overwhelmed by a need for results, which saw my performances go downhill throughout that time. And this was all at a time where I was in my prime, performing really well in the IPL in an incredibly enjoyable, process-driven team environment. But as soon as I went back into this other environment, my kryptonite, my performances started to tank again and the enjoyment factor of playing the game that I loved evaporated very quickly.



When Watson was able to let go of the negative mindset that gripped the team, he was able to play with freedom and the results automatically followed•Craig Golding/AFP/Getty Images


My last three months with the Australia T20 team from early January 2016 through to the T20 World Cup in India was another example of one of those environments. We played India in a three-match T20 International series, where the selectors picked a really big squad and chopped and changed the team significantly from game to game, and then this flowed on to a T20 series in South Africa before we headed to India for the T20 World Cup. The conversations and actions around the group from the leaders - that being the coach, captain, selectors - were consistent messaging like, "All spots are up for grabs if you want to play in the T20 World Cup" and "You need to perform in this game as you might only have one opportunity to press your claim."

As soon as I heard and saw this, I immediately acknowledged in my own mind what this ridiculous situation was creating. This time I opted out. I knew the importance of preparation and focus. The result was that I bowled as well as I had in T20 cricket for Australia, played one of the games of my life at the SCG as captain, and retired at the end of the T20 World Cup as the No. 1 T20I allrounder in the world.

Surprise surprise, we lost to India in the quarter final knockout game. We left a few runs on the table and didn't execute that well with the ball against an Indian team that had barely changed their XI from the first game that we played against them during the series in Australia, three months before.

But the attitudes I saw in that T20 World Cup are everywhere. I saw it recently in a game of junior cricket. The result of the match was important as a place in the grand final was riding on it. A number of the parents had really built this game up as being a knockout game and had stressed to the kids how important it was to win to make the final. Then one of the calmest kids in the team went out to bat with two overs to go and one of the parents said, "Don't get out, otherwise we will lose" as he walked out to bat. And guess what happened. This poor young kid ended up getting out, and because of all of the build-up of importance for this game by the parents and kids around him, the calmest child on the field lost the plot, throwing their gear everywhere in disappointment of letting the team down. It was so sad to see and something that should never happen if the parents around the team simply understood the fundamentals of how to create the optimal environment. Reinforcement of the correct mindset would then filter down to all of the young kids.

It is so easy to allow the "live or die by results" environment to infiltrate your mindset and start to corrupt it. It is easy to start to move your thinking to fear of failure and how important it is to perform and get the results. But by understanding all of the mental skills in this book, you will be armed with all that you need to be mentally tough enough to create a super-strong cocoon around yourself, to just direct your thoughts to continually creating your optimal mental environment to bring the best version of you, no matter what team environment that you are in.

We need to do all that we can in our power to help with creating the best team environment possible, so that individuals don't have to feel like they are rebelling against the team leadership just to stay process-driven, to bring their best A game possible, game in game out. I'm convinced that more and more teams should be open to allowing players to manage their own mental and physical preparation. Everyone is different; everyone comes to know what best suits them; just as a lot of cricket is individual, so should a lot of the preparation be too. Understanding this will create so many more high-performing team environments, higher-performing individuals and most importantly, much more enjoyable team environments too, so that we never lose the fun and joy that we get playing the game that we love.

Why Britain cannot build enough of anything

 The problem is bad rules, not bad people opines The Economist

Sep 1st 2022

Duncan sandys, a Conservative minister in the 1950s and 1960s, has two reasons to be remembered. The first is that he was the “headless man” being fellated by the Duchess of Argyll in a Polaroid photo, which emerged in divorce proceedings so vicious that they were turned into a bbc One drama earlier this year.

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The second reason is less salacious. In 1955 Sandys issued a circular that fundamentally changed Britain. It implored local councils to forbid building on the edge of cities in order “a) to check the further growth of a large built-up area; b) to prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another; or c) to preserve the special character of a town”. The authorities had tried to restrict urban growth since the reign of Elizabeth I. Now they could.

Today all four nations of the United Kingdom have green belts. About 13% of England is so designated, including the surroundings of every major city. The girdle that encloses London is three times the size of the capital. A stroll through it takes in scrubland, pony paddocks and petrol stations. In “The Blunders of our Governments”, a book by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, the policy is held up as a rare example of legislation achieving exactly what was intended.

The green belts do their jobs well, pushing development into the rural areas between them (see maps). Indeed, most parts of the planning system work as intended. Councillors retain democratic control over the planning system. Environmental watchdogs enforce their mandates fiercely. Stringent rules protect bats, squirrels and rare fungi. Courts ensure that procedures are followed to the letter. But the system as a whole is a failure. Britain cannot build.

In total, about 10% of gdp is spent on building, compared with a g7 average of 12%. England has 434 dwellings per 1,000 people, whereas France has 590, according to the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. There is little slack in the market. In France, about 8% of dwellings are vacant at any one time. In England, the rate is barely 1%. Britain also struggles to build reservoirs and (despite boasts from successive prime ministers) nuclear power stations. With almost 500,000 people, Leeds is the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system. What has gone wrong?

The problem starts with the Town and Country Planning Act, which nationalised the right to build on land. Where once owners could do almost as they pleased, after its passage in 1947, local councils controlled what was built where. They have never relinquished that power. The planning system has more in common with an old eastern European command economy than a functioning market, argues Anthony Breach of Centre for Cities, a think-tank. “We do not have a planning system, we have a rationing system,” he says.

Even when councils approve development, other outfits can stop it. Natural England was created in 2006 with the aim of protecting flora and fauna. After a European Court of Justice ruling in 2018, it was tasked with ensuring “nutrient neutrality”, meaning any development could not increase phosphate or nitrate pollution in rivers. Natural England came up with a blunt solution: building could not go ahead unless developers could prove it would not lead to an increase in nutrient levels, a stipulation that few could provide.

The result was a near total freeze on house-building. Local politicians and developers, who had spent years in painful negotiations, were caught out. In total, about 14% of England’s land faced extra restrictions. One industry group argues that 120,000 houses were affected, or 40% of Britain’s annual housing target. Liz Truss, the likely next prime minister, has promised to scrap the requirement, but details are scant.

Newts present as many problems as nutrients. Anyone who harms a great crested newt while building can be jailed for up to six months. Bats are a nightmare for anyone renovating or developing (enterprising nimbys sometimes install bat boxes in order to attract them to a potential site). Protected under law, it is a crime to harm a bat or destroy its roost. A full report, which involves ecologists scouring a property with bat-hunting microphones plugged into iPhones, can cost £5,000 ($5,800).

If a roost must be destroyed, a like-for-like replacement must be installed. hs2, a railway line, was forced to build a £40m bat tunnel to stop the creatures being squished; its route is lined with bat-houses, which are large enough for humans. For developers, the rules are an expensive annoyance. For bats, however, the legislation has been a success. Numbers of the common pipistrelle have almost doubled since records began in 1999.

Some schemes do not survive contact with environmental objections. A planned nuclear power station in north Wales was rejected by the planning inspectorate in 2019 partly on the ground that it might affect a local population of terns. Inspectors ruled that “it cannot be demonstrated beyond reasonable scientific doubt that the tern colony would not abandon Cemlyn Bay”. That the terns had existed next to a previous nuclear power station was little defence. Inspectors also worried about the effect construction would have on the dominance of the Welsh language.

Even small housing estates now require reams of impact assessments and consultations. A planning application used to involve a single thick folder, says Paul Smith, the managing director of Strategic Land Group, which helps customers win planning permission. Now it is a thicket of pdfs, often running to thousands of pages.

For a development of 350 houses in Staffordshire, a developer had to provide a statement of community involvement, a topographical survey, an archaeological report, an ecology appraisal, a newt survey, a bat survey, a barn owl survey, a geotechnical investigation to determine if the ground was contaminated, a landscape and visual impact assessment, a tree survey, a development framework plan, a transport statement, a design and access statement, a noise assessment, an air quality assessment, a flood risk assessment, a health impact assessment and an education impacts report. These are individually justifiable, yet collectively intolerable.

See you in court

Make an error, however, and a legal challenge will follow. Anyone affected by a decision and able to afford a judicial review can challenge a planning decision. For a group of motivated, well-off nimbys, whipping together £20,000 for a review is easy enough. In Bethnal Green, in east London, a mulberry tree blocked the conversion of a Victorian hospital into 291 flats. Dame Judi Dench, an actor, was roped in to support the tree, which was so frail it required support from a post haphazardly nailed onto one of its branches.

After a campaign, the mulberry was in 2018 designated a veteran tree, which gives it special legal rights. (The number of signatories to save the tree matched the then population of Bethnal Green.) Although the developer had proposed moving the plant, a judge ruled that the council had not properly considered the danger that it might not survive: “A policy was misinterpreted; a material consideration was ignored.” The site sits derelict today.

Councils behave rationally when it comes to development. They levy no income tax or sales tax, and cannot even fund all their operations from property taxes, known as council tax. In all, local government imposes taxes worth less than 2% of gdp, according to the oecd. So more development does not equal much more money for better services. But it does equal more complaints. Councillors often enjoy majorities of just a few dozen votes. A well-organised campaign can replace an entire council, as happened in Uttlesford, in Essex. The result is that local councils are “a bottleneck on national economic growth”, argues a joint paper by the Centre for Cities and the Resolution Foundation.

The government in Westminster can usually override local objections. “When the state decides to act, it has unlimited power,” says Andrew Adonis, a Labour peer, who oversaw the introduction of hs2. Projects such as hybrid bills allow the government to bypass the planning system, turning Parliament into a kind of planning committee. The process is so arduous that sitting on the committee is often a form of punishment from the whips who enforce party discipline. But the benefit is that courts do not challenge primary legislation. Judicial review claims bounced off hs2 like stones off a tank.

Even when the government acts, it is often cautious. A plan to turn a quarry in Kent into a settlement of 15,000 homes was one of the most ambitious schemes, when announced by George Osborne, the then-chancellor, in 2014. Yet it is around a seventh of the size of Milton Keynes, a maligned but highly successful new town begun in the 1960s.

Larger schemes, such as a push for a million homes stretching between Oxford and Cambridge, with a new railway and motorway linking them, have been ditched due to local opposition. “We were a bit out of puff,” admits a cabinet minister. Greg Smith, a Tory mp, had already put up with hs2 slicing through his constituency, and it seemed unfair to subject him to more building. In Britain, pork barrel politics works in reverse, with mps keen to keep things out of their constituencies.

As a result, Britain’s most productive region is shackled. Burgeoning life-sciences firms fight for scarce lab and office space while world-class researchers live in cramped, expensive homes. The average house price in Oxford, £474,000, is about 12 times average incomes. Given the opposition of local councils and local mps to housebuilding, though, it can hardly be said to be against voters’ will.

Britain is rare in that the Treasury functions as both a finance ministry, keeping a close eye on spending, and an economic ministry, investing for the future. Thriftiness tends to trump investment. “[The Treasury] can add up but they can’t multiply” as Diane Coyle, an economist, puts it. It shackles big infrastructure projects, balking at upfront costs even if there are large returns later on.

The result is false economies. hs2, a £100bn project to connect London to Birmingham and then Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, was intended mostly to add capacity to Britain’s crowded railways, not (despite the name) to speed journeys up. The government recently cut the eastern leg of the scheme to save money. That it was the most beneficial part of the scheme—the eastern leg to Leeds and Sheffield had a benefit-to-cost ratio of nearly 5.6:1, compared with 2.6:1 on the western leg between London, Birmingham and Manchester—was overlooked. Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian responsible for London’s sewer system, is said to have argued that: “We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen”. Now, the opposite principle applies.

Political capital is less fungible than the financial kind. When it comes to building things in Britain, there is usually no alternative scheme ready to go. If a big project is scrapped, the political capital spent on forcing through its approval cannot be instantly reallocated. The slow process of winning support at a local and national level must start anew. In the meantime, nothing is built.

And Westminster can be capricious. In 2022, after years of argument, Transport for London won permission to build 351 flats on land it owned at Cockfosters Underground station. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, blocked the development because it removed too many car parking spaces. The Leeds Supertram Act was passed in 1993. Three decades later, Leeds possesses no tram, super or not, as a series of governments refused to fund the project. In 2016 the government rejected a proposal for a trolleybus, in part because it did not think the route would reduce inequality within the city.

Scepticism among nimbys is often justified. Post-war town planners botched city centres, bulldozing through objections. Birmingham’s Victorian centre was carved up to make way for ring roads that still throttle the city. London narrowly avoided a similar fate. New developments, such as Nine Elms, manage to be expensive while looking cheap. Outside big cities, development is often limited to boxy housing estates, which are notorious for poor building quality. A Welsh property surveyor has amassed 560,000 followers on TikTok by angrily taking viewers through snags in newbuilds. (“Check out what this absolute melt has done with this hinge,” he almost screams in one video. “That is absolutely ridiculous.”)

In Oxfordshire a group of residents have spent almost a quarter of a century fighting attempts to build a reservoir. The Environment Agency and a public inquiry sided with the residents over Thames Water. The objectors are shrewd, motivated and well-versed in water regulation. The chairman of the Group Against Reservoir Development (gard) is a retired nuclear scientist; his predecessor was a brigadier. But after a summer of drought, in which Thames Water had to implement a hosepipe ban, the victory rings a little hollow.

Efforts are being made to convert the unbelievers. New planning legislation offers residents the chance to propose their own development and, in effect, approve it themselves via street votes. The government is trying to improve design standards, hoping that beautiful buildings will attract less opposition. Those who put up with infrastructure, whether wind turbines or a reservoir, may benefit from free energy or water bills under one scheme floated by ministers.

Officials are also toying with a net-zero trump card. Projects deemed crucial to making Britain emissions neutral by 2050 would be able to ride roughshod over many obstacles. At the moment policy aimed at protecting the environment hinders projects that should help the climate. The government protects flora and fauna because voters want it; circumventing such rules can only be done in the name of the environment, runs the logic.

Building is binary, however. If something is built, those who oppose it will be unhappy; if it is scrapped they will be delighted. There is little incentive to meet halfway, or to accept a payoff. “This is not some sort of poker game where we demand huge compensation,” said Derek Stork, who chairs the reservoir-killing gard. Britain cannot build. But that is just the way voters want it.

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis writes Peter Kalmus in The Guardian

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The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.

The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.

The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).

By now, the imminent collision with comet Diabasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”

But this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars. 

After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.

The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.

Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.
We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what’s coming while failing to act.

I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.

We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we’d feel once this happens – if it happens – would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.

MSP won’t bankrupt India. It’s complex, but so is disinvestment

Debunking six myths about the MSP for BJP and allies, free-market wallahs and ecological warriors. Yogendra Yadav in The Print 


 

A spectre is haunting India’s ruling class – the spectre of MSP. Over the last few days, various sections of this ruling class – political allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party, economic ideologues of free-market and some ecological warriors – have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre and stymie the possibility of India’s farmers getting a fair price for their produce.

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dramatic, though over-delayed, capitulation on the farm laws, the fear of the ascent of the rural has left the Indian bourgeoisie petrified. Minimum Support Price (MSP) is now the new battleground. End of “reform” – arguably the most abused word – is the latest war cry. Ever since the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) has reminded the PM of its pending demand of a legal guarantee of MSP, we have witnessed a flurry of articles, editorials and debates out to block the possibility that the PM may concede this one as well. MSP is the “bane of agriculture” and the demand for its legal status “totally unreasonable” says the 50-word editorial of The Print, which I often agree with.

As in much ideological propaganda, this tirade against MSP is full of ignorance, prejudice, and fabrications. I cannot imagine such ill-informed canard getting space on national media if it concerned share market, Provident Fund, debt restructuring or anything that touched upon the interest of the “middle class”.

As this historic farmers’ struggle enters end-game, it is vital to debunk some of the misinformation and disinformation that surrounds the current debate on MSP. 
Farmers shifting goalpost?

The first lie is an accusation: Farmers are shifting the goalpost by inventing the demand for legal guarantee of MSP once the demand for repeal of three agricultural laws was conceded. This is nonsense, contrary to the well-known and widely publicised position of the SKM. Demand for MSP realisation has been prominent on the charter of demands, next only to the repeal of three laws, at every stage of this struggle, from the very first memorandum to the 11 rounds of negotiations and the Kisan Sansad. The government’s power-point response to the SKM’s demands acknowledged this issue. This has been one of the main demands in the public domain, reiterated in almost every public speech. There is nothing new or surprising about it. Assured remunerative price has been a flagship demand of the farmers’ movement for decades.
‘MSP already exists’

The second lie is plain and simple: MSP is already available. So, why bother about legal status? Sadly, the PM’s rhetoric of “MSP tha, hai aur rehegi” has given fresh lease of life to this myth. The truth is that MSP has existed mostly on paper. The government’s own data shows that only 6 per cent farmers actually benefit from it. (I think a realistic number is around 15 per cent). That is why, over the years, farmers, movements have made three demands.

We can call these three components of the demand for MSP. One, the promise of Minimum Support Price should have a sound statutory status, instead of remaining just an executive order. (A working group of Chief Ministers headed by Narendra Modi recommended this component to PM Manmohan Singh in 2011. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices also reiterated this demand in its 2017-18 report.) Two, the government should make good this promise by creating a well-funded and effective administrative mechanism that ensures that every farmer actually received at least this minimum price for her entire produce. (Successive governments, including this one, have repeatedly promised this without putting such a mechanism in place). Three, there should be a fair and comprehensive method of computation of MSP that takes full cost into account and is extended to all agricultural produce. (This was recommended by the Swaminathan Commission). All these three asks remain unfulfilled to this day.

 
Environmentally unsustainable?

The third lie is presented under an ecological garb: Legalisation of MSP would lead to over-production of water-guzzling paddy and delay the much-needed diversification of crops. This reasoning is fallacious: The over-dependence on paddy (and sugarcane for that matter) is not because of generous MSP, but because of skewed procurement. While the government declares MSP for 23 crops, it makes good this promise only for wheat and paddy, and that too in select states. No wonder all farmers in these states are hooked to these crops that are not environmentally sustainable. The solution does not lie in withdrawing MSP, but in making sure that the farmers realise MSP in other crops like chana, makka, bajra and various dals. The government should offer attractive MSP for pulses (as recommended by the Arvind Subramanian committee) and oilseeds and ensure their purchase.
Will it distort the market?

The fourth lie is dressed up as elementary economics: Any tinkering with prices by way of MSP would distort the market. Yes, it would, just as TRAI regulations distort telecommunication market, just as ban on surge prices distort road and air transport market. Ever heard these free-market wallas complain against these distortions? Do we not fix minimum wages lest they distort labour market? Should we allow aspirin to be sold for Rs 1,000 per tablet? As for the fear of food prices going up, the way to control it is to offer subsidised food to the poor, not to deny fair price to the producer. The fact is that “free market” is and must be regulated all over the world to meet overall societal objectives. Farmers are offered subsidies and price support all over the world. If price assurance is a bad idea, why declare MSP in the first place?

Impossible for govt?

The fifth lie takes bureaucratic form: MSP may be a good idea, but it is practically impossible. How can the government purchase all the produce of all the 23 crops? Where would it be stored? What would the government do with it? Or so goes the argument. The simple response is: No government needs to do something as silly as that in order to ensure that all farmers receive MSP. My colleagues and I have repeatedly argued that there are multiple methods for ensuring MSP to all farmers. The government can procure more than it does today, especially in pulses, coarse grains, and oilseeds. For the rest, the governments need not purchase. The farmer can be given deficit payment for the gap between the MSP and market price, as was done by the Haryana government this year for bajra. Government can do selective intervention in the market, or use protectionist policies in international market, to prevent prices from falling. And, in the last instance, it can use punitive measure to disallow trading below MSP. All this is complex, yes. But developing a mechanism for MSP delivery is no more complex than designing disinvestment or drawing up mining contracts.
Will India go bankrupt?

Finally, the fiscal lie: India would go bankrupt! My colleague Kiran Vissa and I had debunked this fear-mongering by presenting a rough estimate, with complete breakdown, of how much would it cost the government to make up for the gap between the existing MSP and the prevailing market price. Our calculation for 2017-18 showed the overall cost to be Rs 47,764 crore (just 1.6 per cent of the Union Budget that year and less than 0.3 per cent of the GDP). If the MSP were to be raised to the level recommended by Swaminathan Commission, it would still cost Rs 2.28 lakh crore (about 7.8 per cent of Budget and 1.2 per cent of GDP). Can India afford it for the welfare of nearly two-thirds of its population? That is the real question that the country must face.

Thanks to this historic farmers’ movement, the country has woken up to a political reality: Farmers do not belong to the dustbin of history, they are very much a part of India’s present and future. A legally binding system of fair calculation and effective delivery of MSP to each farmer is a logical corollary of this realisation. As A.R. Vasavi says, it’s time to move towards “Maximum Support Policy”. It is all about political will now.

Never mind aid, never mind loans: what poor nations are owed is reparations

At Cop26 the wealthy countries cast themselves as saviours, yet their efforts are hopelessly inadequate and will prolong the injustice writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

Excerpt from a painting depicting the British East India Company in India, 1825-1830. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images  


The story of the past 500 years can be crudely summarised as follows. A handful of European nations, which had mastered both the art of violence and advanced seafaring technology, used these faculties to invade other territories and seize their land, labour and resources.

Competition for control of other people’s lands led to repeated wars between the colonising nations. New doctrines – racial categorisation, ethnic superiority and a moral duty to “rescue” other people from their “barbarism” and “depravity” – were developed to justify the violence. These doctrines led, in turn, to genocide.

The stolen labour, land and goods were used by some European nations to stoke their industrial revolutions. To handle the greatly increased scope and scale of transactions, new financial systems were established that eventually came to dominate their own economies. European elites permitted just enough of the looted wealth to trickle down to their labour forces to seek to stave off revolution – successfully in Britain, unsuccessfully elsewhere.

At length, the impact of repeated wars, coupled with insurrections by colonised peoples, forced the rich nations to leave most of the lands they had seized, formally at least. These territories sought to establish themselves as independent nations. But their independence was never more than partial. Using international debt, structural adjustment, coups, corruption (assisted by offshore tax havens and secrecy regimes), transfer pricing and other clever instruments, the rich nations continued to loot the poor, often through the proxy governments they installed and armed.

Unwittingly at first, then with the full knowledge of the perpetrators, the industrial revolutions released waste products into the Earth’s systems. At first, the most extreme impacts were felt in the rich nations, whose urban air and rivers were poisoned, shortening the lives of the poor. The wealthy removed themselves to places they had not trashed. Later, the rich countries discovered they no longer needed smokestack industries: through finance and subsidiaries, they could harvest the wealth manufactured by dirty business overseas.

Some of the pollutants were both invisible and global. Among them was carbon dioxide, which did not disperse but accumulated in the atmosphere. Partly because most rich nations are temperate, and partly because of extreme poverty in the former colonies caused by centuries of looting, the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are felt most by those who have benefited least from their production. If the talks in Glasgow are not to be experienced as yet another variety of oppression, climate justice should be at their heart.

The wealthy nations, always keen to position themselves as saviours, have promised to help their former colonies adjust to the chaos they have caused. Since 2009, these rich countries have pledged $100bn (£75bn) a year to poorer ones in the form of climate finance. Even if this money had materialised, it would have been a miserly token. By comparison, since 2015, the G20 nations have spent $3.3tn on subsidising their fossil fuel industries. Needless to say, they have failed to keep their wretched promise.

In the latest year for which we have figures, 2019, they provided $80bn. Of this, just $20bn was earmarked for “adaptation”: helping people adjust to the chaos we have imposed on them. And only about 7% of these stingy alms went to the poorest countries that need the money most.

Instead, the richest nations have poured money into keeping out the people fleeing from climate breakdown and other disasters. Between 2013 and 2018, the UK spent almost twice as much on sealing its borders as it did on climate finance. The US spent 11 times, Australia 13 times, and Canada 15 times more. Collectively, the rich nations are surrounding themselves with a climate wall, to exclude the victims of their own waste products.

But the farce of climate finance doesn’t end there. Most of the money the rich nations claim to be providing takes the form of loans. Oxfam estimates that, as most of it will have to be repaid with interest, the true value of the money provided is around one third of the nominal sum. Highly indebted nations are being encouraged to accumulate more debt to finance their adaptation to the disasters we have caused. It is staggeringly, outrageously unfair. 

Never mind aid, never mind loans; what the rich nations owe the poor is reparations. Much of the harm inflicted by climate breakdown makes a mockery of the idea of adaptation: how can people adapt to temperatures higher than the human body can withstand; to repeated, devastating cyclones that trash homes as soon as they are rebuilt; to the drowning of entire archipelagos; to the desiccation of vast tracts of land, making farming impossible? But while the concept of irreparable “loss and damage” was recognised in the Paris agreement, the rich nations insisted that this “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.

By framing the pittance they offer as a gift, rather than as compensation, the states that have done most to cause this catastrophe can position themselves, in true colonial style, as the heroes who will swoop down and rescue the world: this was the thrust of Boris Johnson’s opening speech, invoking James Bond, at Glasgow: “We have the ideas. We have the technology. We have the bankers.”

But the victims of the rich world’s exploitation don’t need James Bond, nor other white saviours. They don’t need Johnson’s posturing. They don’t need his skinflint charity, or the deadly embrace of the bankers who fund his party. They need to be heard. And they need justice.

Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism

George Monbiot in The Guardian


‘A few decades after the Portuguese colonised Madeira, in 1420, they developed a system that differed from anything that had gone before.’ Photograph: Thomas Pollin/Getty Images
Wed 6 Oct 2021 13.00 BST


Whenever there’s a leak of documents from the remote islands and obscure jurisdictions where rich people hide their money, such as this week’s release of the Pandora papers, we ask ourselves how such things could happen. How did we end up with a global system that enables great wealth to be transferred offshore, untaxed and hidden from public view? Politicians condemn it as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. But it’s not. It is the face of capitalism.

Capitalism was arguably born on a remote island. A few decades after the Portuguese colonised Madeira in 1420, they developed a system that differed in some respects from anything that had gone before. By felling the forests after which they named the island (madeira is Portuguese for wood), they created, in this uninhabited sphere, a blank slate – a terra nullius – in which a new economy could be built. Financed by bankers in Genoa and Flanders, they transported enslaved people from Africa to plant and process sugar. They developed an economy in which land, labour and money lost their previous social meaning and became tradable commodities. 

As the geographer Jason Moore points out in the journal Review, a small amount of capital could be used, in these circumstances, to grab a vast amount of natural wealth. On Madeira’s rich soil, using the abundant wood as fuel, slave labour achieved a previously unimaginable productivity. In the 1470s, this tiny island became the world’s biggest producer of sugar.

Madeira’s economy also had another characteristic that distinguished it from what had gone before: the astonishing speed at which it worked through the island’s natural wealth. Sugar production peaked in 1506. By 1525 it had fallen by almost 80%. The major reason, Moore believes, was the exhaustion of accessible supplies of wood: Madeira ran out of madeira.

It took 60kg of wood to refine 1kg of sugar. As wood had to be cut from ever steeper and more remote parts of the island, more slave labour was needed to produce the same amount of sugar. In other words, the productivity of labour collapsed, falling roughly fourfold in 20 years. At about the same time, the forest clearing drove several endemic species to extinction.

In what was to become the classic boom-bust-quit cycle of capitalism, the Portuguese shifted their capital to new frontiers, establishing sugar plantations first on São Tomé, then in Brazil, then in the Caribbean, in each case depleting resources before moving on. As Moore says, the seizure, exhaustion and partial abandonment of new geographical frontiers is central to the model of accumulation that we call capitalism. Ecological and productivity crises like Madeira’s are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.

Madeira soon moved on to other commodities, principally wine. It should come as no surprise that the island is now accused of functioning as a tax haven, and was mentioned in this week’s reporting of the Pandora papers. What else is an ecologically exhausted island, whose economy depended on looting, to do?

In Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë attempts to decontaminate Jane’s unexpected fortune. She inherited the money from her uncle, “Mr Eyre of Madeira”; but, St John Rivers informs her, it is now vested in “English funds”. This also has the effect of distancing her capital from Edward Rochester’s, tainted by its association with another depleted sugar island, Jamaica.

But what were, and are, English funds? England, in 1847, was at the centre of an empire whose capitalist endeavours had long eclipsed those of the Portuguese. For three centuries, it had systematically looted other nations: seizing people from Africa and forcing them to work in the Caribbean and North America, draining astonishing wealth from India, and extracting the materials it needed to power its Industrial Revolution through an indentured labour system often scarcely distinguishable from outright slavery. When Jane Eyre was published, Britain had recently concluded its first opium war against China.

Financing this system of world theft required new banking networks. These laid the foundations for the offshore financial system whose gruesome realities were again exposed this week. “English funds” were simply a destination for money made by the world-consuming colonial economy called capitalism.

In the onshoring of Jane’s money, we see the gulf between the reality of the system and the way it presents itself. Almost from the beginning of capitalism, attempts were made to sanitise it. Madeira’s early colonists created an origin myth, which claimed that the island was consumed by a wild fire, lasting for seven years, that cleared much of the forest. But there was no such natural disaster. The fires were set by people. The fire front we call capitalism burned across Madeira before the sparks jumped and set light to other parts of the world.

Capitalism’s fake history was formalised in 1689 by John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government. “In the beginning all the world was America,” he tells us, a blank slate without people whose wealth was just sitting there, ready to be taken. But unlike Madeira, America was inhabited, and the indigenous people had to be killed or enslaved to create his terra nullius. The right to the world, he claimed, was established through hard work: when a man has “mixed his labour” with natural wealth, he “thereby makes it his property”. But those who laid claim to large amounts of natural wealth did not mix their own labour with it, but that of their slaves. The justifying fairytale capitalism tells about itself – you become rich through hard work and enterprise, adding value to natural wealth – is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.

As Laleh Khalili explains in the London Review of Books, the extractive colonial economy never ended. It continues through commodity traders working with kleptocrats and oligarchs, grabbing poor nations’ resources without payment with the help of clever instruments such as “transfer pricing”. It persists through the use of offshore tax havens and secrecy regimes by corrupt elites, who drain their nation’s wealth then channel it into “English funds”, whose true ownership is hidden by shell companies.

The fire front still rages across the world, burning through people and ecologies. Though the money that ignites it may be hidden, you can see it incinerating every territory that still possesses unexploited natural wealth: the Amazon, west Africa, West Papua. As capital runs out of planet to burn, it turns its attention to the deep ocean floor and starts speculating about shifting into space.

The local ecological disasters that began in Madeira are coalescing into a global one. We are recruited as both consumers and consumed, burning through our life support systems on behalf of oligarchs who keep their money and morality offshore.

When we see the same things happening in places thousands of miles apart, we should stop treating them as isolated phenomena, and recognise the pattern. All the talk of “taming” capitalism and “reforming” capitalism hinges on a mistaken idea of what it is. Capitalism is what we see in the Pandora papers.